The Senate’s crash cart
In opting to open debate on who-knows-what health care bill, which will leave whoknows-how-many-million more Americans without insurance, Senate Republicans collectively surrendered to the sundering of Washington norms by one Donald J. Trump. Senators broke no law; they violated no regulation. They simply broke faith with the people they purport to represent and the deliberative process they are supposed to honor.
Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and his allies crafted bills in secret, without any Democratic input. They held not a single hearing on the substance of a single measure. (The Affordable Care Act, by contrast, had nearly 80 hearings.)
They received devastating Congressional Budget Office estimates of the pain inflicted on millions of Americans by their various blueprints.
And then, in a blind rush, they pressed ahead, decency be damned. Now, the Senate has allocated just 20 hours of debate before a vote on final passage of the bill to be named later.
Never has such a significant piece of legislation been handled so irresponsibly.
What’s next? Bad or worse: a slate wiped painfully clean (32 million more uninsured), a full replacement for Obamacare (18 to 22 million) — or a made-up-on-the-fly bare bones legislation that will likely upend coverage for a mere 15 million, while jacking up premiums for almost all.
The recklessness was all the more poignant given the return of Sen. John McCain. The Republican maverick was back in D.C. for the first time since his recent diagnosis with an aggressive brain cancer, for which he had the best care.
“Why don’t we try the old way of legislating in the Senate, the way our rules and customs encourage us to act?” McCain pleaded, urging genuinely bipartisan action. “All we’ve managed to do” in attempting to dismantle Obamacare, he said, “is make more popular a policy that wasn’t very popular when we started trying to get rid of it.”
Yet the earnest words came just after he joined his party in defiling the democratic process.
For the umpteenth time, we say: The current law needs reform. But it has worked in far more ways than it has failed. Tend to it. And let go, once and for all, of the destructive fetish to slay the Obamacare beast.