The House’s TrumpCare vote last week has lit a new fire within the liberal base, and it is motivated as hell heading into the 2018 cycle. Our ActBlue page targeting endangered House supporters of TrumpCare is fast approaching $1.5 million. Swing Left also crossed the million dollar mark on Saturday, so they’re likely well above that. Candidates are pouring out of the woodwork, giving Democrats a wealth of options on a dramatically expanded map. As EMILY’s List noted, they talked to 900 potential women candidates during the 2016 cycle. The’ve already crossed the 11,000 mark this year. A massive wave is building, and the House vote this past week supercharged it. So how can Republicans justify voting on a deeply unpopular bill they haven’t read, and without a CBO score?
Because they needed to energize their base, they say.
“We have to keep our own base excited because off-year elections are about the base,” said Representative Steve Stivers of Ohio, who oversees the House campaign arm. “We need to show them accomplishments.
That makes sense. The GOP 2010 wave was built on a toxic brew of an energized Tea Party Right, with a liberal base depressed by the lack of single payer or a public option. Republicans would be well-served to avoid that formula. Problem is, there was one way to avoid it, and that was to deliver on their promise—full repeal. What they delivered instead was met with a big, fat, meh.
Lifezette:
The Obamacare repeal package being pushed by Republican leaders in the House of Representatives will eventually lead to a full government takeover of the health care system, a prominent Washington cardiologist predicted Thursday.
Dr. Ramin Oskoui, who also is LifeZette’s health adviser, said on “The Laura Ingraham Show” the Obamacare replacement bill that the House is set to vote on Thursday is fundamentally flawed and will not reduce health care costs.
“They need to go back and start from scratch,” he said. “We’re on our way to single payer, which will be also incredibly inefficient. We’ve seen what happens at the VA.”
Ironically, they are right. The GOP’s ineptitude in handling the repeal effort means that people are more supportive than ever on the idea of government-guaranteed healthcare. In the long-run, they have paved the way toward single-payer.
The National Review:
Now that the House has passed the American Health Care Act, Senate Republicans should work on improving it.
It sucks, it’s not good enough, and the Senate—where procedural maneuvers and Republicans have only a tiny majority—is supposed to fix it?
Weekly Standard played it straight. “Bill passes. Now it moves to Senate.”
Breitbart covered the Democratic reaction to passage, as opposed to celebrating the bill itself. As the New Republic noted, “It seems that, for Breitbart, anger at the Democrats is stronger than any elation at the passage of the bill, which will likely kick millions of people off health insurance.”
The fury against the GOP at Free Republic was brutal, and boiled down to this:
Republicans have just finally conceded the entire argument against socialized medicine in America. They have officially retreated from the belief that liberty, self-governance and free markets are ultimately the best way to provide the most people with the best health care.
By supporting government-run health care — even if it is a little less government-run than Obamacare — Republicans have, in fact, endorsed government-rationed health care. Remember those evil death panels we used to all be opposed to?
Well, now you are the death panels.
Bottom line, the base was promised repeal. Giving them a shit-sandwich instead isn’t motivating and energizing that base, it’s making them angry. By accepting government involvement in health care, the conservative base is freaked—doesn’t this inevitably lead to single-payer? It may not be inevitable, but chances are dramatically improved. Conservatives definitely have reason to be terrified!
So the best conservative media outlets can do is to point to angry liberals and say, “they hate it, so it can’t be that bad! Aren’t you psyched?” That may or may not work in the long-run. I’ve stopped trying to pretend to understand that crowd. But if the immediate reaction is any indication, Republicans kicked a hornets nest on the Left, without getting any commensurable kudos on the Right.
And if you’re a Republican senator watching this play out, do you really want to give that hornet’s nest a second kick?
(The bigger the backlash, the more scared Republican senators will be to play ball. So keep donating to the future Democratic opponents of those asshole Republicans in swing House districts who voted to kill people by taking away their insurance.)