Health Care

Senate wins give GOP momentum for O-Care repeal

The GOP will take control of the Senate with fresh momentum to dismantle the president’s signature healthcare law.

All 10 newly elected Republican senators have campaigned on the promise to repeal and replace ObamaCare, and five have already voted against the health law while serving in the House.

{mosads}Each GOP winner in the country’s closest races – Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), David Perdue (R-Ga.), Joni Ernst (R-Iowa) and Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) – have vowed to strip apart the law.

Similar pledges were heard in less competitive races in Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, West Virginia and South Dakota. Those candidates – James Lankford (R-Okla.), Steve Daines (R-Mont.), Mike Rounds (R-S.D.), Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.), and Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) – will also join the Senate for the first time. 

Senators-elect Gardner, Lankford, Daines, Cotton and Capito have already voted for repeal in the House, which has taken dozens of votes against the law.

Gardner, who emerged from a hard-fought race against Sen. Mark Udall (D-Colo.), has promised to bring the fight to the Senate.

“It is not too late to start over with a full repeal and replacement of the president’s healthcare law,” Gardner declared during his campaign.

Critics of the law across the country are hoping that the GOP wave will help roll back the law. While much of the law has now been in effect for four years, ObamaCare opponents argue that the push for repeal is just as strong.

“Every single winner successfully campaigned on a promise to repeal ObamaCare,” Brent Bozell, chairman of the conservative group ForAmerica, said Wednesday.

“That’s a unanimous promise to the American people to be against this. It is time to do it, and stop talking about it,” he told the crowd at an event sponsored by Conservative HQ.

With vast momentum for the GOP, Bozell predicted that Republicans would vote to repeal the bill “as fast as doors of the new Congress swing open.”