President Obama won’t continue to fight against Republican attempts to repeal his signature legislative achievement once he leaves office on Jan. 20, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said Friday.
“The president will be a private citizen on Jan. 20. He will be a private citizen with deeply-held views about the most effective way to reform the healthcare system of the United States,” Earnest said. “You could certainly expect the president to follow these developments closely and continue to be thinking about how these kinds of reforms should work.”
“But there’s a long tradition in this country … of the outgoing president giving the incoming president the opportunity to succeed, and so I would not expect President Obama to be regularly holding conversations” about the Affordable Care Act, Earnest said.
Obama has spent the past week working closely with Democratic lawmakers in Congress to prepare a defense against Republican promises to strip Obamacare through budget reconciliation and, eventually, replace it with a market-based system. Obama sat down Friday with writers from left-leaning outlet Vox to discuss the merits of his healthcare law.
“The president has had ample opportunity over the past eight years to regularly make speeches and regularly write op-eds,” Earnest said. “The time for him to do that on a regular basis has passed.”
“When it comes to making the public case for this approach, it’s time for other people to step up,” he added.
