During his White House exit interview and Fox News audition on The Hannity show last night, Donald Trump’s outgoing Chief of Staff Reince Priebus argued that Trumpcare is still undead.
Near the end of the first part of his lengthy interview, Priebus dropped this bomb as he and host Sean Hannity hashed over the failure of the so-called “skinny repeal” of Obamacare the night before:
PRIEBUS: Getting John McCain back on board with health care reform bill, repeal and replace – I think it’s still possible. I think getting Lisa Murkowski on board with repealing and replacing Obamacare is going to be important.
Here’s the thing: I don’t think it’s over, though, Sean. I wouldn’t, I would not say that repealing and replacing Obamacare before the end of September is off the table.
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I want to emphasize the fact, looking forward positively, I think that the Republicans can still get this thing done. They only need one more vote. They can get Lisa Murkowski or Susan Collins or John McCain to come up with something that may work. Now Lindsey Graham and Cassidy and others are talking about a straight-up block grant and sending the money back to the states. Maybe that’s gonna catch fire. I think it might.
I’d like to think that this was just as much baloney as Priebus’ slobbering over Hannity, Trump and Anthony Scaramucci. But Republicans seem obsessed with taking away health insurance from their fellow Americans.
Watch “pro-life” Priebus salivate over new ways to kill us below, from the July 28, 2017 Hannity.
Apparently, neither is repealing Reince Priebus . . .
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Let’s face facts. The GOPiggies will never cease trying to destroy Obamacare. It is the signature piece of legislation of that Black Muslim who occupied their White House. Once Obamacare is gone, the GOPiggies will rejoice by shouting about the failure of the Obama Presidency.
The fact remains that Pence could have done this in January, as soon as he became our acting President. But he wanted the blame for this to go to the Congress, both so he could say that he’d followed proper order and so that he could avoid being held accountable after millions lose their coverage. It is clear that Pence and Trump were frustrated by the fact that they couldn’t muster enough votes even with a threshold of 50, to get this into conference so they could sneak the full repeal in that way. They were clearly angered by this – to the point that the senators from Alaska were actually called this week and threatened with the loss of funding to their state if Murkowski didn’t hop to and get with the program. I find it interesting that Trump wants to publicly blame the Dems for this, when the GOP pursued a vicious approach of locking the Dems completely out of the process and publicly stating that they didn’t need a single Dem vote to get this done.
Even on Fox News, there are now some pundits saying that this situation will result in Dems and GOP congresspeople working together on “repair”. (Krauthammer notably tried this idea out last night) But that’s not going to happen. Pence will never permit it – he needs the ACA gone, so he can give Trump a public victory of some kind within this year – and all they’ve done so far is publicly rip up most of the programs started under Obama and force Neil Gorsuch into Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court seat. The pundits keep forgetting that these guys are playing for keeps and they’re not acting like adults about it. The new push is to do what we’ve known Trump would bully McConnell into doing for some time – namely, change the Senate rules to get everything done by simple majority vote. With that done, they can push many different bits of legislation through on party line votes and again never need a single Dem to help them. We’re not dealing with principled people who want to work to solve anything – we’re dealing with Buddy Hinton. Reasoning with these guys never works – it just gets you another black eye.