President Trump had made a comment about the House’s healthcare bill, by calling it “mean.” The House Republicans then rushed in their efforts to cover him.
During a private meeting between president Trump and few Republican senators, the president had said to mention that he wished for the Senate’s version of the bill to be far more improvised, and then went on to call it “mean.”
While the source that reported the comment choose to remain anonymous, Rep. Tom MacArthur (R-N.J.) stated, “I still haven’t seen the source, so I’m not going to comment on somebody, two unnamed sources who’ve said two different things,” MacArthur said. “I was with the president on Sunday [at a fundraiser] and he thanked me for my work on the healthcare bill, so I don’t know what these other people are saying he said or what the context was, I just don’t know.”
Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.) stated that he doesn’t feel that the healthcare bill was mean in any way and that it could bring about some very important changes.
“I don’t think it’s a mean bill; I think it’s a very responsible bill,” he said.
“When you consider that every dollar we spend here is the work of somebody else’s hands and the fruits of somebody else’s labor, the most humanitarian thing that you can do is spend that in an accountable way.”
Rep. Dave Brat (R-Va.), on the other hand, was of the view that it could just be Trump trying to push the lawmakers to improvise on things, “I think he’s just doing the business deal,” Rep. Dave Brat (R-Va.) said. “So, where’s the deal right now? It’s in the Senate. So he’s trying to warm them up to get something done so he says, ‘make it better.’ ”
“but if it’s not, I said we’re scratching our heads over here because he put tremendous pressure on us, rightly so, to get something out of the House, and he was in favor of that bill,” he added.