Senate Republicans pleased no one this week. Granted, they were never going to get much love from Democrats defending Obamacare, or their more progressive colleagues who are daring to talk aloud again about a single payer scheme. But their own ideological bedfellows also went after them as their plan, such as it was, was shelved until after the Fourth of July recess.
Talk radio pundits almost uniformly derided their proposal as being weak, absent of vision, and as a treasonous acceptance of the basic thrust of the Affordable Care Act.
Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell and company aren’t done yet, and they may yet manage to pass a measure that deprives millions of their insurance. But it may occur to you, on reflection, that their rightwing critics are right, and that “repeal and replace” is no longer politically feasible for this Senate, and these Republicans.
We’ve started on the road to single-payer health care
Publication: Conservative Review/Mark Levin Show
Author: In a crowded field, Mark Levin is the shoutiest conservative talk show host. He never much liked Trump because he doesn’t share Levin’s fundamentalist commitment to “free markets”.
Why you should listen: Levin is one of the many this week lining up to attack Senate Republicans – and by extension Trump – from the right. He thinks that the Republicans’ failure is the first in a series of failures that will lead to single payer healthcare. Dare to dream. If you want to hear the white hot anger of those who want Obamacare gone – yesterday – boiled down to a few minutes of radio, start here.
Extract: Listen to the whole rant if you have 12 minutes to spare.
Republicans Blew It On Healthcare Reform And Only Have Themselves To Blame
Publication: RedState
Author: Jay Caruso is the assistant managing editor at RedState.com as well as a contributor to National Review, The Weekly Standard, Conservative Review, Opportunity Lives and The Federalist.
Why you should read it: RedState could be the most stubborn #nevertrump holdout on the right, and Caruso helps set that tone. Their fundamental criticisms up until now have been about Trump’s crudity, his unsuitability, and his departures from conservative orthodoxy. Trump and GOP senators have handed them more ammunition this week by being, as Caruso sees it, insufficiently bold in their approach to dismantling whatever semblance of universal healthcare exists in this country.
Extract: “What Republicans have proposed is not a repeal of Obamacare. It’s not even a replacement. It’s a restructuring of how Obamacare works. Forget about an attempt at a free-market solution or something such as what the American Enterprise Institute suggested. They’ve offered a ‘solution’ that solves nothing.”
The GOP Rejects Conservatism
Publication: The New York Times
Author: David Brooks is the “thoughtful” conservative that the NYT has nurtured the longest. Somewhat inexplicably, at a time when the more radical left is surging, but still denied a voice at the newspaper, they keep hiring his mini-mes.
Why you should read it: Brooks nails the Republicans for having no real abiding vision of what kind of country they want America to be. He is late, of course, in noticing this underlying nihilism, and it doesn’t occur to him that perhaps they actually do have a vision which is so dystopian they can’t afford to spell it out.
Extract: “Because Republicans have no governing vision, they can’t really replace the Obama vision with some alternative. They just accept the basic structure of Obamacare and cut it back some.”
li Isn’t What it Used to Be
Publication: National Review
Author: Rich Lowry is head honcho at National Review, which also buys him real estate in the op-ed pages of other “quality” outlets.
Why you should read it: The writers at National Review, unable to throw themselves behind the Republicans’ bad bill and worse tactics, have instead mostly focused on what they see as the left’s shrill opposition to the idea of taking money out of healthcare and handing it to rich people. It resembles their strategy all year whereby they have repressed their long-standing, very public distaste for the president by running the anti-anti-Trump line. How long before this begins to look like simple cowardice?
Extract: “The Brezhnev Doctrine said that the Soviet empire could only expand and never give back its gains. A domestic version of the doctrine has long applied to the welfare state – and never so brazenly as in the debate over the Republican health-care bill. Its reforms to Medicaid are portrayed as provisions to all but forcibly expel the elderly from nursing homes and send poor children to the workhouse. Bernie Sanders has called the bill ‘barbaric,’ a word that once was reserved for, say, chattel slavery or suttee, but is now considered appropriate for a change in the Medicaid funding formula.”
New CBO Report Says the Senate GOP Health Care Bill Would Make Obamacare’s Problems Worse
Publication: Reason
Author: Peter Suderman is features editor at Reason and also somehow writes about blockbuster movies for Vox. He’s previously written for National Review and other conservative outlets, and became a wholly certified young fogey when he won a Robert Novak journalism fellowship.
Why you should read it: The libertarian response, as you might imagine, is outrage that Republicans did not simply raze Obamacare to the ground for a free market system. Worse still, for the Reason crowd, they didn’t appear to be even interested in doing so. Republican senators, of course, have to answer to voters, who are not well-disposed to the idea of losing what health cover they have, and increasingly interested in single payer schemes. Suderman, on the other hand, is free to push for a scheme that has little support outside the rarefied world of think-tanks and subsidised rightwing media.
Extract: “It is hardly surprising that when it came time to repeal and replace Obamacare, they instead produced legislation that simply rewrote it, offering the same thing, but less of it. And it is even less surprising that the legislation they have released undercuts the criticisms that McConnell and others have made of Obamacare, because their plan has the same problems – but even more acute.”
