It’s an embarrassing day to be a Republican.
Seven years to come up with something better than Obamacare, and here we are, facing a do-or-die vote, with absolutely nothing.
Not that we don’t understand health care, but that we don’t understand reality.
(Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)
The reality that Paul Ryan is about as weak a speaker as this country has seen in a long time. The reality that backstabbing Trump is Republican suicide. The reality that so-called conservatives in the House don’t understand politics any better than they do the Constitution.
The Democrats have been stomping Trump since the day he swore in, and now the Republicans are waving the Democrats off and wading in to double tap him while he’s down. After campaigning around the country on “repeal Obamacare,” the Republicans are about to tell America that it got punked.
Because a handful of piss-ant Republican congressmen from Skoal country can’t pull their heads far enough out of their hind ends to see things the way they are.
Trump gave conservatives a Scalia Junior for the Supreme Court, and has got lackeys ripping up the nanny state from stem to stern, and now they’re going to kill him on Obamacare because he didn’t kiss their fannies just right. And in so doing, they are going to perpetuate the program they say they hate.
Some of these huckleberries stand there in the scrum of extended iPhones talking about how the Trump health care plan isn’t conservative enough. So they’re going to kill it. Which will leave Obamacare in place.
It’s like Obamacare is dog crap and Trumpcare is lima beans. No, you may not like lima beans, but you like them a whole lot better than you like dog crap.
What galls me the most is these Johnny-come-lately conservatives who wax poetic about the Constitution, like they’re the first ones ever to read it. They talk a lot about it, but they seem to have missed its fundamental principle of electoral governance – the center rules.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m a conservative myself. A real conservative. I had an assault rifle and a dog-eared copy of “Atlas Shrugged” before most of these pups were born. I didn’t read about Reagan, I voted for him – and I served under him. And my country-boy-can-survive conservatism goes all the way to the bone. I swore an oath to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States, and to bear true faith and allegiance to the same, and you can count on me keeping it.
So I’m not going to be lectured by faddists who milk other men’s patriotism to advance their own political ambitions.
The Constitution says that a potential law of this land must be embraced by a majority of the members of the House of Representatives, and by a majority of the members of the United States Senate, and win the signature of the president of the United States. That means a whole lot of people have to be on board for the train to leave the station. And the only way that happens is for there to be consensus, cooperation and coalition. You’ve got to get 51% twice, and a presidential signature, or the Constitution says you are a no-go.
It is a system designed to govern in the center, to moderate extremes, and to penalize and ostracize those who shout in from the fringe. Purists may claim fidelity to the Constitution, but the Constitution itself marginalizes them.
That has a practical impact on the legislative process. It means that the only things that will get passed are those that are acceptable to a majority. In the real world, that means many will be pleased, and many will be disappointed, but for most, the good outweighs the bad. The problem with some Republicans in the Trumpcare debate is that they insist on getting all good, and refuse to accept any bad.
They are egocentric, and blind to the legitimate representative interests of other Americans – including those of a different party or persuasion. And because they can’t get it exactly their way, they’re going to crash the whole thing.
The frigging idiots.
Unwilling to accept 80 percent, they are going to get zero percent.
And the American people are going to suffer.
Failure to pass Trumpcare – even as an intermediate step in a longer process – is to make Obamacare permanent. It is to weld the chains of a failed policy around the health and wellbeing of Americans who voted four months ago for exactly the opposite thing.
Obamacare opposition is going to fall apart because of Republican stupidity, and all the Democrats have to do is stand there and not laugh too loudly.
House Republicans must stand and deliver.
Or openly betray their duty and the campaign pledge of their party, and destroy this president who offers so much hope to conservatism.
I’m not optimistic about which way it’s going to go.