The Texas Senate months ago approved a sweeping proposal requiring transgender people to use public restrooms corresponding to the gender on their birth certificates – similar to a law that sparked national outcry and boycotts worth billions of dollars in lost revenue when North Carolina approved a similar measure past year.
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“I don’t know how we get to 50 [votes] at the moment”. He said he wanted the Senate bill to have “a lot more money” than the House measure, which would provide $138 billion over a decade to help states buttress health care markets. “Everybody’s working on it, I’m hopeful we’re going to get there, but that’s all I can tell you about it”, Justice said in brief comments while he walked from a late-day discussion with House Democrats and back into a gathering of Senate Republicans.
Senate President Mitch Carmichael, R-Jackson, said the talks were unorthodox and unconventional but productive. “What are you going to tell those parents when you go home?” said Rep. Dan Huberty R – Houston.
Despite McConnell’s public push to distinguish the Senate health-care effort from the secretive House process by focusing recent Republican lunches on health care and meeting with a smaller group of senators to discuss it, some critics say he is repeating the lower chamber’s mistake of crafting the bill too privately.
“High-risk pools have not had a stellar record”, said Sen.
House Republicans – along with House Republicans and House Democrats – have been skeptical of the income tax reductions and accompanying sales tax increase favored by Senate Republicans and the governor.
Sen. Thune is part of that working group.
“We’ll get them but it’s going to be hard”, he said. Dean Heller, R-Nev., said of a Congressional Budget Office analysis that projects that the House bill would cause 23 million Americans to lose insurance coverage by 2026 and create prohibitively expensive costs for many others. The report also said that people who are sick, older or have a pre-existing condition who live in states that opt out of insurance protections could see their premiums skyrocket.
Further pushing the fight over bathrooms into the final days of the legislative session, the Senate – as expected – officially rejected the House’s proposed compromise on Thursday.
The bill requires the state to set up a special judicial security division and allows personal security for state judges who have been threatened or attacked.
While many lawmakers said there had been enough intra-conference discussions to at least launch Senate leaders and the heads of relevant committees on writing a blueprint, they also made clear there would still be plenty of wrangling among the rank-and-file before anything final emerges.
Republicans are starting to express concern about the lack of progress.
Medicaid and tax credits are the two other contentious topics with which senators are wrestling.
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“I think the group as it formed, initially it was sort of an organic group, there were people who had a specific interest in one area of the health care reform debate”, said Sen. That could entail, he said, propping up Obamacare until a Republican plan is implemented. “It’s needed. It’s something we have to have to run the Senate”, he said.
