- The GOP removed the $35 monthly cap on insulin prices in a landmark bill that passed the Senate.
- Senate Republicans who did so cited procedural arguments about how the measure was proposed.
- It obscured the fact that Republicans could have sidestepped this issue if they wanted to.
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GOP senators tried to blame Senate procedure for their move to eliminate the proposed $35 monthly cap on insulin.
The response came after 43 Republicans voted against the measure, causing it to drop from the massive spending bill that passed the House on Sunday.
Few of the 43 Republicans commented on why they removed the measure.
Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin was one, writing that he opposed the measure as a ballot measure pushed by Democrats to trap Republicans in a politically unpopular vote.
“Lying Democrats and their cronies in the corporate media are at it again, distorting the Democrat vote I ‘get,'” he tweeted.
“Democrats actually wanted to break Senate rules to pass the insulin price cap instead of going through regular order. They put it in a bill that it wasn’t allowed, all for show.”
Instead, he proposed an alternative Republican price cap measure that Democrats had rejected as too modest.
Similarly, Senate Minority Leader John Thune told reporters before the vote that Democrats “wanted to tempt us, I guess, to vote against it.”
The rule Johnson was referring to was a Senate lawmaker’s ruling that the insulin cap proposed by Democrat Sen. Raphael Warnock was ineligible for consideration under the same rules as the rest of the package.
The procedure in question is known as budget reconciliation, and it allows certain financial measures to pass with 50 votes instead of 60. In that case, most of the Democrats’ proposals, except the insulin one, were allowed to proceed.
While they were correct that the measure was considered inadmissible under the 50-vote rules, neither Johnson nor Thune acknowledged that the measure could have been saved anyway if 10 Republicans wanted to support it.
Warnock preemptively placed the blame for the measure’s failure among Republicans.
“The only way it won’t pass is if the people on the other side of the aisle decide to block it,” Warnock told The Washington Post.
Democrats rejected an alternative price cap measure proposed by Republicans as too modest.
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