I have yet to read or hear news coverage of yesterday's repeal-and-replace collapse that omitted similar wording to the NY Times'. Sen. Susan Collins' defection — she called the latest bill "deeply flawed," a euphemism for "stupendously cruel" — "virtually ensur[ed] that Republicans would not have the votes they need for passage," reports the Times. What's "virtual" or uncertain about at least three hard votes against it?
Shockingly, it was Donald Trump who assessed his party's legislative predicament without spin or equivocation. Calling in on the "Rick & Bubba" radio show, he said "We’re going to lose two or three votes, and that’s the end of that." I'm a bit unclear on why he used the pronoun "we," since, unshockingly, he blamed the entire fiasco on his party. The only certainty in the Trump administration is that when failure lands with a manifest thud, the president of the United States and leader of the Republican Party will assure his base that he had nothing to do with it. Turns out, the demagogue who promised to single-handedly "fix" pretty much all of America's carnage is just a bystander (except to add to it).
But though Trump's gloomy remark that "that's the end of that" lacked equivocation, was it accurate? Not necessarily. In one of the funniest comments I've ever heard come from a Republican pol, Sen. Orrin Hatch mused that "We're supposed to be able to handle complications." Note the conditional verb usage. Still, in modern GOP jargon, "handling complications" only means further manipulating the Senate's rules.
As Politico reports, "Some Republican senators have suggested starting over, with parliamentary language in a new budget blueprint that once again would shield repeal legislation from a filibuster…. Republicans could provide reconciliation instructions for both health care and tax reform" (my emphasis). "That might entail some procedural hurdles, but one GOP aide said Monday that because the Finance Committee has jurisdiction over about 95 percent of health care policy, 'it’s not like we couldn’t slip it in anyway.'"
Yet what are procedural hurdles and extended hypocrisy about what Republicans repeatedly denounced as the legislative scourge of Democrats' health-care reconciliation maneuver? Even those complications are but trivial pursuits when compared to the straightforward simplicity of Republicans' far deeper and far more cynical objective in prolonging the reconciliation option.
Adds Politico, Doing so would put the contentious issue of health care back in the spotlight during the 2018 midterm elections.
Here is a base-pandering bone from which Republican curs just can't let go. The policy of Obamacare is, to the GOP, of much lesser importance than the politics of it. For decades, from the Reagan through the Bush II administrations, they dangled all manner of cultural wedges — such as the abolition of a woman's right to choose — before their socially conservative base. But achieving their cultural reactionaryism would have cooked some their finest, raw electoral meat. And God knows they couldn't have that; the politics of demagogic cynicism demanded that such issues always be kept fresh — and readily available for cheap pandering.
For what genuine, realistic policy ideas do Republicans actually have to sell?