I’m sure he didn’t/won’t get harassed for it, either, though.
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In a ideal world, proper procedure is a good way of arriving at justice, consensus, and wisdom. In a less than ideal world,
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To be fair, Palin as Veep candidate was his and his team’s call; nobody forced her on them.
I think it’s bigger than that, to him. He’s always been concerned about his legacy, and he’s just had a very clear reminder that he’s running out of time. He’s never going to be an admiral and he’s never going to be the president. The best he’s ever going to be is what he was a decade or two ago: a senator with a reputation as a principled maverick who votes his conscience even if it’s not what his party wants.
That reputation was always an exaggeration at best and an outright fiction at worst. It still is. But I think he’s just successfully reclaimed it, provided he doesn’t go and fuck it up again. When he dies, this is what’s going to be in his obit. If he’s lucky, it may even push Sarah Palin out.
It’s also a pitch-perfect Hollywood ending. Guy comes in fresh off brain cancer surgery, gives a big speech, and makes one last maverick face turn and saves the legacy of the guy he ran so hard against. When somebody makes a movie someday (by which point “healthcare good, Trump bad” will be the historical consensus), they’ll play this up like Senator Paine changing his vote and Darth Vader saving Luke from the Emperor all rolled into one.
Don’t get me wrong, I still think the guy’s an ass. But I think he’s just made a very canny move to ensure that history remembers him kindly.
(He also kinda just fell on his sword; there are other Republicans who didn’t want this to pass, and if he had been an aye, somebody else might have had to go nay and face the wrath of the base.
Course, he could have achieved the exact same end result if he’d just stayed home, and nobody would have blamed him. But then he wouldn’t have gotten to make a big speech.)
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Actually, had he “shut it down” a week ago by voting no to proceed to debate, this fiasco would have continued for… well, no one knows how long. By saying yet to proceed to debate, and making his party think he was a “yes” on the actual bill, they were convinced to bring it to the floor for the actual approval vote that happened last night. Here’s the thing about the reconciliation process: they’re only allowed one vote per session per topic. So now, the healthcare reconciliation vote has happened and failed, and my understanding is they can’t try to repeal the ACA through reconciliation again until the next Senate session (which I think is in 2018).
So yeah, McCain actually played the rest of his party on this. He brought it to a failed close.
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John McCain: IDGAF, America, I does what I wants!
(And before you all yell, I’m not a huge fan either, but this is the funniest picture I could find with the word maverick in it, so there. Real props to Murkowski and Collins and the, shudder, Democrat senators.)
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The most questionable politician for me is the guy from Kentucky’s 5th Congressional district, it constantly votes for a Republican and has one of the worst living conditions from economic growth to health, i don’t understand how people can believe things will get better thinking the same way the situation was created
But then it would have been repealed because it would have gone to Pence to break the tie of 50s since it was just a single 1 vote
This was really all about making some kind of illusion of victory – “YEAHHH We just passed a law!” But even then it was not assured, they still had to work with the House on a final bill in committee.
If the GOP had passed something, then they would own it. People losing coverage, Medicaid disappearing, that would firmly be the fault of the GOP.
But now they can simply find ways to not enforce or fund parts of the ACA, leading to the “death spiral” they predicted, which they will then blame on Obama and the Democrats. “See? We TOLD you!”
Either way the US has to hobble along, carrying it’s preconceived prejudices against universal health care like a heavy stone until one day it just gets tired of hauling the weight around and dumps it. “Hey. . . wow. . . why didn’t we do this before, so much easier!”
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That’s my take as well; more than anything he did this for the attention, and to paint a veneer of authenticity of that unearned ‘maverick’ title for which he wants so badly to be remembered.
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What i want to know is how much funds does the GOP actually get from health insurance companies
It doesn’t make sense that the original Obama bill was a lot more “left” and the (GOP/)Tea Party fought him to the current water downed version, and to me its a bit more fasict-lite now
And the GOP doesn’t actually explain that a UHC system would actually benefit Deep South/Traditional Red states most
They don’t ‘sell’ it to their constituents because they have basically been taught to not want it, or that they don’t need it
Its like taking the horse to the river but you can’t make the horse drink :(
But the only people who are going to buy that are Republicans anyway. And probably not even all Republicans.
“Bipartisan fixes, no repeal” is the broad consensus among the public now. Continued Republican efforts to sabotage and sandbag the ACA instead of reaching across the aisle to try and improve it will backfire, just as surely as the repeal effort has.
Blaming the previous administration will work for the Fox News audience, but to moderates and independents it’s just going to sound like an excuse. Obama is not the president anymore – and he’s a hell of a lot more popular than the guy who is.
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As I’ve said before, I’m getting really tired of it having to actually get worse before it gets better. Let’s not lament the fact that the GOP failed to fuck over literally 10% of this country’s population just because it’ll theoretically make it harder to beat them next November. There are still 49 senators and 217 members of the House with on-the-record votes in favor of ludicrously destructive legislation that would have harmed millions of people and absolutely killed thousands unnecessarily. That’s still solid material for a campaign ad, with the benefit of me not having to spend every week until at least 2018 choosing between my anti-depressants and food.
The thing is, though, that argument doesn’t work especially well when you’re on the record saying “we’re going to let this mess tank”. Republican voters are more likely to fall for it, but by a 2-to-1 margin, the public will blame the GOP. The party in power gets blamed when things go wrong, regardless of whose fault it actually is, but in this case that blame would be laid appropriately at the GOP’s feet.
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Yeah, but how could that ever happen? It’s not like the GOP was excluded from work on the original ACA bill, they shunned the entire effort. Now suddenly they are supposed to work with Democrats? And what exactly would they do to “fix” Obamacare? It’s already a relatively conservative law, about as close as we could get to insuring everyone without just having true universal health care. The “fixes” they just offered weren’t fixes at all.
Let’s hope so.
You misunderstand. I’m not disagreeing with you on what the Republicans are going to do, I’m merely predicting that people aren’t going to fall for it. I think you’re absolutely right that they’re going to continue to try to destabilize the exchanges and then blame it on Snowball, but I also think most people will see through it and blame the Republicans, rather than public opinion swinging back to opposing the ACA.
If we had a functioning Congress, the answer would be to provide incentives for insurers to stay in the exchanges and for healthy people to join them, and perhaps some adjacent changes to work better competition into the prescription drug market (importing from Canada, allowing the government to bid on prices, etc.). If we had a functioning Executive Branch, the answer would be to enforce the mandate and quit grandstanding and sowing uncertainty. If the Republican leadership looked more like Romney and less like Trump, I think modest bipartisan fixes would be entirely possible and could do a lot of good.
If we had a Democratic congress, we’d probably be talking about reviving the proposal for a public option.
On the plus side, we may have leapfrogged that; single-payer has actually become something of a mainstream position in the Democratic Party recently (and I’m even seeing some conservatives make the case for it, albeit those in the vanishing “conservative intellectual” class rather than anyone with any real power or influence).
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I doubt he gives a crap about poor people’s health care, as he recuperates from surgery at one of his 8 houses. I think he did it purely to stick it to Donald Dork, whom he hates.
And McCain has been strongly defending that choice ever since, to the point of still claiming that Palin would make an excellent President. No remorse at all.
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I’m not sure I’d want to go there. Given how few congressional districts are actually competitive, there have to be a lot of consistently poor districts that consistently vote Democrat. They’re consistently poor, so the Democrats, even after years of having taken the district, have utterly failed it and yet the people keep voting in the Democrats.
Now, I can come up with all sorts of excuses for why they’re still poor: Republican obstructionism, etc., but the Republicans would obviously claim the same.
I’m certain that the members of the district would claim their woes were created by Democrat-leaning policies (immigration. environmental policies, etc.) and what they need are the sort of manufacturing jobs that have been promised by Trump.
Thus the real story is not people voting against their interests, but that people vote their identity, and American identity has this huge split. Moreover, what the parties do is only subtly relevant to people’s economic future making policy outcomes almost irrelevant. Instead, policy must reinforce identity.
To be honest, I do think repealing ACA would have been one of the few policies were even partisans would have been able to connect the dots. The outcome was probably the best the Republicans could have hoped for. The Republicans “fought the good fight” against ACA and “just” lost. It remains fully in place so that people don’t destroy the Republicans when an identity policy actually hits home, and it’s still there as a symbol to rally the troops.
The outcome was also the best that the American people could have hoped for. Millions of Americans are safe (from this particular peril) for another session.
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I always come to the conclusion that public school doesn’t teach life skills, skills that should be learned from parent(s)/legal guardian and that Rep-voters would oppose out of saying that the gov shouldn’t teach people how to live
I think one of the best lessons would be mutual funds, but with that people need to apply themselves, and yeah at the end of the day people need to apply themselves
Sorry I wasn’t clear-- I’m not disagreeing with you either.
