Assuming that President Trump is unable to provide Republicans with the assurance that he can throw Obamacare -- otherwise known as the Affordable Care Act (ACA) -- into a "death spiral", it's likely that Republicans will now be working to legislate together with Democrats. Ever since Republicans became stubborn about reforming health care on their own, Democrats made their demands that Congress focus on fixing the current problems Americans are having with the ACA.

The limits GOP's partisan legislation

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has reluctantly said that Republicans would finally make a bipartisan effort to make some fixes to the current law.

This was only after the Republican Party had suffered a series of humiliating defeats with their health care bills. Prior to this, when McConnell and other Republican leaders had talked about bipartisanship, they meant that they wanted Democrats to submit to the Republican agenda and work with them to get rid of Obamacare.

Out of the Republican Party, a growing number of lawmakers who rejected recent efforts to repeal the ACA appeared to start getting serious about bipartisanship. For instance, Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska.) seized the spotlight when she was vocal about the need to add stability to insurance providers as many of them have been reluctant to join the exchange under the ACA.

Working to stabilize Obamacare

Hints of bipartisan legislation to fix the ACA were more apparent after repeated efforts by Republicans to destroy Obamacare established a level of uncertainty for insurance providers. In an interview with Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT.) last month, he expressed the view that Congress would need to enforce the individual mandate and stabilize those insurance providers.

It would appear that this would not only be the first priority for Democrats but for Republicans too. Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) suggested that he could move on a short-term bill to bolster insurers, which look like the first details of what bipartisan legislation could look like.

Prior to the August recess Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.) announced that he would begin to hold hearings with Democrats to discuss how they could stabilize the insurance market.

This was despite the fact that McConnell had said that they would hold another repeal vote before the "skinny repeal" failed. Now that Senate Republicans has said they would move onto tax reform, this leaves Sen. Alexander to have those hearings before the Sept. 27 deadline when insurance providers are due to join the marketplace for 2018.

Polarizing insurance providers

Certainly, this would now provide some certainty for those insurance companies. In an article publish by NBC News titled: "What's next for health care if GOP can't repeal Obamacare?", the object of obstruction for any bipartisan support has been Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-Tx) who suggested that working with Democrats would mean bailing out the insurance companies.

Many conservatives like Sen. Cornyn have even used the practice of working across the aisle as a threat.

This is because of the intense presence of an extreme right-wing agenda which rejects bipartisanship in the Republican Party. In fact, John Cornyn even said that "it was unfortunate" that they had to work with Democrats. For Republicans in the House of Representatives, it appears that President Trump's brand of conservatism has more influence and therefore fallen to divisive politics. But even Republicans in the House were unable to get enough support from their own party to vote for their American Health Care Act (AHCA) the first time around.

House and Senate 'Trumpublicans'?

The only reason House Republicans were able to get enough votes to pass the AHCA in the House and to the Senate was because House Speaker Paul Ryan lied to moderates just to get it passed.

As an example, Senate Republicans said that the House Republican bill hadn't passed the "smell test", a bill the Senate decided to cannibalize and use to write their own. Needless to say, even their bill wasn't good enough to even get enough votes in the Senate.

Senate Republicans resist Trump

Prior to a meeting with Republican senators at the White House, President Trump said that there was "movement" on health care which was already seen as a vague statement. There is no indication from the President that he's willing to submit to bipartisan legislation as he continued to threaten to take action on his own to kill Obamacare by withholding subsidy payments to providers. At the most, Secretary of Health and Human Services, Tom Price, said over the last weekend of July that they would not let or help Obamacare implode.

But given the administration's ability to manufacture lies, there are no assurances that they won't try.

So far, the same goes for Senate Republicans who have rejected President Trump's interference in the way Congress legislates. For instance, Trump has demanded that McConnell "blow up" the rules of passing bills and go to a majority for everything. But McConnell has rejected this repeatedly on matters of principle. But even this isn't certain and in this Political Climate, there is little indication that Republicans would pay the consequences if they did.
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