Appearing on the New York radio show LI in the AM with Jay Oliver, Rep. Peter King (R-NY) was asked about the secrecy with which the Senate Republicans are handling the drafting of their health care bill.
He didn’t exactly defend them.
The host noted that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) “kind of blew it off,” but pressed King about talking about the bill in session. “It’s really just Republicans really not making it a public forum,” said Oliver. “Is it an egregious act of trying to do something underhanded here?”
King warned of a “cloud over the whole final product” during the exchange, about 11 minutes into the clip embedded below:
To me, as much as possible, you should do things in public. Listen, there has to be private meetings all the time, but there should be more public debate on this, it just looks like they’re trying to hide something. It adds to conspiracy theories and everything else. Listen, all of democracy can’t be open all the time, there are things that have to be done behind closed doors, that’s just common sense. But having said that, that should be kept to a minimum. If this is too secretive, it’s going to put a cloud over the whole final product.
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King, the fourteenth-most senior Republican House member in Congress, voted for the American Health Care Act (AHCA). He is a member of the ostensibly moderate Tuesday Group which did not uniformly support the bill.
The Senate is expected to finally release their version of the bill this week after a month of secret discussions involving only Republicans.
There have been no public hearings about either version of the bill. Sen. McConnell has set a completely arbitrary deadline of trying to pass the bill before the Senate takes a week-long recess during the week of the Fourth of July. That is just over a week from Thursday of this week, the day when some expect the first draft of the bill to be released beyond the Republican caucus.
The deeply unpopular bill is essentially a tax cut for millionaires masquerading as a repeal of Obamacare. According to the Congressional Budget Office, it would cause 23 million fewer people to have insurance than currently do.
Many Republican House and Senate members who were in office when Obamacare was drafted eight years ago had attacked that legislative process for being secretive — preserved for posterity in 14 very awkward tweets, spotlighted in a ThinkProgress article this week. In fact, Obamacare was drafted and debated over a period of many months, with, according to Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-MD), 79 hearings devoted to it.
The secrecy surrounding the Senate version of the bill is working in the authors’ favor — most newspaper front pages are ignoring the bill, despite the massive impact its passage would have on the economy and people’s lives.