The principal question itself remains unchanged: What has changed?
In a frantic bid to show how well Republicans can govern, Mitch McConnell has arranged for a truly deplorable day of gross mismanagement. "It's hard to capture what an absurd and somewhat unbelievable situation" the Senate majority leader has thrust his party into, wrote health-care maven Sarah Kliff yesterday. Twenty-four hours later, the "situation" is the same — absurd and, for Republicans, entirely believable — which the situation was a week ago, a month ago, six months ago. Nothing has changed.
McConnell's plan is simply to open Pandora's box. He merely wants a procedural vote to proceed to mayhem; first, reports the NY Times, a vote "to take up the health bill that narrowly passed the House in May" — narrowly, because it was perhaps the most ghastly piece of legislation since the Fugitive Slave Act. Assuming success there, "the Senate would then be able to consider numerous amendments, including complete substitutes for the House bill. But it remains unclear what would take its place, and Senate Republican leaders have not said which substitute measure would be considered first."
Kliff wrote that "there are two that seem most ripe for a vote": There's the Obamacare Repeal Reconciliation Act, which would cut 32 million Americans out of health care; and there's the Better Care Reconciliation Act, which is the more charitable option, in that it would cut only 22 million Americans out of health care. Both are the product of no congressional hearings, no communing with experts, no bipartisan negotiations, no nothing but a blind, headlong rush to rescind an Obamian legacy that Republicans have scandalously misrepresented for seven years. Again, nothing has changed.
What remains most poignantly unchanged, however, is that just on the procedural vote, Sen. Susan Collins is, reportedly, a no. "At least two other Republicans, Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska," continues the Times, "have indicated they will not vote to proceed if Senate leaders plan to then put forth a measure to repeal the health law without providing a replacement" — a replacement, that is, that a miscellany of diehard conservative senators would vote against. Likewise, whatever diehard conservatives might support would meet insurmountable resistance from the moderates. So, once again, nothing has changed.
Neither has Donald Trump's intensifying case of rabies, being the foaming canis lupus familiaris that he is. "Every Republican running for office promised immediate relief from this disastrous law" of Obamacare, said the pseudopresident at the white doghouse yesterday. "But so far, Senate Republicans have not done their job in ending the Obamacare nightmare."
Trump had, of course, repeatedly insisted that it's Obstructionist Democrats! who are responsible for our long national nightmare. But what's one more contradiction atop a thousand others? Flipping, flopping and frothing is but another feature of our changeless, mad-dog chief executive.
Thus I ask again. Although today's Senate proceedings are (so far) the lowest point for a party that knows no intolerable lows, what, really, has changed?