Lance Mannion: They're STILL still Republicans

Posted Friday afternoon, July 14, 2017.

Kentucky’s junior Senator Rand Paul, one of the only two Republicans who’ve taken a principled stand against the Senate’s bill to repeal the Affordable Health Care Act. Unfortunately, his principles are evil-minded. Even more unfortunately, they’re not that much different from the principles that are behind most of his Republican colleagues’ intention to vote for it. Photo by J. Scott Applewhite, courtesy of AP via the New York Times.

With their bid to roll back the Affordable Care Act only a vote away from collapse, Republican leaders scrambled Thursday to rally GOP senators behind revised healthcare legislation in hopes of passing it next week.

The new version — which represents Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s latest bid to unite his fractious caucus — would still enact historic cuts in federal healthcare assistance to low- and moderate-income Americans and fundamentally scale back Medicaid’s half-century-old guarantee of health coverage for the poor.

I like that phrase in there, about McConnell’s “fractious caucus.” It’s a near tautology. Caucus’ are by nature fractious. But the headline on the story, as headlines unfortunately often have to do, reduces something amusing to the banal:

Divided Senate Republicans unveil new version of Obamacare repeal bill

Divided Senate Republicans just doesn’t cover it the way fractious caucus does.

They’re certainly fractious. But divided. How are they divided? They’re all in agreement. They’re all Republicans, and the Republican position on health care is the same as it is on every other proposition that the government should do things to take care of our weakest and most unfortunate fellow Americans---Too bad for THEM!

They’re not divided. They’re just having disagreements about how many people they can get away with letting die.

On the one hand you have the likes of Rand Paul, Mike Lee, and Ted Cruz---who, by the way, is the Devil or at least one of his demons. Their position is “All of them! Let them all die! That’ll teach them for having had the temerity to make demands on our consciences and wallets when we’re so busy looking out for Number One!”

On the other you have the likes of Dean Heller, Lisa Murkowski, and Shelly Moore Capito, whose position is “Well, I’d rather none but if they have to do, as long as few of them are my voters, I can deal with it.”

In between are the majority of them whose position is, “Whatever. What do I care? It’s not my lookout. Just as long as my donors get their tax cuts.”

All on her lonesome is Susan Collins, the only Republican who seems the least bit bothered by the idea of millions of people being left to suffer and die and their families go bankrupt just to give Donald Trump some unearned bragging rights. And her commitment to basic decency doesn’t seem all that firm, probably because she is all on her own.

As you’ve probably guessed, I’m not optimistic that Mitch McConnell will fail to get Affordable Care Act repealed. I think that if there was a real chance it would be defeated, it would already be defeated, in fact if not act---there’d be five Republican senators who’d already loudly and emphatically made clear that for reasons of common decency and pragmatism they would be voting No, no matter what. Whatever they might believe as good Republicans about government aid of any kind, they’d be pointing out that repealing Obamacare in order to replace it with empty promises that don’t mask the gratuitous cruelty would throw the entire health care system into chaos and cost everybody, including the short-sighted greedy rich bastards demanding their tax cuts, far more money than is already being spent.

But as it stands, there aren’t even the three it would take to defeat the bill or at least make Mitch McConnell pull it again.

Besides Collins, who as I said is shaky, the only principled NO is coming from Rand Paul, and his principles are evil-minded. He is the most passionate and committed disciple of selfishness and greed in his caucus. If in the forced march through a life full of suffering and sorrow we all take, the Democratic ideal is “Nobody gets left behind,” while the Republican is “You’re on your own and too bad for you if you can’t keep up,” Rand Paul is for going back and shooting those who are too weak and fall behind.

At Slate, Jim Newell doubts there’ll be the one more.

In one reality, all of the remaining holdout senators come out together to announce that they can’t support the motion to proceed, and the effort dies. Safety in numbers.

In another, no additional senator comes out to announce that he or she can’t support the motion to proceed. Portman, Capito, and Hoeven are convinced well enough that all of that loose money in the bill can be collected to ensure that low-income people have some sort of quasi-private options for obtaining medical care. Murkowski, who got a carve-out in the bill released Thursday, accepts it. McConnell assures Heller that he’ll make all the necessary phone calls on his behalf to help him find good-paying private-sector work come January. The Congressional Budget Office score comes out, and it’s not great, but since President Donald Trump’s Health and Human Services Department will be scoring the Cruz amendment instead of CBO, the worst of the bill’s effects on those with pre-existing conditions will be masked. The bill proceeds to the floor, a vote-o-rama of amendments occurs, McConnell cleans the bill up at the end, and the bill passes.
Any third Republican senator could have given a press conference Thursday afternoon and killed the bill. But it didn’t happen. Instead of finding their exit ramp off the bill, they’re trying to find their way to yes.

I like the way Newell slyly implies Heller’s headed for defeat in November and that he’s a craven enough opportunist that he’ll vote to screw his voters on the way out the Senate door if he’s sure it’ll bet him a cushy job as a lobbyist or corporate board member.

The bill has been tweaked to make it less obviously mean and less immediately rewarding to the rich greedy bastards demanding their tax cuts, but it's still the same in effect and intent, punishing the poor and the sick, reopening the market to fly by night companies selling worthless policies to th naive and desperate, giving all insurance companies permission to screw all their policy holders even those who think their employer provided insurance keeps them safe, and furthering the realization of Paul Ryan's drunken frat boy dream of ending Medicaid on the way to ending Medicare and Social Security as well, and fifty Republican senators are apparently fine with that, and that's what makes them Republicans.

One of the reasons the political press corps were too slow to take Trump seriously is that they didn’t take Republican voters seriously---that is, they didn’t see them for what they are or listen to what they said they wanted. For decades they’ve been covering “conservatives” as jess plain folks who were naturally suspicious of Big Government and the East and West Coast elites presuming to tell them how to run their lives and their political leaders in Washington as a mix of moderates and even a few liberals of the type who’d held no sway in the party since at least 1994. The GOP has been moved radically to the right by Right Wing corporatists who made common cause with Right Wing Christians and gathered in the white small town and suburban middle class by exploiting its fears, hatreds, bigotry, racism, and greed, promising them a share of the plunder, and training them to blame it on THEM, those others when the money didn’t come through. The fractious national coalition has been united in its insistence that “It’s all for us. There’s none for you. And any attempt on your part to make us share marks you as parasites and thieves.”

That’s today’s GOP, and, with the exception of Collins, all the Republicans in the Senate are comfortably at home within it. Which is why I’m not optimistic that third Senator will turn up. The ACA is based on the proposition that there are things we all ought to share.

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I’m not optimistic, but I’m not defeatist. Call your senators. And your Representative in case they talk to their colleagues in the upper chamber and because if the repeal passes he/she will have to vote on it again. I’ve made my calls. I’ll make them again. I’ve also called the White House. What the hell? He did promise not to cut Medicaid and he’s called the AHCA mean. Worth reminding him. And at least we’ll have the satisfaction of knowing he’s thrown another tantrum when he’s handed the message slips when he gets home from France and sees more proof he’s not universally loved.

I’m waxing poetical there, but you get the point. Don’t take me literally, but take me seriously and call.

The White House phone number is 202.456.1414.

The Senate’s switchboard number is 202.224.4124.

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Related posts from the back issues of the Mannionville Daily Gazette:

Where Trumps come from, once more with feeling.

They hate us. They hate all of us.

They're still Republicans (First Chapter).