Listen as Larry spoke with Rep. Louie Gohmert about House Republicans pulling the AHCA.
During the interview, Rep. Gohmert discussed how close the House was to approving the AHCA bill:
O’Connor: I’m going to read from Fred Barnes article called, “Sand in the Gears” at Weekly Standard. He doesn’t name you in particular, but talks about the Freedom Caucus and he says, ‘the Freedom Caucus now is a roadblock to success because they insist on what cannot be achieved”. What’s your response to that?
Rep. Gohmert: Well actually, if Fred had any idea how close we were, if we could have just fixed some of the language, we could have gotten a deal. And there were some of us that were hoping that we would do what happened in the summer of 2014, I believe it was, when Boehner tried to push through a border security bill. In that case, he had over 230 Republican members, of the House, agree to vote for a bill before it was filed. It was filed that evening and when we found what was in it, people started hearing from home, and so on Thursday when it dropped below 200 votes Boehner said, ‘we can’t pass it gotta go home’ and guys demanded an emergency conference. We had it, at the conference they said, ‘hey there are a lot of people that know what needs to be in the bill, this is a bad bill. Let’s put everybody that knows what needs to be in it, in a room, let them work it out, until we get a bill we can all vote for. It took about 2.5 hours Larry, and there were a bunch of people in the room, but we were able to put together a bill that everybody could vote for and be proud of. And some of us were kinda hoping it would happen there, others said they were hoping we would go ahead and vote, some in the Freedom Caucus, because that would mean everybody in America would get to see how many ranking House members, including the more moderate, also had major concerns about the bill.
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