ICEBERG RIGHT AHEAD

Let’s not beat around the bush: this is a disastrous result for the Republican Party. Paul Ryan and the kind of people who think he is some sort of genius (spoiler alert: these are without exception very stupid people) thought that Donald Trump was going to be a matador for the GOP in Congress a la George W. Bush. They figured they could whip through whatever legislation they wanted and count on having it signed by a compliant chief executive without the interest (or intellect) to tamper with it. And that’s exactly what they got. The only problem came when it was time to craft the legislation – and then, a party that churned out five dozen different “repeal Obamacare” bills when out of power came face to face with reality. Something the modern GOP has never been able to survive.

See, the dirty secret of Obamacare has always been that it IS the Republican alternative. Literally. It is grounded in the Heritage Foundation’s alternative plan which was the Republican response to the Clinton healthcare package in the early 1990s. The telling thing is that in an attempt to round up support on the right, Ryan put on the table the “essential medical benefits” rules – which in turn led a lot of Republicans from districts that voted for Hillary to see visions of ads in 2018 saying “Trump and $NAME voted that your insurance doesn’t have to pay for your emergency room visits.” Which is great if you love insurance companies, but those particular members of Congress are well aware that insurance companies don’t vote, and people who find themselves screwed out of health insurance do. Semantic games about “health care access” don’t wash with Ed Earl Brown when he’s on the verge of declaring bankruptcy because of health expenses (like 60% of personal bankruptcies in the last year before the passage of the ACA).

The other problem is that these members – and more, probably – look at Donald Trump and see someone whose approval ratings right now are worse than Obama’s ever were in eight years in office. Trump can threaten all he wants, but when the President is clocking 38% approve against 57% disapprove, being on the outs with Trump – especially in a Hillary-voting district – will make any Congresscritter say “pleeeeease don’t throw me in that briar patch.” Which is why Paul Ryan had to pull the vote rather than risk going down to defeat, which would almost certainly have been worse. At least at this point, nobody is on the record with a bad vote they have to defend next year.

But it’s as bad a blow for Ryan as for Trump, if not worse.  Trump, after all, thinks he’s CEO of America. He cuts ribbons, cashes checks, issues orders and waits for people to scramble. He’s not interested in governance or policy, at all. He genuinely thinks America is a bigger version of The Apprentice. Paul Ryan, by contrast, sits where Newt Gingrich once sat twenty years ago, in an office and role that was crafted expressly to make the GOP Speaker of a GOP-majority Congress the de facto Prime Minister of the United States. There’s no filibuster in the House. The rules are entirely at the Speaker’s will. And the Republicans have a majority of over 40 seats. In theory and on paper, until the 2018 elections, the House Republicans should be the windshield and the House Democrats should be the bug.

Trump (and to a lesser extent Ryan) are already trying to find a way to pin this on the Democrats. That might wash with the sort of people dumb enough to have voted for Trump, but anyone with an IQ above room temperature who passed 12th-grade government class can tell you that won’t wash. Ryan should be able to say frog and watch his party jump. Today he proved that he can’t do it any more than John Boehner could. And if the House GOP can’t all hold hands and jump off the cliff, there is no planet on which the Senate GOP will do so – especially if it comes down to breaking a filibuster for legislation (the Supreme Court is another matter). 

No, the plan at this point will be to sabotage Obamacare to death by a thousand cuts and blame its failure on Democrats – who are already tooling up to say that Obamacare was doing great until the GOP started mucking with it and creating uncertainty and trying to pillage YOUR health care to line the pockets of Blue Shield. Trump voters aren’t too too bright, but they probably aren’t going to go to the rack to make sure that Blue Shield can duck out of paying for their prescriptions. And Trump is already making “on to the next” motions to shrug it off, as if this wasn’t a priority anyway.

The GOP is learning the hard way that eight years of blind obstruction plus a 70-year-old kindergartener in the White House is some mighty thin ice on which to build actual governance. The Democrats are warming up a flamethrower. It’s not going to be pretty.

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