A few weeks ago I found myself screaming at the car radio. In an NPR report on Republican health care legislation, I heard Rep. Tom MacArthur, R-N.J., say, “I think it would be healthy to get a bill passed and then actually educate the American people about what that specific bill actually does over time.”
Really? Really? The Republican Party spent years pummeling Nancy Pelosi, the leader of the House Democrats, for saying something almost identical about the Affordable Care Act (although her comment was generally taken out of context in a way no responsible journalist would).
MacArthur wasn’t in Congress in 2010, but you’d think he’d have heard enough GOP talking points to avoid channeling Pelosi. You’d think he’d remember how the Democrats crammed down Americans’ throats an unpopular bill so egregious that it couldn’t win a single vote from across the aisle.
No Republican could vote for something as un-American as requiring Americans to buy insurance, you see, even though that kind of personal responsibility was originally proposed by the Heritage Foundation and was included in two bills introduced by Republicans in 1993.
The breathtaking hypocrisy of elected Republicans when it comes to Obamacare will be the stuff of a generation of political science dissertations, and Rep. MacArthur may not even be a footnote.
Remember when the “Lie of the Year” (according to Politifact) was President Obama’s assurance that “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it”? Obama was a liar, the Republicans said, and he lied about how his signature legislation would affect the Americans he was lying to. Lying about health care is a very bad thing.
Or it was until Donald Trump told voters that the long-promised Republican replacement for the ACA would be better and cheaper and would cover everyone. Nominee Trump actually said these words in October: “You’re gonna have such great health care at a tiny fraction of the cost, and it’s going to be so easy.”
Honest Republicans in Congress didn’t rise up to denounce that as a lie, so they must have been prepared to deliver a bill that would do exactly that. Great health care! A fraction of the cost! So easy!
It’s hard to understand, then, why it took two tries for Republicans in the House to get a bare majority to vote for a replacement bill. Not one vote came from the other side of the aisle, but that’s probably because the Democrats are obstructionists.
Or maybe it was because the Congressional Budget Office said the House bill would result in an additional 23 million people being uninsured after a decade and out-of-pocket costs would skyrocket, especially for older folks. That was good enough for President Trump to support it “1,000 percent.”
Incredibly, the House’s bill, which enjoyed about half as much popular support as Obamacare at its lowest point, was not something the Senate could support with the same zeal as the president. Truth be told, he too lost some of his enthusiasm when the afterglow of the Rose Garden celebration wore off. In June he told Senators that the bill he supported 10 times more than was mathematically possible was too “mean.”
Curiously, the Senate also forgot to have a bill ready to go, the way one would expect after so many years of begging voters for the chance to fix Obamacare. Why not? The supremely hypocritical reason came out in a town hall meeting in Pennsylvania earlier this month when Republican Sen. Pat Toomey committed what is sometimes known as a Kinsley gaffe: He accidentally told the truth.
“I didn’t expect Donald Trump to win. I think most of my colleagues didn’t. So we didn’t expect to be in this situation,” he said. (To achieve full candor, Toomey would have had to acknowledge that Republicans also weren’t prepared to repeal or replace Obamacare if Mitt Romney had been elected in 2012.)
So Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell demonstrated the proper way to craft sweeping legislation: Put 13 white males behind closed doors and hammer out something that 50 of 52 Republicans can accept so that Vice President Mike Pence can cast the deciding vote. And while Democrats were despicable for using their control of the federal government to pass unilaterally a bill that included numerous Republican amendments after a mere 25 days of debate in the full Senate, McConnell used the prospect of having to work with Democrats as a threat. Republicans don’t practice what they preach, which is the Sunday school definition of hypocrisy.
As of this writing, McConnell had failed to deliver anything in the Senate, but it won’t be for lack of trying every single thing that Republicans criticized Democrats for.
Gwen Moritz is editor of Arkansas Business. Email her at GMoritz@ABPG.com. |