Setting up an "artificial deadline for defeat" on the American Health Care Act was a mistake, but President Donald Trump and Republicans can still sort through what they learned and move on to repeal and replace Obamacare, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said Monday.
"Remember, it took [President Ronald] Reagan eight months to pass a tax cut, which was giving away money," Gingrich told Fox News' "Fox & Friends" program.
"It took us 18 months to pass welfare reform, which is extraordinarily popular, and it even took [President Barack] Obama and Nancy Pelosi eight months to pass Obamacare."
The next step, Gingrich said , would be to develop an argument about healthcare, which can be taken to the country.
"If they get a good argument on health, for example, in rural counties, I think they can get North Dakota's Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, because she represents an entirely rural state that was overwhelmingly for Trump," said Gingrich. "So you start with a 60-vote strategy in the Senate based on the grassroots."
The key, Gingrich continued, is not to campaign for a bill in Washington, but to have a bill that is "so clear, that is so vivid, that Trump can go to the country, hold those 20,000-30,000 person rallies. Two rallies in North Dakota would make it very hard for the senator to vote no."
Instead, the White House used the "insider model," which allowed a Congressional Budget Office "fake score" and the Senate's "absurd rules for reconciliation" to matter, said Gingrich.
"Remember, this is the age of Donald Trump because people don't trust Washington politicians," the former speaker said. "So saying, 'oh, we'll fix it in the second and third part' denied everything we know about the American people right now."
Gingrich said he also thinks it's a mistake to shift the focus to tax reform rather than onto infrastructure.
"You can reach out to every single Democrat on infrastructure," said Gingrich. "You can write a bipartisan bill that gets an enormous margin. Trump ought to want a Trump majority in the House of 300 plus and a Trump majority in the Senate of 65 or so. Not a Republican majority; a Trump majority."
Then it would be time to do tax reform, but it's important to be "very, very exciting about infrastructure reform" in order to attract Democrats.
"It's going to create jobs," said Gingrich. "The earlier you start on infrastructure, the earlier you're going to be creating jobs and infrastructure."
After that, he'd do taxes and at the same time make another push on healthcare, while making sure the bill would have 60-65 percent of the public's support before bringing it to Congress.
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
© 2024 Newsmax. All rights reserved.