DCCC Chair Cheri Bustos: GOP on ‘Defense’ for Pushing for Obamacare Repeal

Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) chair Cheri Bustos (D-IL) said in a statement on Wednesday that Republicans’ push for taking “away people’s health care” has put the GOP on “defense.”

Bustos announced that they had added two candidates to the DCCC’s “Red to Blue” program to flip red districts in favor of the Democrats, noting that the DCCC will target 33 seats in the Red to Blue program.

The DCCC added Ammar Campa-Najjar in California’s 50th congressional district and Nancy Goroff in New York’s first congressional district to the Red to Blue program. Campa-Najjar hopes to defeat former Rep. Darrell Issa (R) in California while Goroff hopes to defeat Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) in New York.

Bustos contended that House Democrats have the opportunity to expand their House majority during the 2020 congressional elections because Republicans have to defend that they are allegedly “trying to take away people’s health care.”

She said:

House Democrats have recruited a historically strong class of candidates. Their local leadership, fundraising, and extraordinary records of service put Democrats in a commanding position to continue expanding our offensive battlefield and expand our majority. In contrast, Washington Republicans are still trying to take away people’s health care during a deadly pandemic and it’s putting them on defense in what they once assumed was ruby-Red territory.

Bustos is presumably referring to Republicans’ Supreme Court cases, Texas v. Azar and California v. Azar, which hopes to strike down the Affordable Care Act (ACA), or Obamacare, after Republicans zeroed out the ACA’s individual  mandate.

Democrats regained the House majority in 2018 after a Republican majority in Congress failed to repeal Obamacare. Democrat congressional candidates claimed that through Republican ACA repeal efforts, they were trying to remove Obamacare protections for patients with pre-existing conditions.

Despite Democrats’ claim, Republican ACA repeal bills such as the American Health Care Act (AHCA), the Better Care Reconciliation Act (BCRA), and the Graham-Cassidy proposal would not eliminate preexisting condition protections if the bills were to become law.

Because Republicans did not have a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, Republicans would have been unable to pass any legislation that would alter ACA statutes protecting pre-existing conditions.

Sean Moran is a congressional reporter for Breitbart News. Follow him on Twitter @SeanMoran3.