Oh my god they're turning on each other. And not just infighting but maybe it’s possible we’ll see the return of dueling on the floor of Congress sometime soon. Stranger things, man.
Context: the GOP’s healthcare bill, which I believe may have been titled the “America America America The Best Number One OK America Rules Europe Drools Also Here’s Some Money Rich People and Everyone Else Can Suck Eggs Act of 2017” was pulled before the vote Friday afternoon. Bear in mind here why the GOP leadership decided not to bring the bill to a vote: it wasn’t because they realized the bill was as close to evil as one can get without holding an amulet, and it wasn’t because they suddenly became aware that it would result in the deaths of millions of people - more than if they repealed the Affordable Care Act and replaced it with a Denny’s menu - while giving a massive tax cut to the rich and driving the poor people in this country (aka the GOP base) to the edge of a financial cliff, teetering face first over a precipice and then leaving birdseed on the hood. Those things were by design. And it wasn’t because they worked out that this bill did nothing to fix the problems in the ACA, and would cost the country more than just leaving it in place. It was because the GOP is just really, really, unbelievably bad at legislating.
For seven years, almost to the day, the GOP has been taking every possible opportunity to lambast the ACA, holding expensive show votes once an hour and spouting absolute nonsense about death panels and government overreach. To hear the Republicans tell it, people were better off back in the good old days when if you got sick and were poor, your options were to either lose everything you own and pass debt on to your descendents unto three generations, or to die. That was somehow preferable to people being able to get coverage. Who knew? So the GOP blasted the ACA and decreed that the moment they had the opportunity, they would repeal it “root and branch”. If only those pesky Democrats would get out of their way, they’d be able to enact their reactionary legislative agenda and see to it that the landmark legislation pushed by the Black President was erased from the history books. Then Drumpf came along and made a splash with the people that think the ACA and Obamacare are two different things (the latter is for the blacks, obvs) by shouting about how he was gonna repeal Obamacare on “Day One”. He said that, over and over, because he had absolutely no idea how government works and loves shouting. Fast forward to January, after Putin and the KGB made good on their promise to deliver him the election if he continued to launder their money through his shitty businesses, and now not only did Mr Day One have his office, he had a majority GOP congress, in both houses, who were also determined to kick millions of Americans off their insurance the second those tacky gold drapes went up in the Oval Office.
Only they didn’t do that. They spent about sixty days continuing to talk about what they were gonna do, they came up with double top secret bills that they locked in a room at the Capitol and refused to allow anyone to see. What happened to Day One? What happened to the moment you get the chance, the moment the damn Democrats get out of the way?
As it turns out, legislating is hard. Especially when your party is comprised of an equal percentage of spiteful white bigots, Rand acolytes who believe the poor would be better off dying, and actual dyed-in-the-wool lunatics who by some series of extremely unlikely circumstances did not manage to die at fifteen in an incident involving fireworks, livestock and pneumatic machinery. And since all of those people have more or less the same amount of power in your big tent (the kind you see encircling a house when they're spraying for termites), it becomes impossible to get anything done. So, surprise surprise, when the week came (about two months after Day One) and the GOP leadership determined that Now Is The Time For All Good Maniacs To Come To The Aid Of The Tinpot Dictator, and said self-styled autocrat declared that if they didn’t hold the vote immediately he was gonna hold his breath until he died, and they started to count the members who might actually vote for this shitty, shitty bill, it quickly became clear that this dog wasn’t gonna hunt.
So in typical fashion, they pulled it at the eleventh hour and then immediately rushed back to their offices to drink and masturbate while sucker-punching themselves or to their safe spaces in front of television cameras, where they quickly blamed the failure of the legislative equivalent of a car made of cereal boxes and earwax on the Democrats, the media, the weather, Zorgon the River God, anyone unfortunate enough to be passing by, etc. After the entire country laughed in their stupid baby faces and pointed out that the fault rested entirely at their own feet, they had a good hard look at themselves, took a deep breath, and immediately began blaming each other.
Eh, closer, at least.
So now it’s begun. The reality-based version of the Great Loyalty Oath Crusade (not to be confused with the actual loyalty oath campaign Drumpf and co actually made their actual campaign staff sign around this time last year, which actually happened), wherein all of these dummies that have been promising repeal for the better part of the last decade are going to start casting suspicious glances at one another and making sure that everyone knows that they would have gotten away with it if it hadn't been for those meddling centrists/hard-liners/actual psychopaths/RINOs/Presidential staffers. Drumpf, a man who wrote a book about how to make a deal and told the American people that he was the only one that could “get healthcare done”, because that’s somehow a sentence, failed to make a deal and now looks like that idiot kid who asks you if you want to see a dead body and then shows you a rotting dress form in the ravine behind Jo-Ann Fabric. Ryan is now once again the most hated man in Drudgedonia and Breitbart’s Home for Nazi officers who escaped to Argentina and discovered a way to live forever by inhabiting the bodies of college Republicans. Somewhere, Boehner and Obama are having a drink and laughing (not together, of course), and the rest of the USA is quickly learning what us libtards knew, that the people the Rightwing voters sent to represent them in DC are not only evil but also really, really bad at doing government.