The fate of the American health care system now rests with a group of allegedly “moderate” senators, who are getting ready to approve a bill to repeal the Affordable Care Act, a repeal bill so monumental in its cruelty that they feel they have no choice but to draft it in secret, not let the public know what it does, hold not a single hearing or committee markup, slip it in a brown paper package to the Congressional Budget Office, then push it through to a vote before the July 4th recess before the inevitable backlash gets too loud.
“We aren’t stupid,” one GOP Senate aide told Caitlin Owens — they know what would happen if they made their bill public. Even Republican senators who aren’t part of the 13-member working group crafting the bill haven’t been told exactly what’s in it.
Today, we learned that in a break with longstanding precedent, “Senate officials are cracking down on media access, informing reporters on Tuesday that they will no longer be allowed to film or record audio of interviews in the Senate side hallways of the Capitol without special permission.” Everyone assumes that it’s so those senators can avoid having to appear on camera being asked uncomfortable questions about a bill that is as likely to be as popular as Ebola. As Julie Rovner of Kaiser Health News tweeted about the secrecy with which this bill is being advanced, “I have covered every major health bill in Congress since 1986. Have NEVER seen anything like this.”
–Paul Waldman
How the Republican Coward Caucus Is About to Sell out Its Own Constituents — in Secret
It creates an interesting question. Let us suppose the Republicans do their thing and kill off Obamacare and replace it with some sort of AHACA, and chop EPA funding in half, and eliminate NPR, and so on and so on. Now imagine Democrats come back to power in say 2024, with the Presidency and one or even two houses of Congress. Should the Democrats, in such circumstances, attempt to undo all the things Republicans have done to undo their past accomplishments? Or should they just shrug and say “What’s done is done. We’ll find new things to do.” and look for changes to make in mental health care and technological means of carbon emission controls and so forth — call it “mid-century liberalism”?
The latter would certainly be their standard operating procedure.