President Trump’s spokeswoman on Tuesday ripped ObamaCare and congressional Democrats for not supporting the president’s agenda and for demanding the release of the special counsel’s full report on Russia.
“We know that it’s a failure, we know it’s a disaster, we know it doesn’t work and Americans don’t want it,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters outside the White House, referring to ObamaCare.
But polls show that the Affordable Care Act has gained popularity with a plurality of Americans, with the Kaiser Family Foundation’s tracking poll showing that at the end of March, 50 percent of Americans had a favorable view of the law while 39 percent did not.
She also blamed Democrats for Trump’s inability to fulfill his promises to repeal and replace ObamaCare or enact immigration reform — even though Republicans had control of Congress for the first two years of his presidency.
“We also know Democrats are unwilling to work with this president to fix the broken system we have, whether it’s on health care, whether it’s on immigration. If they want to get serious about sitting down and solving problems over the next two years, we would be more than happy to do that,” she said.
“So far, all we have seen from them is they want to play political games and not do their jobs.”
Team Trump last week backed a lawsuit seeking to overturn ObamaCare in its entirety, predicting that the GOP would soon be “the party of health care.”
On Tuesday, however, Trump said the Republicans would not unveil their plan until after the 2020 elections.
Sanders also said it was up to Attorney General William Barr to decide how much of special counsel Robert Mueller’s report on his Russia probe would be released after being asked if Trump still wanted it made public.
Barr last week released a four-page summary of the roughly 400-page report, which stated that Mueller found no grounds for accusing Trump of collusion, but also neither accused nor exonerated him of obstruction of justice.
And she repeated the president’s attacks on Manhattan Rep. Jerry Nadler and other Democrats for arguing that the public has a right to know what Mueller found in his roughly two-year probe, which resulted in the indictments and convictions of a handful of Trump’s former aides and advisers.
“We know by the actions that we have seen from Nadler and other Democrats in Congress is that the president’s right. They will never be satisfied. They’re sore losers,” she said.
“They lost in 2016. They lost because they tried to convince all of America of something that we all knew was untrue, that the president had colluded with Russia. It was a total lie then. It’s a total lie now. And they continue to lose on this issue. At some point, they have to decide they’re ready to move on like the rest of the country,” said Sanders.
Nadler, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, has vowed to subpoena the full report if the White House stonewalls
While Sanders asserted that the “rest of the country” wanted to move on, polls say otherwise, including an NPR survey last week that showed about three-quarters of Americans want the report to be made public.
Barr has said he would release a redacted version to Congress this month.