Sen Murray is challenging the Paul amendment (full repeal) as violating the rules. That comes first before any votes.
Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) will have some extra attention on him, having on Tuesday given an impassioned speech imploring the Senate to return its institutional norms.
This will show what a partisan POS McCain is.
Like the dog that chased the car, now that they have caught it, they have no idea what to do with it.
Since the Parliamentarian already ruled on the Planned Parenting defunding I doubt very much that fiddling with the language will manage to get them around it. And it all but guarantees Collins and Mukowski at a min. vote no.
So Trumpcare 3.0 has already gone down in flames, and so has the Cruz amendment. Here’s what I see as the most likely outcome at this point:
“Clean Repeal” will go down in flames, then we’ll have the zillion amendments, most of which will fail, a few of which will pass but go nowhere because the underlying bill still won’t have the 50 or 60 votes it would need to pass (depending on the parliamentarian). The Democratic amendments aimed at moving to regular order and the committee process will go down on a party-line or near-party-line vote (maybe Collins and McCain get the two “golden tickets” giving them permission to buck the party leadership on that).
And then finally, probably somewhere around 2:30 am Friday morning, McConnell will unveil “Skinny Repeal” (repeal of the individual and employer mandates and some of the Obamacare taxes, defunding Planned Parenthood if they can get that past the parliamentarian, and maybe some language taken from a few amendments, if there are any that actually passed by strong enough margins that they might increase the chances of the final bill passing). After barely enough time to read the bill, and with no independent, nonpartisan analysis, they will vote on “Skinny Repeal” and probably (but by no means certainly) manage to pass it, and if they succeed in passing it they will then send the whole steaming, reeking pile of chickenshit to a conference committee to deal with later.
Then they go home and tell their constituents “I kept my promise and voted for Repeal, and I voted for x, y, and z amendments which clearly demonstrate my deep concern about blah, blah, blah, which are very important in this district, and now it’s in the hands of the conference committee and who knows what they’ll do with it, so until they produce a bill it’s unreasonable to expect me to take any position on anything other than I support repealing Obamacare and replacing it with something really great.” Not saying I think that’s going to fly with Trumpcare-skeptical voters, but out of a bunch of bad options, that might be their least-worst choice.
Now if we could just convince Mother Pence that Washington DC is full of brazen hussies, and she has Pencey scurry back to Indiana, there goes the tie-breaker…
This is all a show, be it a combination of Kabuki theater, Klingon opera, and stand-up comedy.
The fundamental fiction that the Rs continue to push is that they were right about Obamacare all along because … they have to be right to justify everything including their existence. Facts don’t matter nearly as much as perception and the Ds lost the perception argument a long time ago, and are only clawing their way back due to the obvious fact that the Rs don’t have anything better than Obamacare to offer and, as perceived, options that are much worse for people.
So you have all (or nearly all) the Rs seeking to turn the clock back to 2010 lest they lose more ground in the original perception war they won. They know if they lose more ground they will be shown for what they are: liars. If they don’t repeal, they are obvious liars to everyone for nearly a decade. If they do repeal, they will be shown as liars to everyone except their base voters who would rather believe the lies.
This is what they talk about behind closed doors in those R-only meetings. And it is enough to make nearly every one of them accept the less of two evils (in their minds) and even cause John McCain to crawl out of the hospital and lie openly about the process that passed O’care. It was regular order, but the Rs still demanded all kinds of concessions then voted against it anyway simply to obstruct. The Ds didn’t ram anything down anyone’s throat in healthcare. The Rs simply made an ideological and political stand so they could run against it for political gain.
I honor your service, John McCain, but shame on you for perpetuating this partisan lie about Obamacare. Your stand-up comedy routine is not funny.
For the Rs, there are just too many of their ranks in the Senate who believed and pushed the repeal and replace with something far better ('great", in Trump terms) which they knew at the time was BS but used it for political gain and they have just enough latent shame reflex not to accept being shown as liars on that lie. The fact is that there are far better plans the Obamacare, but they are all more toward the Progressive side of the argument such as public option, statewide single-payer, national single-payer, or just more money put into the system and extracted from the wealthy to pay for it. Duh.
That’s the messaging and line of argument the Ds should use, while simultaneously defending Obamacare as a valid attempt to turn health insurance into a public utility.
GOP. Propensities. Reason. Estranged.
No worries…
gop can’t govern.
With Trump’s Vogon Poetry during intermissions…
Well McCain showed he was a piece of shit for voting for BRCA last night after he said he didn’t support it in his fraudulent speech yesterday afternoon.
Could go straight to the House and they pass it as the “common denominator” and declare victory and hold another beer fest in the Rose Garden and go about monkey wrenching the ACA in earnest and then blame the chaos on the ACA which they have spent years priming the base and the media that any day now it would collapse. Then scream “see we told you so”.
I hope you’re wrong, but fear you may be right that the terrible nightmare bill goes back to a secret joint Trump GOP Congress cadre refusing to take public and Democratic input. The “skinny bill” would kick many millions off of health insurance and further increase insurance costs.
The GOP is an evil, relentless destroyer with no agenda to help anyone other than their donors, and contemptuous of the very institutions they purport to serve. A pox on all of them allowing this to occur. A particular pox to John McCain who said he wouldn’t do this. Unless he changes his behavior and stops this madness, my only hope is his final illness is painful.
Yup, McCain really is going out on a low note. What a pathetic way to end his career. The Milquetoast Maverick™ limps off into the sunset, loudly sharting his pants as he goes.
Votes seem to be coalescing around skinny repeal. Conventional wisdom is that it would be merged into the House bill and then re-presented. I think it’s quite possible that skinny becomes their primary bill. They may go back and say we can’t repeal all of O-Care at once, so we will take it out piece by piece, starting with the mandates, and they’ll use their typical big gov’t burdening Americans talk to sell it. Their idea would be to cause a collapse of the exchanges and then come back in a few years and finish the job.
Problem for GOP is that insurance co’s will oppose skinny strongly. I don’t think that opposition will be enough to stop the GOP, unless those guys get support from the Koch Bros.
The irony is that GOP will leave public health care alone and then tank and rig the private HC market. This will then enable Dems to turn the debate towards m4a. I prefer a hybrid system than m4a, but the result of GOP’s failure will be to broaden support for a gov’t healthcare solution.
That would probably work great for the hard-core base. But polls already indicate a large majority of voters – including a huge majority of independents (even more than Democrats, interestingly enough) and a surprisingly large amount of Republicans – are already inclined to blame Trump and the GOP if the health insurance market implodes.
If both houses actually passed “Skinny Repeal,” which almost everyone agrees would cause a death spiral of rapidly increasing premiums and falling coverage, and Trump signed it into law, their collective “ownership” of that collapse would become even stronger.
Not saying they won’t do it. They have no good options. Perhaps they will conclude this is their least-worst option. They might even be right about that, may be right to fear their own rabid Trumpublican base more than they fear losing support among the broader public. But even so, they’d still experience massive blowback.
I have never doubted not for one moment these souless Republican men will repeal the AFCA and replace it with nothing but a shell. bringing us back to the past. the reasons they do so are simply evil. they know it and the American people know it. History will not treat them well if the US even has a history. everybody dies. including these Republican men
Agreed. I think that is likely their least shitty option and most spinable.