Really not sure where this goes, but im asking, in part a procedural question so I’ll start here. Just last week, McConnell failed to get the votes for the latest incarnation of the bill, and Trump was saying how he’d just let Obamacare fail. Then all of as sudden yesterday I hear they’re voting whether to debate Obamacare. When did this motion get entered and why? Does this vote mean they will now debate Obamacare openly with Democrats rather than craft the bill behind closed doors? Is the GOP hoping including the Democrats will help get some votes?
They passed a motion whether to begin debate to find out what items they should consider to add to a bill or bills that they may want to vote on sometime in the indefinite future. In current Washington, this counts as a victory. It allows them to say that the Republicans are keeping their promises.
Since the OP goes beyond procedural questions to speculation, I have move this to Great Debates.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
Do you have a seconder for that motion? And did the Honourable Gentleman yield? 
More bribes got given. Now it might pass.
For the last eleventy-seven years, the Republicans have been promising their constituents that if the voters gave them the power, they would repeal Obamanationcare. And for all of those eleventy-seven years, the Republicans repeatedly made the pointless gesture of voting to repeal Obamacrap. But NOW they have the power-- OMG!!-- and after all that bluster, they can’t get their shit together enough to actually come up with a better plan, PLUS (ironically) in their backassed way, they accomplished something the Democrats were never able to do, namely, make Obamarama popular-- OMG X 2!
But they still have to go on the record as having attempted to fulfill their campaign promises to repeal. It’s utter stupidity and the impotence of their efforts to develop and pass a decent healthcare plan is evidence of two things: 1) Obamacare is a pretty good plan that just needs bipartisan cooperation and tweaking, and 2) there isn’t a functioning pair of gonads on the Repub side of the aisle in either chamber of Congress.
TLDR: the vote is a charade, a gesture for show, so they can say they “tried.”
And, as usual, their base will eat it up with a smile.
And if even this ludicrous charade fails to get a majority, then what does that mean for them?
It doesn’t really matter. It’s going to be a long wait before facts have any place in Republican politics again.
Add long as they get something passed, they can take it to conference.
I think the most apt comparison - the Republicans are like a dog that chases cars all the time. This time they caught the car and are stuck with “what do we do now?”
Politically it makes perfect sense; it kicks the can down the road, and kicking the can down the road is important in politics.
If the GOP just gives up, it’s a huge, huge public failure and might mean they never get a shot at this, depending how the 2018 midterms go.
By winning a procudural vote to at least debate the bill,
- They appear to have won something. Remember that a great many people on both sides of the political spectrum don’t pay attention to details. Millions of people, on both the right and left, really do think that this vote repealed Obamacare.
Even among more informed voters, if feels like the GOP won. In politics, you always want to be like the British Army; maybe you don’t win all the battles, but you wanna win the last one.
- They could wear the electorate down and get something passed to get the tax breaks in place and the ACA vastly reduced in scope.
I doubt #2 will happen. They can criticize it all they like, but every time the CBO comes out with a score they get hammered again. Until they come up with some significant changes (like eliminating the enormous tax cut, good luck with that), it’s not happening.
FYI, this Pit thread is a great way to follow the developments, largely thanks to updates by jsgoddess. Last update confirms that the Republicans are trying to pass something just to get to conference.
This effort by the Republican party might be the single most irresponsible example of legislating that I’ve ever witnessed, and I suspect it’s one of the most irresponsible in the last 100 years or more. Yeah, you could argue that the decision to authorize military force or the USA Patriot Act were egregious mistakes but there was at least some context, and there was also protracted debate. Above all else, those legislative acts enjoyed mostly bipartisan and public support. The attempt by the GOP to repeal Obamacare not only lacks bipartisan input, but it also is shockingly unpopular, and yet they go forward with the legislation that they know will have a detrimental effect on the lives of millions of people. This is something that might be expected by the oligarchs in the Roman Senate, but not the modern day United States Senate.
This is exactly why I have no hope at all that they’re going to stop the Trump administration from building a powerful and potentially democracy-crushing Executive branch. The Senate itself is behaving in ways that even come close to representing the common weal.
I think the GOP is hoping to lay traps for the Democrats. For example, they pass an amendment that kids in hospital get a visit from the Easter bunny, and other (less sarcastic) amendments that, by themselves, seem like good ideas. They hope to craft, with support from the Democrats, a bill that retains the main features of Trumpcare — tax cuts for the rich, strangling Medicaid, and increasing worker anxiety — but with some features the Democrats voted for. On the final vote, the Democrats will be faced with a Hobson’s choice: if they don’t vote to replace Obamacare with Trumpcare they will be voting against the Easter bunny.
I honestly don’t think the republicans could stomach offering the democrats an easter bunny, even a poisoned one. The republicans are devoted to the idea of NO QUARTER!!! NO COMPROMISE!!! EVERRRR!!!1!
As an outsider, is the U.S. ready to switch to some type of centralised health system funded by an income tax levy… say 2%?
I get the impression that actually thinking about what might constitute a health system that finds a broad consensus on a workable balance between efficiency, effectiveness and affordability went by the board some time ago…
No.
Much to my heart-felt regret and despair, we have not reached that level of desperation yet. Because we’re that stupid and cruel.