PLANS FOR A PLAN

Republican Accidentally Outs Johnson’s Bluff in Shutdown Fight

Rep. Jeff Van Drew shared the GOP’s timeline to create a new healthcare plan, and it doesn’t match up to Mike Johnson’s immediate promises.

Jeff Van Drew has been called out for adding yet another unclear qualifier to the riddle of the GOP’s healthcare plans—one which directly contradicts the promises of House Speaker Mike Johnson.

The New Jersey representative offered his take on CNN’s Inside Politics Sunday, suggesting that he and his fellow Republicans could knock together a plan that in about a year.

“You have to have a plan. And the plan is to come up with something better,” he said.

Van Drew added: “That‘s not going to happen in a few weeks. That‘s going to take a good part of the year to have something substantive and real that works. And we can do that.”

Van Drew was responding to host Manu Raju’s question. “Are you concerned about the backlash from voters if the GOP does not come up with a plan here?” Raju asked.

“Yeah, it is politically stupid,” Van Drew began. “It does not make sense to come up with no plan. Dealing with healthcare. That‘s real. That really helps people.”

After vowing that Trump “cares about real people” and thus has healthcare as a real priority, a timeline that could take “a good part of a year,” contradicts other party messaging.

On X, viewers were quick to point out that this flies in the face of recent claims from other GOP members. Others seemed baffled by Van Drew’s suggested timeline, with Trump refusing to talk about healthcare until the shutdown ends and other Republicans seeming as unsure as Democrats about what coms next.

“Mike Johnson claims Republicans have a healthcare plan ready to go, Marge Green said he’s lying, while Van Drew says it is going to take them at least a year to come up with one,” one person pointed out.

Another theorized: “They’ve had over 10 years to come up with one. I think it’s safe to say that they don’t have one and they never will.”

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Speaker Johnson has spoken on healthcare, and claimed to have a 90-minute slideshow on the topic—but he did not share it when he discussed the matter on C-SPAN. The Daily Beast been able to obtain a copy from his office in the weeks since.

On October 27, Johnson claimed at a press conference that the GOP “have a long list of ideas” in order to better healthcare, and are “grabbing the best ideas that we’ve had for years to put it on paper and make it work,” according to PBS.

Meanwhile, as pointed out on Twitter, Marjorie Taylor Greene has claimed that no healthcare plans have been shared among the Republicans at all.

On X last week, she blasted: “More of my Republican colleagues are finally talking about the unaffordable health insurance crisis, but yesterday on our GOP conference call Speaker Johnson said he has ideas and pages of policy, but did not say a single policy plan. I think that is unacceptable.”

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