We begin today’s roundup with The New York Times and its editorial on yesterday’s votes in the Senate:
The majority leader, Mitch McConnell, browbeat and cajoled 50 members of his caucus to vote to begin a debate on health care without even telling the country which of several competing bills he wanted to pass. Vice President Mike Pence provided the tiebreaking vote. The proposals vary in severity, but all of them would leave millions more people without health insurance and make medical care unaffordable for many low-income and middle-class families. It is clear that Mr. McConnell does not much care which of these proposals the Senate passes; for whatever reason — pride, White House pressure, sheer cussedness — he just wants to get a bill out of the Senate. It could then go into conference with the House, which passed its own terrible bill in May.
Here’s George Zornick’s analysis at The Nation:
The pure absurdity of this situation is largely by design. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell needs confusion to get an Obamacare repeal over the line: confusion about what’s being voted for, who is supporting what, and what the legislation will do to people. (The House of Representatives is already moving to gut the CBO and replace it with a small agency that will simply aggregate the findings of DC think tanks, many of which are funded by deeply ideological conservative interests.) McConnell also needs to rely on procedural radicalism—this level of chicanery and deceit has never been seen before in the Senate.
Annie Lowry at The Atlantic reminds us of the huge number of medical bankruptcies that existed pre-ACA:
Much of the debate around the GOP’s proposals has centered on how the bill will determine whether Americans have access to health care. But economists and policy analysts fear that any of the options under consideration by Republicans in the House and the Senate would not just strip away coverage and care from millions of America’s most economically vulnerable families. It would financially imperil them too. “There’s been an appropriate focus on how many more people will be uninsured,” said Larry Levitt of the Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit that performs health-policy research. “In some ways, lost in the shuffle has been the dramatic changes these replacement bills would make in how much financial exposure low-income people would have.” [...]
The result both for the insured and the uninsured would be more people going bankrupt, amassing debt, dipping into their savings, selling assets, and otherwise facing financial ruin when dealing with calamitous health problems—health problems, it is worth noting, that often destroy earning power at the same time as they require costly treatments.
Margaret Hartmann:
Next up is a vote on a straight Obamacare repeal with no replacement, which is scheduled for midday Wednesday. That’s also expected to fail, though the Senate put the measure on President Obama’s desk in 2015. Then, at the end of the week, the Senate votes on whatever new trick McConnell can pull out of his bag.
John Cassidy at writes about John McCain’s hypocrisy at The New Yorker:
McCain supported McConnell’s motion. In doing so, he helped enable the Majority Leader to pursue his fallback strategy: getting practically any sort of measure passed and tossing the details of reform over to a Senate-House conference, which would deliberate in secrecy, with little input from anyone outside the G.O.P. leadership. [...] If he had been following his own advice, McCain would have broken with McConnell and voted against the motion. If the motion had failed, the Republican leadership would have had little choice but to start talks with the Democrats about patching up the Obamacare insurance exchanges and, perhaps, making modest changes to Medicaid. Indeed, earlier this month, after McConnell’s repeal-and-replace bill failed to garner the support of fifty-one Republicans, Lamar Alexander, the chairman of the Senate health committee, announced plans to convene bipartisan hearings on ways to stabilize the individual-insurance markets. Now that McConnell’s motion has passed, such plans are in abeyance.
At The Los Angeles Times, Doyle McManus calls out Republicans for voting to proceed to a bill that doesn’t exist:
How did McConnell build a majority in favor of nothing in particular? Easy: He announced that any Republican who voted no would be labeled as voting to preserve the whole of Obamacare — anathema to their conservative constituents.
Proving, perhaps, that the skills McConnell perfected in opposition to Obama, when Republicans became known as the “Party of No,” could still come in handy, even in a governing majority.
Turning to another issue, Donald Trump’ is cowardly refusing to fire his handpicked Attorney General, choosing instead to bully him into resigning. Here’s Paul Waldman’s take on this at The Week:
Pause for a moment to marvel at the fact that the president of the United States is not only publicly humiliating one of his Cabinet members (and the first senator who endorsed him), but all but ordering the country's chief law enforcement officer to go after his defeated political opponent. That's a common occurrence in dictatorships and weak states where the victor of an election tosses the loser in jail, but it's not something we're used to seeing in America. [...] Just to be clear, Jeff Sessions is a uniquely odious figure, perhaps the most malevolent force within the Trump administration. [...] Taken in a vacuum, the fact of Sessions no longer being attorney general would be cause for nothing but celebration. But it won't happen in a vacuum. If it happens, it will be part of an effort on President Trump's part to obstruct justice and evade responsibility for his own actions and those of the people around him.