It is a clearly untenable position that the Republican Party finds itself in with the recent release of the Graham-Cassidy healthcare repeal bill. The bill is such a transparent cynical-catastrophe. This is something that is self-evident to most every American, but alas, there’s at least 34 percent of the population that thinks Donald Trump isn’t a complete failure of a human being. Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote a scathing op-ed in Monday’s New York Times that explains how “Trapped by Their Own Lies,” the Republican Party is at this moment in history. He begins by wondering aloud how, after Sen. John McCain’s famous “no,” the Republican Party finds itself once again trying to push through a clearly craven, universally derided healthcare bill, that cannot be defended with any level of merit. Krugman explains that when your political party makes its entire platform about saying things with zero actionable policy ideas—to achieve political power—you are going to find yourself without any actionable policy. Promising to “repeal” Obamacare while also lying about how you could “replace” it with something better was a lie.
But repealing the Affordable Care Act wasn’t the only thing Republicans promised; they also promised to replace it with something better and cheaper, doing away with all the things people don’t like about Obamacare without creating any new problems. Remember, it was Bill Cassidy, not Jimmy Kimmel, who came up with the “Jimmy Kimmel test,” the pledge that nobody would be denied health care because of expense.
Yet Republicans never had any idea how to fulfill that promise and meet that test, or indeed how to repeal the A.C.A. without taking insurance away from tens of millions. That is, they were lying about health care all along.
And this lie, while one of the larger and more erroneous ones in the Republican Party’s bag of bullshit, is not the only one. In fact, as Krugman explains, there may not be a single policy issue that the Republican Party can tackle that will not a) completely disappoint their base, or b) destabilize our country's economic, global, educational, standing.
The next big item on the G.O.P. agenda is taxes. Now, cutting taxes on corporations and the wealthy may be an easier political lift than taking health insurance away from 30 million Americans. But Republicans still have a problem, because they’ve spent years posing as the party of fiscal responsibility, and they have no idea how to cut taxes without blowing up the deficit.
As with health care, the party has masked its lack of good ideas with lies, claiming that it would offset lower tax rates and even reduce the deficit by eliminating unnamed loopholes and slashing unnamed wasteful spending. But as with health care, these lies will be revealed once actual legislation is unveiled. It’s telling that Republicans are already invoking voodoo economics to justify their as-yet-unspecified tax plans, insisting that tax cuts will pay for themselves by leading to higher economic growth.
The Republican Party, like Newt Gingrich, are big on “ideas.” And like Newt Gingrich, all of those “big ideas,” are fucking terrible and have been proven to be fucking awful.
We haven’t won the battle to save health care yet. Republicans are STILL pushing to repeal Obamacare before September 30. Call your senators at (202) 224-3121 and urge them to vote “NO” on any repeal bill. (After you call, please tell us how it went.)