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The Senate Parliamentarian has given Republicans an impossible deadline for repealing the Affordable Care Act.
If Republicans want to try again to repeal the Affordable Care Act with just a simple majority, they only have until the end of September to do it.
That's according to Sen. Bernie Sanders, the ranking member on the Senate's budget committee. According to Sanders, the Senate parliamentarian declared Friday that the Senate's 2017 budget resolution, which gave reconciliation instructions to repeal Obamacare, will expire at the end of the month.
That means that Republican senators will either have to pass a new budget to repeal health care with a simple majority or they will have to have 60 votes—a filibuster-proof majority—to make changes to Obamacare.
That doesn't mean the maniacs are giving up, though how they can manage to pull that off along with Harvey relief and funding the government and raising the debt ceiling and everything else they are tasked with doing in the 13 actual work days they've scheduled this month, is a mystery. Nonetheless, maniac spokesperson Alyssa Farrah tweets the Freedom Caucus plan. "Idea is: 2015 repeal already passed House & Senate. Just needs R votes to begin process, then have 2 yr window for bipartisan replace." Uh, huh. When it is pointed out to her that they tried that already in the Senate and it failed, she persists. "When there's a will & looming deadline, there tends to be a way. (2 yr delay on repeal may sway mods)."
It won't. That ship sailed in the Senate when leadership decided that they were returning to regular order and would have actual hearings, where they get testimony from experts and everyone, on stabilizing the markets under the existing law. But the fact that the House maniacs are still agitating on this means that when the window slams shut at the end of September, the enmity they have toward the Republican Senate is only going to get stronger.