That is an explanation of a quagmire, not a call to arms. The Republican leadership’s argument of last resort, when whipping votes, has been that the Party has to do something dramatic about Obamacare simply because, for the past seven years, it has said that it would.

But to say that the divisions in the Republican caucus represent a coherent ideological debate between well-defined factions-business, populist, Freedom Caucus, libertarian-would be to assign to the process a dignity it doesn’t merit. was a party stumbling away in shame from a self-inflicted defeat or one that was narrowly saved by the obstinacy of a few of its members, who prevented it from doing something truly harmful to the lives of Americans. Meanwhile, Ted Cruz slipped in an amendment that made the bill even worse, by opening a door to “junk” insurance plans and exorbitant premiums for people with preëxisting conditions.Īll of this might suggest either that the G.O.P. For that, they were called traitors to their party, and threatened with primary challengers. The damage that a repeal-without-replace plan would inflict was too much for Collins, Shelley Moore Capito, and Lisa Murkowski, who said that they would vote against bringing any such bill to the floor. Others, notably Jerry Moran, Rand Paul, and Mike Lee, insisted that the bill didn’t do enough to scrub Obamacare, and much of the Medicaid system, from the landscape. Every configuration of the bill so far has been unacceptable to more than one senator, for reasons both good and bad.Īs the senators skittered between plans that would result in the loss of insurance coverage for as many as twenty-two or maybe thirty-two million Americans, some of them, including Heller and Susan Collins, expressed genuine concern about the devastating effect the bill would have on their constituents. This means that, with Vice-President Mike Pence as a tiebreaker, McConnell can lose only one vote. The Republicans have fifty-two Senate seats-fifty-one, for the moment, given the absence of John McCain, who last week received a diagnosis of brain cancer. In acting as though the bill still has a chance, McConnell may be undertaking another Trump-like maneuver: reducing matters of state to the level of farce. McConnell, for his part, greeted Trump’s White House rant as a welcome act of statesmanship, portraying the President as a latter-day Lyndon Johnson “totally engaged,” behind the scenes, in the effort to round up votes.

The Senate version was drafted in secret and reflected an almost complete indifference to the needs of any Americans, really, apart from the wealthiest. Republican legislators peddled conspiracy theories about Obamacare being part of a scheme to strip Americans of their freedoms. The bill got as far as it has in the Senate the same way that a similar one was passed in the House, with lies told in public and callousness dealt in private. Yet, at the meeting, when Trump said that Obamacare is “gone, it’s failed-it’s not going to be around,” he was just repeating what Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his colleagues have said any number of times. The one plausible notion Trump presented at the meeting was that, under President Obama, congressional Republicans had “an easy route: we’ll repeal, we’ll replace, and he’s never going to sign it.” Trump added, “But I’m signing it.” In other words, Trump had turned the Republicans into people with a real job-a hard job-and revealed their inability to perform it. A range of Trump’s traits were on display: lying (he wildly misrepresented the terms of the most recent Senate bill) an obsession with betrayal (he complained that senators who were his friends “might not be very much longer”) hinting at retribution (he said of Dean Heller, who had helped stall an earlier version of the bill, “He wants to remain a senator, doesn’t he?”) and inconsistency (he can’t seem to decide whether he wants to replace the bill or just repeal it). Anyone still inclined to pity the Senate Republicans might pause to examine Donald Trump’s taunting of them, at a meeting last Wednesday at the White House, for their failure to blow up the American health-care system.

Gop stands for meaning