After a saga of failures by Republicans trying to pass health care reform over the past few weeks, President Trump has had a few meetings with Republican senators at the White House where he's told them to keep trying. Trump has taken to Twitter repeatedly, goading them and saying that they failed the American people after seven years of saying that they were going to Repeal and Replace Obamacare -- a.k.a. the Affordable Care Act (ACA).

Mitch McConnell's legislative 'beat down'

The series of failures before the Senate's August recess appears to have beaten Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) into submission.

McConnell was obviously troubled when Sen. John McCain (R-AZ.) gave a "thumb down" for his vote on the Senate floor. Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) would reveal during an interview on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert that Sen. McCain's vote took place after vice-president Pence left the Senate floor. Here is a clip of that moment via Huffington Post.

During the first meeting with Trump over the last few weeks, McConnell appeared to be under a lot of pressure due to the epic failure of partisan legislation. After that meeting, McConnell appeared to be somewhat energized to do the President's bidding which only resulted in a second week of defeat. The Senate Majority Leader appeared to concede defeat during his speech on July 27 following the failure to pass the "skinny repeal," where he showed that he wanted to move on to other legislation.

Here is his speech after the bill was defeated.

Republicans leave room for partisan sabotage

McConnell slammed Democrats for their success in defeating Republican efforts to repeal and replace Obamacare. During recent failures, President Trump made it quite clear that neither he nor Republicans would take the blame for their failure to kill Obamacare.

After these repeated failures -- when it appeared that Congress would start returning to regular order and toward bipartisan legislation -- Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-TX) publicly blamed Democrats for not helping Republicans repeal and/or replace the ACA.

GOP preps political climate for Trump's 'death spiral'

McConnell referred to "bailing out" insurance providers during his speech which Cornyn has already said that Democrats were wanting to do.

And even though McConnell has said that Republicans would start looking into what ideas Democrats had for health care reform, McConnell showed that he was still not interested in working with them. This is clear when he referred to "bailing out" providers, saying that it wasn't something he wanted to be a part of before claiming to take an interest in the Democrats' ideas.

Its been reported that President Trump has some options that might test Congress to see how the his administration can "death spiral" Obamacare. With a leader like Mitch McConnell, it's likely that there won't be any effort on the Majority Leader's part to stop the President. Judging from the tone of his statements, he would only be so happy to see the ACA fail without his involvement.
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