To nationwide cheers, Trumpcare went down in flames Friday. It was a spectacular failure on the part of a pr*sident who had vowed from the beginning to the end of his campaign that he really is the brilliant guy depicted in his ghost-written The Art of the Deal and would quickly repeal and replace Obamacare.
So used to snapping his fingers and having his commands carried out instantly. Not this time. Let that be an omen of what is to come.
The failure had many parents. A fractious Republican Party led by incompetents who could not wrangle their ultra-extremist wing into line. Members of the Freedom Caucus didn’t vote against the repeal-and-replace legislation because it was not good enough. They voted against it because it wasn’t bad enough.
Then there was the lunatic confidence of the leadership that the rotten replacement legislation designed to rip health care coverage away from 24 million Americans and give the 1% yet another giant tax break would sail though Congress with barely a murmur.
By Friday’s end, Donald Trump had shown himself to be master of The Art of the Squeal as he blamed the Democrats for the failure that humiliated and wounded him and Speaker Paul Ryan. “They 100 percent own it,” the pr*sident said. That generated some guffaws.
Democrats, however, do deserve some “blame.” Not a single one of them supported the repeal-and-replace bill. They did not join the “third way” NoLabels crowd and try to compromise with Trumpcare supporters by adding, as one wag on Twitter put it, a “slice of cheese to a shit sandwich.” So hurrahs to them.
In late December, Sen. Chuck Schumer, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi had launched “Our First Stand: Save Health Care,” a campaign to keep Obamacare intact that included dozens of January rallies across the nation.
But it was the huge range of grassroots actions that did the heavy lifting.
This included action like that of The Save My Care effort. Its participants went to 53 cities in 23 states to stir opposition by giving citizens a chance to speak publicly about why health care matters to them.
Last week, Move-on.org coordinated health care-related “stake-outs” in front of the home-turf offices of 32 senators and representatives. And there were scores, if not hundreds, of local actions, many of them organized via Indivisible, which targeted some Republicans whom it was thought might be moved into the “no” column, and some were.
Usually sparsely attended town hall meetings with members of Congress have overflowed with citizens eager to give representatives a piece of their minds. Not the least of this upsurge, indeed, one of the key elements of the rebellion, was the barrage of emails, faxes and phone calls to members of the House and Senate. It wasn’t unusual to find their voicemails full. Hurrah to that.
However, while we celebrate the humiliating failure brought about by all these factors—Republican split, Democratic unity, grassroots surge—we have to prepare for the next rounds. While Trumpcare has been smothered, there’s plenty of damage the regime can still inflict on the Affordable Care Act. Indeed, Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price could, as Charles Gaba (aka Brainwrap) has pointed out, do much in that regard via the executive order Pr*sident Trump signed in January. And whatever other shenanigans his advisers can come up with.
Throughout all of our continuing rebellion against the regime’s efforts to sabotage Obamacare, we need to keep in mind that our ultimate goal is to the create a truly universal health care system in which every person in the country is covered. You know, the way all the other developed nations of the world do. Such a system is obviously not going to be put into place as long as the people currently in charge of the Senate, House and White House remain in charge.