GOP: If at first you don’t succeed, do exactly the same thing again. 

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• This will sound familiar, per Vox’s Sarah Kliff: “House Republicans are hurtling toward a vote on a bill that is disliked by most Americans, opposed by nearly every major health care group, and not yet scored by the Congressional Budget Office.” [Vox / Sarah Kliff] 
• No, that is not news from March, when House Republicans introduced a health care bill called the American Health Care Act, planned to vote on it under similar circumstances, but then pulled it from the floor without a vote less than three weeks later. [Vox / Sarah Kliff] 
• It’s news from today — Wednesday, May 3 — because House Republicans are hurriedly planning a vote on a revamped version of the AHCA for Thursday (that’s tomorrow).
• They can only afford to lose 23 Republican votes, and right now roughly 18 centrist Republicans are looking like a definite “no.” But House Republicans are finally within striking distance on their health care bill, flipping at least two members through a small amendment and shoring up support among some undecided members through good old-fashioned whipping. But GOP leadership faces the same problem they’ve had all along: They’re still short the votes, and putting the bill on the floor now and trying to eke out passage could be disastrous if the vote doesn’t go Speaker Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) way.  GOP whips ― most notably, Chief Deputy Whip Patrick McHenry (R-N.C.) and Majority Whip Steve Scalise (R-La.) ― have been feverishly working the House floor this week, hearing out wavering members and working out deals where, if Republicans were just a couple votes short, lawmakers would vote yes.That means that if the bill passes, the margin may only be one or two votes. But if it fails, the total could look much worse.Republicans need 217 votes on the bill if all members vote, meaning they could lose 22 of their members and still pass the legislation. That 217 threshold could be lowered if some members are absent ― or if leadership could convince a fence-sitter to just not show up. But leadership believes they can’t go to the floor unless they’re within a few votes. Based on the HuffPost whip count, it looks like Republicans are right around the number they need.[Huffington Post / Matt Fuller] 



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• Why rush into a vote under such inauspicious circumstances? Budget reconciliation. Budget rules determine whether a vote needs a simple majority of 51 votes to pass the Senate, or whether it needs 60 votes. Republicans will never get 60 votes to repeal Obamacare as long as they have fewer than 60 Republican senators (they currently have 52), so the best they can hope for is to pass a bill through the Senate on only 51 votes. But certain interpretations of those rules suggest that if they want to qualify for a 51-vote health care bill, they have to pass it before moving on to tax reform and passing a new budget (both of which they’d like to do this year). [Vox / Andrew Prokop] 
• It’s clearly a ... risky ... strategy. Even last week, when Republicans considered bringing the bill to the floor to squeak through a vote within President Trump’s first 100 days, they abandoned the effort because they didn’t have the votes they’d need for it to pass. [New York Times / Thomas Kaplan, Robert Pear] 



Rep. Fred Upton (R-MI)     Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images

• So here we are, with Republican lawmakers attempting to make desperate last-minute concessions to win over undecided colleagues. The latest: throwing an additional $8 billion at a program to fund “high-risk pools” (bringing funding for that to almost $115 billion). The idea here is to (essentially) subsidize health insurance for the most expensive patients, while taking them out of the pools of healthy individuals — which would, in turn, bring down the cost of insurance for those healthy people in the low-risk pools. [Vox / Sarah Kliff] 
• As of Wednesday evening, Trump has reportedly been “furiously working the phones” to try to get Republicans to unite behind this new bill. And it appears to be working — whip counts suggest they’re closer than they were in the past. The question is whether they’re close enough. [Vox / Dylan Scott​]