McConnell had hoped the Senate would vote to repeal Obamacare on Thursday night. He was wrong on two counts: the Senate rejected the repeal again-- and it came on Friday morning, the 52nd anniversary of Medicare.My great-grandparents came to the U.S., refugees from the genocidal tyrannies of Eastern Europe, in the early 1900s. When I was a kid my grandmother sometimes used Yiddish words from her childhood around the house. When I was trying to think of a word to describe Trump's horrifying, degenerate, shameful and dysfunctional regime one of those words popped into my head: hegdesh. Perhaps the last time I heard it was 5-6 decades ago and I recalled it meaning "a messy, confused place." Before using it I thought I should look it up in an English-Yiddish dictionary. My memory was close: "filthy place." Sounds like everything attached to Donald J. Trump and his family and Regime.Did you know he was angry at Priebus for not getting into a public fight with The Mooch when The Mooch told Ryan Lizza that the then-chief of staff is a "fucking paranoid schizophrenic" and a "paranoiac" and seems dot threaten to get him either investigated by the FBI or fired by Trumpanzee. Trump's management style-- divide and conquer-- is primitive, counterproductive and feckless. It may work in a mom-and-pop family business like Trump's but it doesn't work in the real world, not in the corporate world and certainly not in government. The Webster dictionary describes it as "to make a group of people disagree and fight with one another so that they will not join together against one." That's Señor Trumpanzee in a nutshell.McCain got him back but good this week. This was his official statement after he joined Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and the Senate Democrats to kill TrumpCare Friday morning:
“From the beginning, I have believed that Obamacare should be repealed and replaced with a solution that increases competition, lowers costs, and improves care for the American people. The so-called ‘skinny repeal’ amendment the Senate voted on today would not accomplish those goals. While the amendment would have repealed some of Obamacare’s most burdensome regulations, it offered no replacement to actually reform our health care system and deliver affordable, quality health care to our citizens. The Speaker's statement that the House would be ‘willing’ to go to conference does not ease my concern that this shell of a bill could be taken up and passed at any time.“I’ve stated time and time again that one of the major failures of Obamacare was that it was rammed through Congress by Democrats on a strict-party line basis without a single Republican vote. We should not make the mistakes of the past that has led to Obamacare’s collapse, including in my home state of Arizona where premiums are skyrocketing and health care providers are fleeing the marketplace. We must now return to the correct way of legislating and send the bill back to committee, hold hearings, receive input from both sides of aisle, heed the recommendations of nation’s governors, and produce a bill that finally delivers affordable health care for the American people. We must do the hard work our citizens expect of us and deserve.”
Writing for the Washington Post after the vote, James Hohmann noted that "There is nothing Trump can do any more that will get to McCain. Battling an aggressive form of brain cancer, the maverick was willing to vote 'no' on the 'skinny repeal' amendment so that other GOP colleagues who were also opposed to the measure could vote 'yes' to save face with the conservative base. To this day, Trump has never apologized for saying that the former fighter pilot was not a war hero because he got captured in Vietnam. It gets less attention, but the president also besmirched the Arizona senator’s character by repeatedly accusing him of not taking care of other veterans. McCain has never forgotten."And Trump isn't smart enough to remember. Maybe he'll adopt an idea gaining currency among the crackpot right to repeal the 17th amendment that allowed the electorate to pick senators.The Trump wing of the GOP is on the warpath-- and Trump (and Bannon) love it, of course. They're all about disunity, turmoil and chaos... always places for opportunists to thrive. Here was FreedomWorks' statement after the vote Friday:
Last night’s vote was a slap in the face to every conservative who has been promised that Republicans would repeal ObamaCare. Sens. John McCain, Lisa Murkowski, and Susan Collins voted against the ‘skinny repeal’ of ObamaCare, theoretically the least repeal that can be achieved because so many Republicans went back on their votes for a 2015-style repeal. The Republican Party has been all about ObamaCare repeal for the better part of a decade, and now we see that they have been writing checks to voters that they knew the Bank of Obama wouldn’t cash. Now that President Trump would sign it, they have exposed themselves as frauds.
Trump probably would have been just as happy to have signed a Medicare-for-All bill. It's all the same to him. Serious conservatives looking to move forward would be better off reading John Harwood's OpEd for CNBC, GOP needs to buck the crushing partisanship that just toppled health reform, than the incoherent drivel from FreedomWorks.
Ohanian's Obamacare RepealSomething collapsed of its own weight last night, but it wasn't Obamacare. It was a partisan legislative effort that had grown completely disconnected from its ostensible purpose. Congressional Republicans, in the name of improving American health care, ended up searching for any bill they could pass-- whatever its content.Thursday's bizarre spectacle included Republican senators demanding assurances that a bill they were about to vote for would never become law. In the end, the fact that the "skinny repeal"-- like every other variant the House and Senate had considered-- would have left millions more Americans without health insurance proved too much for Republicans Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski and John McCain.Given the GOP's narrow 52-seat majority, their "no" votes were enough to sink the party's seven-year anti-Obamacare crusade. Spectacular dysfunction within the Trump White House-- where a disengaged president oversees open warfare between his chief of staff and new communications director-- only made the effort harder.Now that GOP implosion threatens prospects for tax reform and President Donald Trump's entire legislative agenda. A similar disconnect between campaign commitments, policy goals and achievable legislation hangs over the remainder of the Republican agenda, which includes overhauling the tax code.But Trump and Republican congressional leaders have no consensus on specific objectives. And since their legislative plan is to proceed with only Republican votes, they have minimal margin for error.Trump, who championed the "forgotten" working class in his 2016 campaign, says his principal concern is cutting taxes for middle-income Americans. House Speaker Paul Ryan, who favors cutting top marginal tax rates above all, specifically rejects the idea of focusing a plan around cutting middle-class taxes.Ryan, reflecting conservative deficit hawks in his caucus, wants a tax reform plan that does not increase budget deficits after accounting for economic growth. Trump and his aides emphasize tax cuts and are willing to accept higher deficits.A tax reform statement released Thursday, just as health-care legislation foundered yet again, showed that the White House has prevailed on that point, at least for now. It shelved the so-called border adjustment tax that Ryan hoped would finance deep rate cuts for businesses.What's not certain is whether a cuts-only plan that increases the federal debt could pass even in the House, where Republicans hold a substantial majority, much less the Senate. And while Ryan backs cutting the top personal tax rate, neither the Senate nor key players within the Trump White House have embraced that goal.Hopes for a major infrastructure plan face the same dynamic. The White House has pledged a $1 trillion investment that uses $200 billion in taxpayer money to attract $800 billion in private capital.But GOP leaders, already struggling to boost defense spending, raise the debt limit and pass a budget, face resistance from conservatives on infrastructure spending. Democratic lawmakers will insist on more spending if the White House decides to seek their votes.For now there's only one clear lesson from the GOP's health-care failure. The size of Republican majorities now make partisanship for its own sake too heavy a burden to bear.
And, keeping the essence of the word, hegdesh in mind, let's not forget that to Trump all this is a distraction anyway-- anything and everything to get the focus off Putin-Gate.Deutsche Bank Laundromat-- Scrubbling Rubles Into Greenbacks
