AHCA Paints Republicans Into a Hard Corner [View all]

[sheshe2]

One challenge with writing on the weekend is that much of the biggest news during the week has already been beaten half to death and all the good takes already written. So it is with the Republicans’ passage of the horrendous AHCA earlier this week. The bill is so stupendously bad, and the Republican celebrations afterward so shortsightedly crass, that the four most obvious takes are the only ones worth writing:


1) Donald Trump wants a “win” so badly that he doesn’t even care what’s in the bill or why, even if it means breaking every single one of his campaign promises;

2) Republicans are so desperate to cut taxes for the rich that they’re willing to literally kill millions of Americans to get them, and to set up the financing for their next round of tax cuts for the rich.

3) The most conservative Republicans are now conducting governance by nihilism: the Freedom Caucus knows its bill has no chance in the Senate without being totally rewritten, but they care more about hewing to some version of objectivist Ayn Rand ideology than of their voters–or worse. I’m not a religious man, but they claim to be. If I truly believed in the Almighty and life after death I would be afraid to meet my Maker after voting for such an immoral catastrophe. It’s such a blatantly disgusting giveaway to the wealthy at the expense of the sick that even the Features Editor at Reason Magazine railed against it in the New York Times. Conservative Ross Douthat called it a “self-parodic exercise in cutting Medicaid to fund tax cuts for the rich.” Yikes.


Read More: http://washingtonmonthly.com/2017/05/07/ahca-paints-republicans-into-a-hard-corner/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+washingtonmonthly%2Frss+%28Political+Animal+at+Washington+Monthly%29

Crass. Sick. Immoral.