The ‘Voter Party’ killed GOP health plan
Let’s all enjoy moment again:
The arm slowly comes up extending straight out to the side, the fingers splay out, then close into a fist as the wrist rotates and the thumb decisively thrusts down.
The people have spoken; the gladiator must die.
Well, it wasn’t quite that dramatic, but darned close. Our thanks to U.S. Sen. John McCain, for voting so decisively to kill the Republican Congress’s last, secret, hurried, horrendous attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
McCain had flown in from Arizona after being diagnosed with the same incurable brain cancer that killed his friend Ted Kennedy before he could complete his life’s work of obtaining health care for all Americans.
So if that was McCain’s last hurrah, and it may well have been, it was a damned good one.
And maybe there was just a little bit of soul-satisfying payback to President Donald Trump who early in his presidential campaign so cavalierly dismissed McCain’s Vietnam War sacrifice — “He was captured. I like my heroes not captured.”
Let’s also cheer the two great women Republican senators who made the defeat possible, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.
These two women courageously stood up to the relentless bullying of president and party to do what was right for their own aging constituents — who are so dependent on Medicare and Medicaid — and, by extension, the people of the United States.
We also need to give thanks to that handful of Republican representatives, including our own Patrick Meehan, who voted in the House along with their this Spartacus Democratic colleagues in May against repealing the ACA.
Sadly, that bill passed, setting the scene for the Senate debacle, but Meehan is now working with a group of moderate Republicans and Democrats to try to fix the worst problems of the current law, something Congress should have been doing all along.
Thank you to those thousands of Pennsylvanians who repeatedly wrote, emailed, called and visited their congressmen and senators over the last six months, who showed up week after week at Sen. Pat Toomey’s and Meehan’s district offices.
Thank you to the disabled who rode their wheelchairs into Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s office and had to be carried out by the Capitol police.
Thanks to all those who of you wrote letters to the editors and showed up for “emptychair” town halls to movingly tell your own personal stories about what losing affordable insurance would mean to you and your families.
Thank you to Resist and Indivisible and all the other organizations that have sprung up to push back on the Republicans’ and Trump’s severely reactionary agenda in all its forms.
The First Amendment guarantees the lesser-known rights “of the people peaceably to assemble and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”
That’s what you did and if you had not done that, Meehan, McCain, Murkowski and Collins would not have done what they did.
That’s how democracy to work.
But let’s not forget that Meehan voted all those 58 or 60 times to repeal Obamacare back when those votes were meaningless and that Sen. Toomey — whom a majority of you reelected — has been a chief architect of the disastrous Senate repeal effort throughout its history. is supposed All this vividly illustrates that, as conservative author Michael Lind wrote several years ago, there really are only two major parties in this country, the Donor Party and the Voter Party.
The politicians hear from the Donor Party all the time, in the form of PACS, wealthy contributors, lobbying, fund-raising and even helpfully writing this or that piece of legislation.
The pols only hear from the Voter Party every few years on election day and even then, they don’t much care about or seek out their opinions.
They only care that each voter reliably cast a ballot in accordance with the D or the R after his or her name in the poll book and ultimately, they count on most voters to stay home, as some 40 million did in 2016.
In his first quarter filing with the Federal Election Commission, Meehan (and most other Republicans) recorded numerous donations from the health care Donor Party — insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and medical device manufacturers.
In that same quarter he heard from more of the 500,000 or so voters he represents than he has ever heard before in his political career.
Last year, Meehan’s campaign coffers overflowed but he laid low, spending virtually nothing. Was there even a TV ad? One, I think.
The voters weren’t even aware there was a congressional election going on and Meehan never had to stick his neck out to defend or repudiate the clown at the head of his party’s ticket.
The Voter Party can’t let him off so easy next year.
Meanwhile, the beat goes on. Trump and many Republicans are continuing to quietly chip away at the ACA in large ways and small that may ultimately bring about its “implosion,” while some, like Ohio’s John Kaisich, are working to save and improve the law.
So congratulations to all you ACA gladiators, but to borrow another couple of clichés from ancient Rome, this is no time to rest on your laurels. Back to the Circus Maximus.