Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, you remember, was the guy pinned down by Jimmy Kimmel as to whether or not the Senate was going to strip health care from American citizens in yet another ideological anti-Obama pout-fest, or was going to have a bare sense of decency about the whole whether our children live or die thing. He was the one who coined the term "Jimmy Kimmel test" in promising that no sir, he could never stomach doing such a thing.
And then four months later he turned around and wrote a bill that strips even more people from health coverage. It’s a bill that targets children and adults with pre-existing conditions specifically. A bill that might as well be called the I Played Jimmy Kimmel Big Time, Didn't I Act of 2017.
Around this time, his colleague Lindsey Graham of South Carolina was expressing concern about the rushed process and hasty drafting of Paul Ryan’s American Health Care Act. Four months later, Cassidy and Graham are the lead authors of what’s become the GOP’s final stab at repealing Obamacare. Their bill brazenly casts aside all of their previous doubts, featuring the most slipshod legislative process yet and no guarantees of adequate coverage whatsoever. And neither of them has bothered to explain to anyone why they changed their minds.
That is indeed the kicker, isn't it? Cassidy was the guy vowing that stripping children with pre-existing medical problems off their insurance and leaving them to the wolves was a step too far, even for a Republican. And McCain best-buddy Graham was doing his usual Responsible Republican schtick—a schtick that never includes voting against the thing he's railing against, of course, only the part about making mewling statements on the Sunday shows—up until the point where he personally announced himself the point person for a new effort that would take the embarrassing scramble to pass any possible repeal bill the first time around and turn it into an even more secret, hurried, shambolic affair.
Apparently Graham’s problem last time around is that the Senate waited for a CBO score to see just what effects the bill they were voting on would, once passed, have. He has now remedied that difficulty. There won't be such an accounting this time.
So what's up with that? It's almost as if both Bill Cassidy and Lindsey Graham are shameless, unapologetic liars whose previous concerns were, to a word, mere posturing garbage. They got high marks for saying supposedly decent things on television—then voted for the bill anyway. When that bill failed they were so upset about the not-decent bill not passing that they hastily crafted a bill that did even more of the bad things, ditched the pretense of doing any of the ameliorating things intended to make the bill seem a fraction less cruel the last time around, and are now thumping the tables saying it's either this new, meaner, less encompassing, more destructive version or America will face socialism.
Perhaps Lindsey Graham and Bill Cassidy were liars all along. Perhaps they wanted press for saying decent things they didn't believe. Perhaps they changed their mind when a few other Republican senators took the decency a bit too far and actually voted against the monstrous thing instead of just mewing about it, and have now decided that the time for pretending at decency is over.
We haven’t won the battle to save health care yet. Republicans are STILL pushing to repeal Obamacare. Call your senators at (202) 224-3121 and urge them to vote “NO” on any repeal bill. (After you call, please tell us how it went.)