Campaign Action
Politico remains on the "there's trouble for Obamacare repeal" beat, despite all evidence that Mitch McConnell has no real internal obstacles to getting it done. Politico talks about the "slim prospects," and the senators who are disgruntled over being shut out of the process as if any of them were actually preventing McConnell from shoving this through. The handful of supposedly unhappy senators most definitely have it in their power to do so—it would only take three of them to put it out of reach, and there are more than that among the complainers.
But so far, as Greg Sargent points out in interviews with congressional scholars, there's no evidence they're doing so, and in fact giving McConnell more cover to shove the bill through with a minimum of transparency.
“A private conversation with McConnell in which a senator says, ‘This is really troubling to me and I hope you can find your way clear to do it some other way,’ would be more effective than public complaints,” congressional expert Norman Ornstein told me this morning. “McConnell’s top priority is maintaining his majority, so he’s going to be very sensitive to these senators’ own sense of what’s damaging to them. Leaders have to listen to individual senators.”
That is, leaders have to listen … if individual senators really mean what they say. The Senate is a murky place, where things mysteriously tend to end up happening if individual senators actually want them to, and don’t end up happening if they don’t. The crux of the matter is that, if any GOP senators actually did think of the process as a problem, they could convey that to McConnell, and he would feel a measure of actual pressure to respond to their concerns.
“The job of congressional leaders is to meet the demands of the rank and file,” another expert on Congress, Sarah Binder of George Washington University, told me. “That’s the leverage the rank and file has.” […]
[U]ntil we learn otherwise, we should assume that the only thing individual senators are accomplishing with their complaints is getting good quotes for themselves in the media without creating any meaningful discomfort for GOP leaders that might induce them to change any of this. Indeed, those good quotes may make it easier for rank-and-file senators to vote for the bill in the end—they may argue they are voting for it only reluctantly, after doing all they could to give the public more transparency and input, as their own objections throughout allegedly prove they did.
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.
It's abundantly clear that no single senator would have to stand up to McConnell on this on their own—those private conversations with individual senators could include three, four, six senators, all saying "this is making me look really bad at home and I can't be part of it." We sure haven't seen any indication of that out of McConnell and his leadership team, who are still steamrolling toward a vote before the Fourth of July recess.
So here's a message to all those "concerned" Senate Republicans: put up or shut up. And to the traditional media (Politico) to stop enabling them. Don't let them just tell you they're concerned, ask them what they're doing about it. By the way, Democrats need to be pushed on what they’re going to do to fight this, too.