It’s Spring Training and the spring of the Trump administration and if the president were a baseball player he’d be batting a big, fat .000. Two failed Muslim bans. One aborted “health care” bill.
It would be tempting to attribute today’s glorious crash-and-burn defeat of the American Health Care Act to the power of the American people, who stood up and spoke out in Republican town hall meetings and street demonstrations from coast to coast in defense of the Affordable Care Act and against the grotesque GOP bill.
It would be equally tantalizing to chalk this, what Nancy Pelosi called “a victory for the American people,” up to the damning discord amongst the various factions of congressional Republicans that pitted the corporations-are-people branch against those moderate members who have both hearts and the knowledge that stripping 24 million of us from often life-saving health care in favor of a $144 billion tax break for their wealthiest supporters owners might not go down too well next election day.
So too would it be easy to blame AHCA’s failure on Paul Ryan’s feckless, reckless stewardship of the aborted repeal-and-replace effort — and the cringeworthy callousness of his enthusiastic embrace of stripping the poor, the sick, the disabled and the elderly of the care they desperately need to satisfy the agenda of the Koch brothers and his other corporate overlords.
But no, I choose to lay blame at the top. After all, it was Donald Trump who promised time and again to repeal and replace the ACA with “insurance for everybody.” It was Donald Trump who, when pressed, insisted that yes, “everybody’s going to be taken care of much better than they’re taken care of now.” It was Donald Trump who pushed for a premature vote on a measure with dozens of dissenting Republicans and absolutely no opposition support. It was Donald Trump who lacked the political experience to understand the consequences for lawmakers who denied health care to their own supporters.
And so Obamacare stays. Tens of millions of Americans, including this delighted beneficiary, keep their health insurance. It’s not the ideal scenario — that would be the universal health care touted by Bernie Sanders (and me) for years — but countless lives will be saved. For now. And so for now I say to Trump:
You’re 0-3 on your big agenda items, Your Impotency.
You will not ban Muslims.
You will not take our health care.
Your presidency is a FAILURE.