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Folks in Washington need a civics lesson. As Americans outside the beltway know, our federal government consists of the executive, legislative branch and judicial branches, and each has a duty to use its Constitutional authority in the best interests of all of us.

The executive branch that would be President Trump - has been working hard to keep the promises he made to the American people. But the legislative branch is not doing its part. The effort to repeal and replace ObamaCare, a promise not only Trump made to voters, but one virtually every Republican lawmaker signed on to, has been contentious, unorganized and disjointed.

And now, it is in jeopardy.

For seven long years, the GOP ran on repealing and replacing ObamaCare. They said, "Give us the House." They got that in 2010. They said, "Give us the House and the Senate." They got that in 2014. Then they said, "Give us the House, the Senate and the presidency." On Nov. 8, they got that wish, and frankly, in spite of many Republicans not even supporting the nominee of their party.

In a perfect world, the work on repealing and replacement of ObamaCare would have begun on Nov. 9. And in a perfect world, the GOP would have built consensus among the different factions within the GOP -- meaning the moderates, the conservatives, the Freedom Caucus, the Study Group -- before ever unveiling the bill. That, too, never happened.

Instead, in the two weeks leading up to the release of this bill, House members were saying they were dissatisfied with the legislative process. They were being left in the dark, they had concerns that the bill would not work for their constituents. And, by the way, they never got to see it. So once the American Health Care Act was really revealed, infighting and a public civil war ensued.

The bill was quickly labeled "RyanCare" after its champion, House Speaker Paul Ryan. Others called it "ObamaCare lite." President Trump didn't write this legislation, yet he was tasked with bringing together all the GOP factions and special interests to strike a deal. Respected groups and think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, the Club for Growth, FreedomWorks, Cato, Americans for Prosperity, and frankly, every major conservative radio talk show host in the country and the American people, were all confused, angered and frustrated.

House Republicans the legislative branch were clearly ill-prepared for this moment to lead. They have now failed the president, and it's starting to look like they're the gang that can't shoot straight. President Trump was not served well by his party in the House of Representatives, and he has been put in the position now to do their job and marshal the votes to pass the bill.

My advice tonight for Ryan and the House Republicans is to do what they should have done from the beginning. Get everyone in a room, take away their phones, order pizza, get some beer and lock the doors. The meeting should include moderates, the GOP Study Group, the Freedom Caucus, members of the U.S. Senate, because we have to deal with the reconciliation and procedural issues. The White House should be represented, including the vice president, the Health and Human Services secretary.

And the meeting is not over until they have a deal a majority of the House can support. Even at this hour, there's still time.

House members, it is time to serve your president and the people you represent. It's time for you to fix this and show the American people that they did the right thing by giving you the power and the authority to lead.

Adapted from Sean Hannitys monologue on Hannity, March 24, 2017

Sean Hannity currently serves as host of FOX News Channel's (FNC) Hannity (weekdays 10-11PM/ET). He joined the network in 1996 and is based in New York. Click here for more information on Sean Hannity.

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Sean Hannity: House Republicans leave Trump with heavy ...

American Action Network ran ads Friday like this one thanking California's David Valadao, and others, for repealing Obamacare.

Some basketball viewers on Friday night were subjected to television commercials that were guilty of peddling some alternative facts.

That's because in some markets with conservative-leaning districts, commercials aired praising some Republican House members for their efforts in repealing the Affordable Care Act, commonly called Obamacare.

The problem of course is that repeal effort, which many thought would be a slam dunk, was abandoned because the House Republicans didn't have enough support from within their own ranks.

In the generic ads, the American Action Network, a conservative-leaning advocacy group, urged viewers to call their member of Congress to thank them for keeping their "promise and replacing the Affordable Care Act with a better health care you deserve."

According to the sports and culture website Deadspin, at least four of these ads ran Friday thanking Reps. Barbara Comstock (R-VA), Will Hurd (R-TX), David Valadao (R-CA), David Young (R-IA).

As of Saturday, another eight ads were still on the American Action Network's YouTube page praising Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA), Darrell Issa (R-CA), Rod Blum (R-IA), Gred Walden (R-OR), Don Bacon (R-NE), Kevin Brady (R-TX), Mike Coffman (R-CO) and Carlos Curbelo (R-FL).

The premature ad buy was supposed to coincide with the long-awaited victory lap Washington Republicans campaigned on that once they controlled both houses of Congress and the White House, Obamacare would be tossed out.

Instead, in the midst of March Madness yet another upset took place. This one took place in the halls of Congress, when Speaker Ryan told reporters Friday:

"I don't know what else to say other than Obamacare is the law of the land. It's going to remain the law of the land."

As NPR has reported, Speaker Ryan called the defeat a "learning experience."

President Trump and House Republicans are now expected to turn their attention to another difficult overhaul taxes.

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Oops... PAC Runs TV Ads Thanking Some Republicans For Repealing Obamacare - NPR

Republicans withdrew the American Health Care Act moments before a scheduled vote on March 24, after failing to woo enough lawmakers to support it. Here are the key turning points in their fight to pass the bill. (Jenny Starrs/The Washington Post)

Why were Republicans rushing to vote on a health-care plan that they'd barely finished drafting, that budget scorekeepers hadn't had a chance to fully evaluate, and that, insofar as people did know about it, was widely despised?

In part, it's because their plan was so unpopularand because it got more unpopular the more people learnedabout it.But it's also because only by rushingto reshape a full sixth of the American economy without knowing exactly how they would be reshaping it would Republicans be able to use health care to pave the way for the rest of their agenda, including tax reform.In other words, the GOPdidn't want to let a detail like tens of millions of people losing theirhealth insurance get in the way of two tax cuts for the rich.

Here's what we knewabout the Republican plan. The latest version that the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office had a chance to analyze would have, over the course of 10 years, cut taxes by$1 trillion, disproportionately benefiting the rich; cut Medicaid spending by $839 billion, exclusively harming the poor and sick; and cut the Affordable Care Act's health insurance subsidies by about $300 billion, mostly hurting older people of modest means. Add it all up, and the CBO estimated that 24 million people would have lost their health insurance as a result. Not only that, but premiums would have increased 15 percent to 20 percent more than they otherwise would have in the next four years before so many older people were priced out of the market that premiums would have started to come down, and deductibles, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, would have been an average of $1,550 higher. In short: The GOP would have made insurance more affordable for younger people by making it unaffordable for older people and worse for everyone.

This wasn't just a matter of higher premiums and higher deductibles, though. Trumpcare also would have repealed the essential health benefits that plans are required to cover now. States would have been allowed to write their own rules, so, depending on where you lived, insurance companies might have been able to sell you insurance that didn't coverhospitalizations, prescription drugs, maternity care, mental health care and preventive care, and also imposedannual and lifetime limits on your benefits. People who couldn't afford insurance that actually, you know, insured them might have bought these skimpy plans with their skimpy tax credits why not use them on a fake something instead of a real nothing? but neither the CBO nor they themselves likely would have thought of this as being covered.

The surprising thing, then, isn't that as few as 17 percent of people approved of the American Health Care Act. It's that as many as 17 percent did.

But there's a reason the GOP was pushing a bill that would have taken everything people don't like about the health-care system and made it worse. That's the fact that it would have allowed them to pass two permanent tax cuts for the rich. Anyone, you see, can pass a tax cut that expires after 10 years. But if you want to make it last and you don't have 60 votes in the Senate then you need to find a way to pay for it (or at least look like you did). Taking health insurance away from poor and sick people would have done just that for the Obamacare taxes, which primarily hit people in the top 1 or 2 percent. Indeed, as you can see below in the chart from the Urban Institute, the combination of tax cuts for the rich and benefit cuts for the poor that was the GOP health-care plan would have been areverse Robin Hood that redistributed income from people making $50,000 or less to mostlythose making $200,000 or more.

Now, the crazy thing is that this first tax cut for the rich (in the form of Obamacarerepeal and replace) would have made a secondone (this one coming in the form of tax reform) look more affordable.

That's because, due to parliamentary rules, tax revisions can't lose any revenue outside the 10-year budget window if it's going to be permanent. The question, though, is lose revenue compared to what. If Republicans had repealed the Affordable Care Act's $1 trillion worth of taxes before they revised taxes, that's $1 trillion less they'd have to come up with to make it look like money wasn't being lost. Now, without those phantom savings, tax restructuring, Speaker of the House Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.)admitted, willbe more difficult. Not that it was ever going to be easy. After all, the $1 trillion they were trying to save witha border adjustment tax seems to be on political life support, since every major retailer, including big GOP donors such as Walmart, is opposed to it. And, as you might have guessed, there aren't an extra $2 trillion of savings lying around for them to replace the ones they thought they were going to get from this and repealing the Affordable Care Act.

Which is to say that Republicans will either have to scale back their ambitions for how deeply they will cut taxes or how long they will. Whatever they choose, though, the top tax rate isn't going to stay under 30 percent.

And for the GOP, that's the real tragedy of 24 million people keeping their health insurance.

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Why Republicans were in such a hurry on health care - Washington Post

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Who Stopped the Republican Health Bill? New York Times President Trump met with them in the days before the scheduled vote in an effort to sway them. Republican leaders finally acquiesced late Thursday to one of their demands and amended the bill to weaken the requirement that health insurers provide a ... Republicans' failure on health care bill also hurts prospects for Trump's tax reformMassLive.com Steve Bannon Thought He Could Bully Republicans On Health Care. He Couldn't.Huffington Post Republicans Admit Defeat On Health Care Bill: 'Obamacare Is The Law Of The Land'NPR AOL -Washington Post -CNBC all 5,032 news articles »

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Who Stopped the Republican Health Bill? - New York Times

While President Donald Trumps first major legislative push hurtled toward a major defeat, one of his top advisers, his son-in-law Jared Kushner, was photographed with his wife, Ivanka Trump, on a ski gondola in Aspen.

Kushner may not have been the lead White House negotiator on the doomed healthcare bill. But the image of Trumps top consigliere hitting the slopes at perhaps the most critical moment of his young presidency sent a message loud and clear: The White House wanted a win, but health care was not the dominant priority for Trump that it was for the Republican members of Congress who actually had to take a vote.

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"Their heart was not in the healthcare battle, said a top Republican who was in meetings with the president and his team but declined to be identified because those conversations were supposed to be private. Think about the level of intensity on the executive orders for the travel ban, or on the wiretapping claims. He certainly checked the boxes on healthcare, to his credit. But it's self-evident there was not a certain level of intensity devoted to this."

White House officials have insisted that Trump understood that a legislative victory was crucial at this stage of his administration -- he is struggling to boost a 42.2 percent approval rating according to FiveThirtyEight.com, the lowest of his presidency so far -- and that he was lending the full force of his office to the cause.

"The president and vice president left everything on the field," press secretary Sean Spicer wrote in an email on Saturday. "They were making calls and having members to the White House all week. In total, we spoke or met with over 120 members of Congress." And Kushner, other White House officials insisted, was never deeply involved in health care to begin with.

But according to Republican Hill staffers, in the weeks leading up to the doomed vote, Trumps mind seemed to be elsewhere.

The president made it clear at rallies over the past few weeks that healthcare was just something he needed to get through, in order to move on to the next thing. "We want a very big tax cut, but cannot do that until we keep our promise to repeal and replace the disaster known as 'Obamacare,'" he told an adoring crowd at a rally in Louisville last week.

The president also has been distracted in recent weeks by other issues, like questions about possible collusion between Russia and his campaign, and the evidence-free accusation that President Barack Obama had wiretapped Trump Tower during the 2016 election.

The top Republican said that in one healthcare meeting with the president and his top aides in the Oval Office, it was a challenge to keep Trump focused on the health care vote. "Halfway through that meeting, he stopped to talk about Gorsuch, the source said. His mind was bouncing around. I never felt they were dialed into this."

Trump gamely climbed to the Hill this week, making a last-minute, full-throttle push for the bill in the final hours -- even devoting his news-driving Twitter feed, uncharacteristically, to the health care fight.

But on the Hill, the presidents effort was viewed by Republican operatives as a case of too little, too late. The impression Trump left there, according to multiple sources who did not want to criticize the president on the record, was that Trump didnt know that much -- or care that much -- about healthcare policy That made it hard for him to go tit for tat with members of the Freedom Caucus and get into the weeds on details of the bill. There were other distractions they were dealing with, said one top Republican staffer on the Hill.

And after just 64 days in office, the short-attention span president told the New York Times on Friday he was just happy to finally to move on. Its enough already, he said of the healthcare talks.

Republicans trying to understand what went wrong on Saturday also pointed to the fact that the two lead negotiators on Trumps team, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price and Budget Director Mick Mulvaney, were slowed down by delayed confirmations. Price was only confirmed on Feb. 10, and Mulvaney was confirmed a week later, which prevented them from being totally devoted to the health care cause.

The approach of Trump, who sold himself on the campaign trail as a master negotiator who promised that repealing and replacing Obamacare would be so easy, stands in stark contrast to how his predecessor worked to get the Affordable Care Act passed seven years ago. Former aides to Obama said he devoted the better part of a year working on his healthcare bill, with staffers devoted full-time to its passage.

Obama's commitment to health reform was passionate and unstinting, said his former top political adviser David Axelrod. He was moved by people he had met who were working hard and needed care. He had seen his own mother dealing with cancer and grappling with insurance in her final months.

Trumps predecessor in the Oval Office was steeped in the details of the law and what needed to be done to pass it, Axelrod added. There were many times along the way that it appeared as if all paths were blocked and the bill would fail, and he simply would not let it die.

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Trump defenders pushed back on the notion that the replacement bill failed because the White House didnt care enough. The problem with the bill was the bill, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich said in an interview on Saturday. He also shrugged off Kushners ill-timed vacation, and the optics problem of the presidents top adviser, who reportedly thought supporting the bill was a mistake, hitting the slopes.

This is going to be a long eight years, people need to pace themselves, Gingrich said. This was not a crisis. This was a very important project, which Jared probably thought was under control when he left. The loss of confidence is only three or four days old.

For his part, the president put on a happy face in public and appeared unfazed. On Friday, answering questions from reporters gathered in the Oval Office, he spun the stunning defeat as a victory. "Perhaps the best thing that could happen is what happened today," Trump said. "It will go very smoothly."

On Saturday, he wrote on Twitter: ObamaCare will explode and we will all get together and piece together a great healthcare plan for THE PEOPLE. Do not worry! before heading to the links at the Trump National Golf Club in Virginia.

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Republicans wonder whether Trump's heart was in healthcare fight - Politico