So, I posted this on November 30 of last year. It mostly held up. I repeated my oft-stated observation that the risk-averse strategy for the GOP on Obamacare would have been a series of small-bore bills that repeal portions of the law, e.g. the employer mandate but not the individual mandate, the medical device tax, and so forth, but that getting total party unity among a skittish caucus would be difficult. And hey! Look what happened!
And what role did Tom Price play? Exactly the role I said. None. The House did what the House does. It operates under majority party control. Paul Ryan had a lot more trouble than a Speaker normally would because... [cough, cough, Freedom Caucus], but he got a very conservative bill through. That's how things work in the House. It is not quite purely majoritarian, but it is majoritarian in the sense that the majority of the majority party gets its way, and that's basically what happened. The Senate is another matter. Mitch McConnell did his level best, and as I've said, I think he actually played about the best game a person in that position could have played. It was just probably not a winnable game given the situation. Collins and Murkowski weren't going to support any bill realistically supported by the rest of the caucus, and John McCain decided he hadn't been an actual "maverick" for a while. Add in the dramatics of Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and the difficulties of managing the Byrd rule, and McConnell couldn't get the pieces to fit together.
Where was Tom Price in this? The same place the Secretary of HHS should have been expected to be. Nowhere in sight. Why did anyone think otherwise?
Because Donald Trump is a fuckin' idiot, and those who were writing news stories about it back in late November and early December of 2016 weren't thinking through the legislative process. Cabinet secretaries don't have a role to play in this. That's not their job.
In principle, the VP could play a role, and I often speculated that Pence could have served as a presidential surrogate, given his history in Congress, and the fact that he clearly knows more about policy than Trump (limbo, limbo, lim-BO!). The VP also casts a tie-breaking vote in the Senate, but that wasn't the issue either, and this wasn't an issue on which Trump really needed a surrogate because Trump's position was that he'd sign any bill. ANY bill, as long as he could say he was "repealing Obamacare." No, Price was never going to be involved in the "Obamacare repeal" efforts in any serious way. I was puzzled by assertions to the contrary last November, and the idea that the failed "repeal" effort has anything to do with his resignation (rather than just the flight stuff) just strikes me as silly. And yet, I have read several stories about Trump's anger at Price for the failure of the repeal efforts... As with all Trump administration news, such stories can be taken with grains of salt, but still...
It is kind of amusing to go back and see what I wrote at the time. Checking one's own thoughts to avoid internal revisionist history is important.