The GOP effort to pass health care repeal has been on life support for weeks, but Sen. Mitch McConnell just won't pull the plug.
Managing to pass something now, however—especially with news that Sen. John McCain is fighting an extremely aggressive, even brutal, type of brain cancer—would be the legislative equivalent of pulling a rabbit out a hat without even having a rabbit to begin with.
Whether he's the legislative magician everyone imagined him to be or simply a master of destruction is something we'll find out next week, when he's apparently going to demand a vote on a yet-to-be-determined bill: repeal with no replacement or one of two repeal/replace bills that would both be ruinous to the nation's health care coverage.
Amid McConnell's shell game, Sen. Susan Collins is the only Republican senator who has been consistently firm in her opposition the past couple weeks. Here she is marveling at the fact that McConnell hasn’t even designated which bill they’ll be considering:
"I don’t even know what we’re proceeding to next week," said Maine Sen. Susan Collins, a centrist Republican who has called on her party’s leaders to take a more measured approach to fixing the current healthcare law.
Other more moderate Republicans like Nevada's Dean Heller and Alaska's Lisa Murkowski seem to be waiting to see what kind of goodies McConnell can float their way. To some extent, so is Rand Paul on the conservative side.
But it's McCain's declining health that could change everything for Republicans, and not just on health care. His potential inability to cast votes could reduce their edge in the Senate from 52 to 51 seats, even more razor thin than before. And frankly, McConnell hasn't proven to be much of a whiz at the vote counting so far. Nothing brought his incompetence into sharper focus this week than the spectacle of him and Donald Trump wining and dining half a dozen of the GOP's "yes" votes on health care Monday night, right as two uninvited Senators released statements that torpedoed the bill.
McConnell, for all the hype about his genius, didn't even know who the weakest links in his caucus were, much less how to appease and persuade them.
That's the backdrop against which we can now measure the prospect of Republicans passing anything through the Senate on a party-line vote with an even less predictable head count than they had just one week ago.
Congressional Republicans, who are now desperate to deliver on any of their legislative priorities, haven't yet adjusted to the pall this new uncertainty has cast on their entire approach to governance. With the exception of courting help from Democrats to avert government shutdowns and raise the debt ceiling, Republicans have approached nearly every major legislative battle for the past couple years with an "our way or the highway" attitude. Since Trump took office, Congressional leadership has procedurally rigged every major bill to live or die on a party-line vote—purposely cutting Democrats entirely out of the negotiations, keeping the bills under wraps until the last possible moment, and then blaming Democrats for not working with them when their plans went down in flames.
Even after getting burned repeatedly by that tactic on health care repeal, they are presently setting up the very same dynamic on tax reform, which they also hope to push through a reconciliation process that allows a simple majority in the Senate to pass legislation.
“I feel like it’s our only option,” Republican Study Committee Chairman Mark Walker said.
Going from health care to rewriting the tax code with the same partisan approach is like jumping from the frying pan into the fire. And this raises an interesting prospect: What if Republicans reach the end of this year and head into 2018 having achieved none of their major priorities other than filling Justice Scalia's vacant Supreme Court seat?
Or maybe they manage a temporary tax cut for the rich but don't repeal Obamacare and don't pass a permanent re-rendering of the tax code. Will that be enough for the voters who elected them?
On Monday night, after GOP Sens. Jerry Moran and Mike Lee dealt the potential death blow to health care repeal, Washington Post reporter Robert Costa tweeted out some thoughts on the state of play.
“Most elected Rs don't fear primary challenge if they buck repeal,” he wrote. “They see base's ire as grievance/"fake news" focused, not ACA obsessed.” He added that, privately, many Republicans would rather "blame Dems" leading into the midterms than "shoulder the burden for passing" their own health care repeal.
In other words, Republicans really believe the heart of their base right now is still more motivated by the opportunity to vent their frustrations than they are fixated on getting actual accomplishments even though their elected representatives hold all the power. If that’s true, then continuing to rage against Obamacare still holds more power than actually achieving the goal of repealing it.
In some ways, that sentiment was perfectly summed up by a PPP survey released earlier this week showing that even if Trump's campaign was found to have colluded with the Russians, 77 percent of Trump voters believe he should remain in office while just 16 percent wanted him to resign.
Trump—while he's completely incompetent, makes daily gaffes, has no grasp on reality, and has practically alienated the world (except for Russia)—continues to be his voters’ perfect messenger and chosen leader regardless of whether he worked with a hostile foreign power to undermine the will of the American people.
If Republicans head into 2018 with little-to-nothing to show after a year of flailing governance, expect them to wage a spectacularly nasty, Trump-inspired blame game against anything they think will serve as a lightning rod to both distract and enthuse their base.
Most obviously at the moment, that will include demonizing Democrats like they did Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi in Jon Ossoff's campaign in Georgia’s Sixth District. And it's a strategy that will almost certainly target undocumented immigrants, as if they haven't already bore enough of the brunt of Trump's policies to no good end. Here's a preview of where Republicans think they can get traction by fear mongering:
Sens. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) and David Perdue (R-Ga.) have been working with the White House to introduce a bill by the end of the summer that would cut the current annual level of 1 million green cards by half in 10 years, largely by limiting visas for extended families of legal U.S. residents.
Cotton, who along with Perdue has met twice on immigration with Trump, said the legislation is popular in key states where Democratic senators are up for reelection in 2018. [...]
The strategic thinking among administration members is that they can gain a political advantage on immigration once they begin talking about proposals publicly. The release of the Cotton-Perdue legislation, they hope, will mark the beginning of a public immigration pitch.
If Mitch McConnell is revealed next week to be little more than a snake oil salesman, Republicans will have a choice: They can work with Democrats to actually pass legislation that can make a positive difference in the lives of Americans or they can make a cynical bet that, just like they’ve failed to evolve beyond being a band of grievous obstructors, so has their base. Unfortunately, McConnell hasn’t proven to be good at anything other than destroying the institution he serves in on the way to winning elections.