You laugh, but…
Oops, posted to the wrong thread! Move along, nothing to see here.
Why mess with success?
Make my day. They’d only remind the voters that they didn’t deliver on their biggest promise, and that they still don’t have any sort of reasonable replacement. That should work up the base.
Not to mention that voters are far from ecstatic about the tax cut bill that they did pass. Voters are not seeing a lot of extra money, and as little Marco noted, they are seeing that the business tax cuts are to a large extent going to stock buybacks that are benefiting investors and execs.
And who does Santorum mean by “we”? That quote was just typical stream-of-nonsense talk to fill air time, not something from somebody who’s actually part of any sort of organization. However, his audience *is *the “Get your government hands off my Social Security” faction, so it’s not all wasted.
Look for them all to have to explain why they sabotaged the funding base for ACA and its premiums are suddenly becoming far less affordable - and why an added $1.5 trillion on the national debt is a good thing.
My reading of the political winds is that the polling of Trump and the Republicans in Congress has become less abysmal this year compared to the previous because they’ve stopped trying to push their agenda. Doing something popular is better than doing nothing, which is better than doing something unpopular. Since their agenda doesn’t have anything popular, doing nothing is the best they can try.
The plan discussed above is going to be released sometime this month. Here is an outline of it.
I would suggest that “not going to get involved with Medicaid and trying to fix Medicaid” means exactly that, and “focus on the Medicaid expansion” means trying to denigrate it as much as possible in the hope of killing it in states that may want it, which are not mutually exclusive.
So, I guess we watch to see if they do a budget resolution.
Didn’t they already pass the budget for 2018? I thought that now there is no way to do anything via reconciliation this year, am I mistaken?
There are a thousand ways to fuck with Obamacare, to hinder, thwart, and eventually, kill. Then, when the real victims scream, they will say “Obamacare failed, so its his fault”. Some of the people, all of the time. Same people.
Simply blaming high-cost health care on Obamacare is a winning issue.
I am skeptical that there will be another Obamacare repeal attempt before the election. Republicans are behind right now but their numbers have improved somewhat giving them a realistic shot of pulling an upset and retaining both chambers. This is not the kind of position in which parties feel comfortable taking big risks as Obamacare repeal would certainly be. Secondly, with the Alabama election and McCain’s health problems the chances of Obamacare repeal passing the Senate have decreased even more so why waste a lot of political capital on it?
Of course if Republicans do manage to defend both chambers, all bets are off and there could very well be a serious repeal attempt in 2019.
The Heritage/Santorum plan is out.
Apparently it precludes states from using the reduced block grants to reestablish Obamacare or set up a single payer plan, which is basically just the imposition of ideology. States’ rights my ass.
Discuss.