You'd think that having to keynote a big Republican dinner the weekend that Obamacare repeal died because of a complete and total fuck-up on the part of Republican leadership would be a cause for some reflection, maybe even some self-examination. If you're Colorado Republican Sen. Cory Gardner, apparently not. He was the keynote speaker at the Cuyahoga County Lincoln Day dinner this weekend, and apparently blew the crowd away with utter bullshit. At least that's what Robert Frost, GOP chairman for the county, said.
"He was really incredible. You could hear a pin drop as he explained everything," said Robert Frost, county GOP chairman. […]
"Everyone in the media has portrayed the repeal of Obamacare as this chaotic, upside-down, cloak-and-dagger soap opera," Frost said. "What we learned from Gardner is that, when it comes to process, well, process is messy and complicated, but that is what it is supposed to be.
"Funny how you forget that after eight years of not following regular order," a reference to the expansive use of executive orders by the Obama administration.
Eight years ago, the incredibly complex ACA legislation went straight from the House leadership's offices to the House floor for a vote, Gardner said. "There was no debate, there was no discussion, it was crammed down the throat of Congress to be voted on."
Gardner, who wasn't part of the GOP electoral sweeps that seized the House majority in 2010 and the Senate's in 2014, said Republicans have chosen to return to "regular order" in enacting legislation in Congress.
Where to start? If the 18 days in which Trumpcare was crafted and died was what legislative process "is supposed to be" we're in some deep shit going forward. Because it is about as far from "regular order" as anything we've ever seen.
See, regular order is what happens when you have two responsible parties in Congress. Members and committees think about things that need to be legislated. The committees consider those things over weeks—and sometimes months—of hearings with expert witnesses to help them craft the legislation to deal with those things. Then all the ideas that have developed over that process are put into legislative language and are sent to places like the Congressional Budget Office, which figures out what those things mean for the federal budget and the people who will be affected, and various departments of the government and other stakeholders. Based on the feedback from those reviews, the committee meets again and makes changes to the legislation in a process called mark-up. Then the committee votes on the rewritten bill and either passes it to go to the floor or doesn't pass it and keeps working.
That's regular order—and hey, talk about coincidence!—it's the process President Obama and congressional Democrats followed over months and months in crafting the legislation that became the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. That this story is in the Washington Examiner and that the paper does absolutely nothing to set the record straight shouldn't come as a big surprise, but it sure is journalistic malpractice.
There are two huge lies that Republicans have been promulgating for years and that journalists have to start calling bullshit on. One is that Obamacare is failing. It's not. It's just not. It could stand some tweaks, definitely, but it is working.
The second huge lie is this one, the one from Gardner that completely ignores the process that led to the ACA. To set the record straight on that, House Democrats had 79 hearings, with 181 witnesses, working on the legislation for seven months. That’s after President Obama spent weeks and weeks in private and public meetings with stakeholders. The Senate held 53 hearings, and committees spent nearly 60 hours over 13 days debating and crafting the legislation. In September and October of 2009, the Senate Finance Committee worked on the legislation for eight days, the longest time a bill has spent in mark-up in two decades. In the process, it looked at more than 130 amendments and had 79 roll-call votes. On top of that, the full Senate debated the ACA for 25 straight days. In the middle of all this, President Obama had a seven-hour summit on the bill with congressional members.
That included Republicans.