Campaign Action
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell wants to pass Trumpcare by July 4. Seemingly the only thing that could stop him is if he can't get 50 of his own senators to go along with it. While some of those members are happy to bitch about the fact that the secretive back-room process McConnell is using makes them look bad, so far none of them has shown any inclination to do something about that.
That's not the worst of it, though. The worst of it is in this Vox article in which eight Republican senators are asked "simple and critical questions about the health care bill they're crafting in secret," like how will this bill help people and make the healthcare system better. None of them could answer. Some couldn't even understand the question.
Like Arizona's John McCain, who was either playing very dumb or has spent the whole week staying up late to watch the Diamondbacks' baseball games in a horrifying "who's on first" routine. Asked by Tara Golshan "what are the big problems this bill is trying to solve," McCain answers "Almost all of them. They’re trying to get to 51 votes." Then with dogged persistency refuses to acknowledge that he's being asked about healthcare policy. He's asked specifically "Policy-wise. What are the problems—[in the American health care system] this is trying to solve—and is the bill doing that right now?" And he says "it's whether you have full repeal, whether you have partial repeal, whether you have the basis of it. It's spread all over." Golshan spells out what she's trying to get him to say what Republicans see as the problems with Obamacare and how they'll fix it, and McCain insists on talking about getting to 50 votes. It would be comical if it weren't so terrifying.
Call your Democratic senator/s through the Capitol switchboard, 202-224-3121 and at their local offices and tell them you expect them to do everything in their power to make passing Trumpcare as painful as possible for Mitch McConnell and team.
Then it's Chuck Grassley's turn. The Iowan does slightly better than his fellow octogenarian McCain, because he gets that they're supposed to be talking policy, but gets kind of hung up when he's pressed for what he means by "bringing certainty to the insurance market" and "lowering the rates from now down." When pressed for an explanation as to how what Republicans are doing would do these things, he falls back on "I'm sorry I have to go."
Six more senators doggedly refuse to answer even the most simple policy questions about what's in their bill and how it will fix what they think is wrong, every time going back to some variation of Arkansas's John Boozman: "we’re working hard to come to an agreement so we can solve some of those problems." For everyone of them, process—getting to 50 to get rid of Obamacare—was the focus over the fact that they're talking about taking health insurance away from millions. One of them—Roger Wicker from Mississippi—even pulls the "freedom" card, throwing in "tax cuts" and "competition" for good measure.
None of this is a surprise. The Republican goal has never been to make healthcare policy that works for anyone. It's been about hating President Obama and destroying his greatest achievement and about cutting taxes, not necessarily in that order. They don't do policy anymore, they just do politics.