Nancy has already covered Mitch McConnell’s latest gambit, to repeal Obamacare (with a delay) without replacing it. It is, in effect, a way of punishing his own members for not submitting to his leadership. They will be forced to go on the record as either unconscionable arsonists or as betrayers on the one true belief.
McConnell’s caucus is not happy, as Molly Ball explains in the Atlantic, yet they seem to be giving the president a pass on this so far. Instead, senators are pointing fingers at their leadership and at the House, while House members are yelling right back.
A House Republican staffer described the fractious mood on Capitol Hill as “Republican-on-Republican violence.” As for why lawmakers don’t train their ire on the real root of their problems, the staffer shrugged: “Maybe it’s just easier to attack people without 13 million Twitter followers.”
A lot of people seem mystified about why Donald Trump won’t give up his Twitter habit considering that it has caused him so many political and legal problems. But this helps explain his rationale. He doesn’t actually have much power in the Washington DC, but his army of online supporters helps him intimidate other Republicans and keep them somewhat in line.
Trump is historically unpopular for a newly-minted president. He’s polling in the same neighborhood as Gerald Ford right after he pardoned Richard Nixon. More people say they want Trump removed from office than said that about Nixon right before Nixon actually resigned. But Republican voters still support him and Congress is extremely unpopular, which means that Trump is likely to win a pissing war with critics from within his adopted party. If Trump were to go into the defensive shell his lawyers are recommending for him, he’d lose the little bit of clout that he actually has.
Of course, it was on Twitter that Trump announced that he wanted a vote in the Senate on the repeal-and-don’t-replace bill that the Republicans passed in 2015 only to see it vetoed by President Obama. And McConnell quickly acceded to his demand.
It’s not a strategy for success. It’s an angry response to failure that punishes even the senators who were willing to walk off a cliff for the president. They want some plausible deniability so they can flexibly respond to critics on the campaign trail. They want to be able to say that they were willing to support Obamacare repeal but at the same time deny that they would have supported the specific harmful things contained in the bill. Trump wants to take this away from them and force them to vote for an enormously unpopular bill that will never become law. The Democrats can’t believe their luck.
No vote
It’s dead
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/mcconnell-obamacare-repeal-senate-defections
Less than 24 hours after Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) threw in the towel on his bill repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act and vowed to instead revive a 2015 bill to repeal the law without a replacement, three Republican senators said they would block that bill from coming to the floor for debate.
Sens. Susan Collins (R-ME), Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV), whose states all have large rural and low-income populations dependent on Medicaid, said they will vote against a motion to proceed.
That doesn’t mean no vote.
It means that everyone goes on the record.
McConnell should retreat, but the president has made his demands.
It’s a vote that would further embarrass McConnell and Trump. It’s hard for me to see McConnell actually going through with it.
We’re still making our phone calls just in case a motion to proceed makes its way to the floor. With more than two on record as saying they’ll vote no even for that, it becomes a bit less prudent (regardless of tRump’s demands) to go ahead with that vote. Retreat is McConnell’s least bad option.
That’s what I’m saying, but McConnell knew that before he issued his statement. He’s bending to the president.
Hard to say any more if anyone knows what tRump’s marching orders are. One moment, he’s tweeting for a repeal. Next moment, he’s pouting that ACA will just fail on its own and he won’t own it. If McConnell does bring a motion on the floor for repeal and delay, I am now wagering it will be more just out of pure spite than allegiance to the White House mob boss. Could be wrong, of course. In the meantime, if indeed the zombie Trumpcare bill has truly died, I and some people very near and dear to me will breathe one huge sigh of relief.
+4 because of keepung the pressure on.
I’m getting tired of it.
Trump was right!
It’s a victory, and I’m counting it as such. Will the Republicans stop their intended slaughter of healthcare? Of course not! Does this slow them down? Yeah, and what’s better than that is the rebellion against McConnell and Trump. It’s the sudden appearance of spines in some Senators, and the realization that Americans who need insurance coverage will fight back.
Republicans, backing down. I will bask in the glow, however short-lived, and celebrate a small victory. We need it.
The idea from the beginning was for Senate GOP to vote a bill they knew the House couldn’t pass, and then be able to blame House Republicans for failing to “repeal Obamacare.” This is the effort that just failed.
Senate Republicans know they have no answers about “fixing” healthcare.
From now on, they have to just repeal and lie. The new political calculus is that anybody who cares about health care won’t vote for them anyway and their rabid base will love it – even when their spouses are dying of a pre-existing condition. As in the voter who’s wife was saved due to Obamacare who said “I’m conflicted. Obamacare saved my wife, but I’m a small government guy.” He undoubtedly voted for Trump too.
Their problem now is the 10% who actually expected Trump to do something other than punch hippies. That’s where Trump’s unpopularity hurts them. They can lose a lot of House districts if they lose that 10%.
WOW, that’s a level of cold dead-inside sociopathy I have never heard before.
We’re doing something wrong in this country to make monsters like that…
They hate themselves some government these folks. That right there is years of right wing brain washing.
No, that was not the plan from the beginning. The plan from the beginning was to destroy medicaid and funnel the money into a tax cut for the ultra-wealthy through tax reform. They have been wanting to do that since forever. This was their big chance and they were going to use the resulting momentum to push through everything else they have been salivating over. They failed, big time. Now the rest of their agenda is seriously torqued up. If we can hold it, that is.
This is a major victory, and not just for protecting healthcare and all that entails. It is a major hit on the rest of their agenda.
This. The bill’s not called “Wealthcare” for nothing.
Sheesh, the left still can’t get consistent framing on this. Follow what Obama (and others) have said: it’s wealth redistribution upwards on the backs of the poor, dead and dying.
Not only Wealthcare (whoever coined that term deserves kudos), but the entire GOP program is a massive wealth redistribution from the vast majority of us to just a small handful of very wealthy. Darned unpopular to boot, if the polls on the repeal and maybe/maybe not replace bills concocted in the House and Senate are any indicators. I don’t think I have seen anything on this scale attempted in the US in my lifetime.
For the small government people: Just how small should a government be for a country that is 3.8 million square miles (9.8 million km2)and with over 324 million people? The United States is the world’s third- or fourth-largest country by total area, third-largest by land area, and the third-most populous. It is one of the world’s most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, and is home to the world’s largest immigrant population. I mean really just how small should our government be?
Clearly, we’re gonna need a bigger bath tub.