I want to go back to that TAA voter I wrote about yesterday. It went down in flames, 126-302. This vote was followed by a vote on the TPA — fast track authority. It passed barely, 219-210. It was done this way with the hope that the Democrats would pass the TAA and the Republicans would pass the TPA. That’s because Democrats are generally in support of helping workers and Republicans are generally in support of helping big businesses that already make huge profits. But I find the whole thing curious with regard to what it says about the Republicans’ biggest excuse for never getting anything done.

I’m referring, of course, to the Hastert Rule. When Dennis Hastert wasn’t buggering little boys, he was busy making the House of Representatives totally unmanageable. And one of those ways was by explicitly adopting the “majority of the majority” rule. And Boehner has claimed to be tied to this “rule” as if it came down from on Mount Sinai on clay tablets. The idea is that the Speaker of the House cannot bring a bill to the floor for a vote unless the majority of his caucus is in favor of it. So there are 247 Republican seats in the House, so unless 124 Republicans are for a bill, it cannot be voted on — even if 123 Republicans and all the Democrats want it.

Except that this rule only exists as a convenience. It allows the speaker to avoid embarrassing his caucus as well as himself. When it came to the government shutdown in 2013, the Hastert Rule was thrown out — only 38% of the Republicans were in favor of reopening the government. Well, that’s not really true. Almost all of them were happy about it; they just weren’t willing to take any heat from the Republican base that has been led to believe that it can have everything if it is just willing to destroy the entire country.

When it came to the TAA, the Hastert Rule was even more out of alignment: only 36% of the Republicans voted for it. Of course, clearly the Republicans needed to pass the TAA if they want to give the great usurper Obama the right to made any kind of communist deal he wants — which they clearly do. So it is surprising that so many of them still couldn’t bring themselves to vote for it. They really are terrible at their jobs. Of course, when it comes to voting on it next week, maybe they will change their minds. It’s hard to say.

The main thing is that every time that John Boehner mentions that Hastert Rule, he should be laughed off the stage or screen or podium. There is no Hastert “Rule” — there is only a Haster Excuse. It is just a way for the Republican establishment to use its power to push its agenda. I’m not suggesting that listening to the majority of Republicans is a good idea. But to pretend that this is what John Boehner or any other Republican House Speaker is doing is just ridiculous.

There is one thing that all Republicans know: Obamacare is an unmitigated disaster that is destroying the great system that we had before — “The best healthcare in the world!” But their real problem with it is not the policy. As I’ve discussed a lot around here: Obamacare is the most conservative healthcare reform that could work. All the supposed conservative alternatives since have been brainless ideology that would have made the situation worse — things like tort “reform” (not allowing patients to sue when they’ve been harmed) and allowing insurance across state lines (destroying local control and causing a race to the bottom).

The one thing that Republicans have focused on has been the individual mandate. And that has been a winner. The truth is that no one likes it. It’s like how people like Social Security but don’t like payroll taxes. But you can’t have one without the other. The individual mandate is what allows Obamacare to work. Otherwise, people would have an incentive to put off buying insurance until they were sick. This would result in the risk pool being expensive, resulting in high insurance costs. After all this time, you probably know the drill.

But the Republican hatred of Obamacare has no bounds. And there is no rationality to it, so they hate everything in the healthcare law. Of course, if someone mentions pre-existing conditions or coverage of college students, Republicans will always claim that they too will have those things once their replacement comes out — right after America turns into a land of fairies and elves and everyone gets all the cotton candy they want. But one thing Republicans only scoff at are the measures in the law designed to lower healthcare costs. And not surprisingly, no amount of data is going to stop them from thinking that.

A recent study reported in Health Affairs highlights the way that one of those measures is working. Michael Hiltzik has the details, Here’s Another Way Obamacare Is Changing US Healthcare for the Better. One way that healthcare costs more than it should is by not properly treating a patient. If a patient comes in with chest pains, gets released with antacids, and then comes back the next day with a heart attack, it costs a lot more money than if the chest pains had been properly treated in the first place.

Obamacare deals with this issue by cutting back on Medicare reimbursements to hospitals that have too many of these kinds of re-admissions. This is an especially big deal because hospitals are probably the single most dangerous place to be in terms of getting a disease. So there really is a lot that hospitals can do to improve the situation. The authors of the study looked at these re-admission rates and found that Obamacare really was changing behavior and reducing rates. Hooray!

This didn’t stop Paul Ryan — now chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee — from saying this week, “The whole law’s a lemon.” But of course he would. For him, like all Republicans, the complete catastrophe of Obamacare is definitional. It’s interesting to contrast this with Medicare Part D. Many Democrats were against it. But after it was in effect and working as it was supposed to, the Democrats changed their position. But such open mindedness is asking far too much from Republicans.