As far as Dear Leader is concerned, the entire text of the bill could read “Section 0.1 of the US Code shall read OBAMACARE IS REPEALED, OUTLAWED, AND BANNED” and leave the entire structure in place, I’m not convinced he particularly gives a shit aside from making it sound bad and mean to Obama.
Before moving on to the White House’s plans for changing the tax code, Ruhle asked about how poorly Republicans’ Obamacare repeal plan was polling with Americans.
“Is that what America wants?” she asked.
“America will be happy with what we give them,” Cohn said.
Yes, goddamn it! You will eat that fucking cat food and you will like it!
What the effing F?
This has to be complete bafflegab. The whole point of the current bill is to kill people currently on medicaid to make room for some large fraction of a trillion in tax cuts. The rest of it, horrible and disruptive though it is, is just a fiscal footnote.
Or are they going to kill the poor people just for sport and leave the taxes in there, then plan to cut rich people’s taxes even more in some other way?
“America will be happy with what we give them,” Cohn said.
Spoken like true Goldman Sachs sc*mbag who would be much happier if the majority of us dropped dead tomorrow leaving a few peons to do whatever jobs they’re given.
I read this to mean that “repeal” may go the way of “amended” and maybe with the assistance of some Dems on board. If it becomes too difficult to get the money from the ACA alone, they’ll carve out as much money as possible from other programs as well (i.e., some from the ACA, some from SS, some from Medicare, definitely the VA), pass the tax cuts for the wealthy and call it good.
Gee, it’s almost like they no clear idea of what they’re trying to accomplish.
Which, I’ll concede, is not a problem Ryan and McConnell have.
Sorry Gary, your weekend messaging has been pre-empted by your boss’ Mika tweets. Of course, maybe you took this moment to announce the tax thing so the conservatives wouldn’t notice.
I bet Gary will be one of the first cabinet members to get on board with a 25th Amendment solution. Beware, Donnie Two Scoops!
In other news:
“General Custer Signals Flexibility On Defending Little Bighorn.”
At length I recollected the thoughtless saying of a great princess, who, on being informed that the country people had no bread, replied, “Then let them eat pastry!”
Effing clueless. It seems to be a trait possessed by all republican politicians these days:
The Post has a long look at the “awkward moments” that have gone on between President Trump and GOP Senators in the lead-up to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) decision to put the bill on hold while he tries to secure 50 votes for it. I wanted to flag this moment:
A lobbyist close to Senate Republicans said the score was a devastating blow to McConnell. Senators felt they had been “sold a bill of goods,” the lobbyist said, and had expected the Senate bill to have greater distance from the House bill.
“It knocked the wind out of all the sails,” said a GOP aide.
Senators began to shift into two camps: those who wanted to attack the CBO’s methodology, and those who realized it would not matter once people back in their states heard the numbers.
Sargent writes:
If GOP Senators expected the Senate bill to achieve “greater distance” from the House bill, then they were either not reckoning with the fundamental underlying realities of what GOP health reform is trying to accomplish, or they were hoping for some magical formula to materialize that would obscure those realities from view. Here is the basic math: If you are going to cut Obamacare’s taxes on rich people by hundreds of billions of dollars, you are going to have to roll back an enormous chunk of the law’s massive coverage expansion.
Wait, what? That makes no sense whatsoever from the GOP perspective. 1) if they keep the Obamacare taxes, they haven’t really repealed anything, have they? 2) if the super rich aren’t getting their tax cut, won’t they lose about 30 of their GOP senators’ votes? 3) without removing the tax cuts, they can’t run it through reconciliation rules and they’ll need 60 votes, won’t they?
They’re focused on winning!
(winning what?)
…winning!
25th Amendment solution is looking better every day - make Pence agree to be a caretaker in the WH until “the American people” make their wishes known in 2020.
But, but, but, preserving anything is not what a repeal looks like.
Keep faxing/calling your senators, people. No tweets, no emails: something physical they have to log. Hell, send postcards as well.
So if you keep the taxes, then you can pretty much keep the ACA in place and just make some changes to stabilize the markets and encourage more younger, healthy people to sign-up for coverage. What a great idea. I’m sure the Republicans in Congress will love it.
Rewrite the whole bill so that the tax cut for the wealthy is gone and Medicaid is not touched? Highly unlikely. Aside from the fact it undermines the whole point of the bill, the “conservative”–i.e. fascists–would never go for it.
I don’t trust their motives but . . . I heard that interview and, truthfully, Cohn just sounded like he had no idea what they were going to do. His remarks were very contradictory, and he echoed Trump’s “we will tweak something, anything to get a bill passed.” (He uses better vocabulary than Trump, however.)
"But Sir, Americans are hungry for reliable healthcare coverage!"
"Then let them eat Band-Aids!"
I’m sure a come-to-Jesus talk with GOP mega donors will straighten him out on their true priorities in no time.
smiley, I think you’ve hit the nail etc. reconciliation may disappear without the tax changes. the whole thing definitely goes pfft if they need 60