President Trump will head to Capitol Hill on Thursday for an event with House Speaker Paul Ryan and Irish Prime Minister Enda Kenny.
The Friends of Ireland luncheon, which is meant to be a genial affair for lawmakers on both sides of the aisle, will bring Trump to the halls of Congress at a time when his administration faces mounting pressure to greenlight adjustments to the Obamacare replacement Ryan introduced last week.
Defiant GOP lawmakers have criticized the legislation, claiming it doesn’t go far enough to reduce government’s role in the healthcare industry and ignores key campaign promises about interstate insurance sales and the guarantee that insured Americans are able to maintain their current coverage.
Ryan and the administration both claim that such provisions will come in phases two and three of the repeal and replacement effort, noting that reconciliation rules prevent the House from including everything at once.
But critics of the bill remain wary that a three-stop process is the right approach, much less that phase two and three actually exist.
“There is no three-step plan,” Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., said in a radio interview on Tuesday. “That is just political talk. It’s just politicians engaging in spin.”
Trump last visited the Hill for his first speech to a joint session of Congress on Feb. 28.
