Thursday, March 9, 2017

“Hey, We Tried”

The response to the GOP healthcare bill has been roughly the same as having a wet dog at a wedding, and yet the House and Senate leadership is bound and determined to rush it through both chambers by the end of the month without hearings or even conferences.  (Ironic since the Republicans in 2010 complained bitterly that President Obama “rammed ACA down our throats.”)

The short answer, according to Jonathan Chait, is that when the Republicans couldn’t get repeal-and-replace past President Obama, they had all the time in the world to carry on about how terrible it was and how it was destroying America and they could vote fifty-plus times to repeal it and not worry about actually doing anything.  But now that they have the White House and both the House and the Senate, they can do something… but what?  They’ve got various factions within their own party who have very different goals and they’re all attacking the piñata of a bill the House cobbled together that does everything and nothing.

Not only that, if they repeal and replace Obamacare with something that is truly worse — and this new bill seems to embody the worst of every GOP trick in the book, including tax credits and vouchers — it will be their albatross, and the mid-term campaign will be all about the Democrats running against the GOP House that killed — literally — healthcare.

So the solution seems to be to try and shove this terrible bill through and have it fail so they can go out to the voters in 2018 and say, “Hey, we tried, but there were too many special interests and Obamacare holdovers, so you’re just going to have to suffer through with it while we go on and give massive tax breaks to the rich, gut education spending, demonize immigrants, bully the transgender community, and play slap-and-tickle with the Russians.”