McCaughey is blatantly lying here. The intention of the Pence White House was more than clear – to stop any bipartisan efforts to stabilize the ACA after Trump’s antics all year, and to instead punch its lowest income users in the face.

Trump himself made this clear today in a fairly vicious series of statements in his cabinet meeting, where he openly gloated about having destroyed the ACA, and firmly and angrily declared that it could never have worked and was a failure and a disaster. He also stated that it was only because of his latest attack on the ACA that Murray and Alexander were working together. Which was again, a blatant lie. And he went back to the playbook of saying the only reason reform hadn’t happen was because of Dem “obstruction” – again, a blatant lie.

The reality is that Murray and Alexander have been trying for months to find some common ground to stabilize the ACA, but they’ve repeatedly been stymied by Mike Pence’s demand that the GOP not negotiate with the Dems but instead ram through a 51 vote majority bill on their own to simply kill the ACA. Pence and Trump have been clear throughout that they do not want any Dem input, other than for the Dems to cave and beg for mercy while Trump kicks them in the face again. Since the Dems are not willing to do such a thing, Trump then makes noises about obstruction while making sure that no bipartisan work can happen. Once Trump realized he’d missed the 51 vote window for reconciliation protocols, he clearly decided to just kill the ACA on his own by Executive Order.

McCaughey’s statements, like the lies of Pence and Trump, ignore the facts of what actually happened with the passage and maintenance of the ACA. Let’s remember the actual record of the GOP’s behavior here: The ACA was extensively debated in Congress, in both houses for a year, and everyone had a chance to speak at length about it and make changes and adjustments. The Dems made repeated concessions to the GOP, including the removal of what little public option had been present in the bill and various other tightenings and restrictions to hopefully get the GOP on board, and that was after the Dems used a GOP plan as the backbone for the bill in the first place. It became clear after several months that the GOP had no interest in actually working to pass the bill and was actually working to sabotage it – using the approach they’d successfully employed against Hillary Clinton’s effort in the early 90s, namely to keep trying to send the bill back to its original committees to go back to the drawing board. It’s an old parliamentary trick, intended to gum up the works and prevent such a bill from moving forward – essentially an “obstruct, delay, ignore” approach. But this failed when the Dems not only got the bill to a vote but did so under reconciliation themselves – and passed it. (The angriest I’ve ever seen a Right Wing friend of mine was the day the bill passed – he was beet red furious about it, saying “I hope they HANG him with this. And YES, I DO KNOW WHAT I’M SAYING!!!”)

The Right Wing then campaigned, as they always intended, on the bill having been passed with no GOP votes (not acknowledging that they had threatened and intimidated any GOP members who were fine with the bill into voting in lockstep to oppose it). The result of that, plus the increasing hatred by the Right for Barack Obama, plus the gerrymandering tilt to the Right in 2010, allowed more GOP congresspeople to be voted in, and gave the GOP a majority again in the House. In 2014, the GOP stoked anger about the 2012 election results into a slight majority in the Senate as well. The GOP then worked in earnest to destroy the ACA, to erase it from having existed. The problem at the time was that Barack Obama was still the President, so he would never sign such a bill. But it is notable that the Right Wing did absolutely NOTHING to adjust or improve the ACA when they could have easily done so, and when President Obama repeatedly urged them to do so. Instead, they just voted over 50 times to flat out repeal it. They weren’t interested in negotiating – they just wanted to get rid of it. This was coupled with a series of Right Wing governors refusing to cooperate with the ACA in their states, thus sabotaging a system that was intended to be a large wide net that included everyone and thus could bring the costs down. (By starving the ACA of over 20 states, the Right Wing engineered a scenario that saw premiums go up when they should have decreased, since insurers didn’t have the larger pool of participants that would have made the situation work.) Given the GOP’s obstinance, President Obama made multiple adjustments to the ACA on his own, including adjustments to the various subsidies so that lower income people could obtain plans. The GOP then cried foul and screamed that President Obama couldn’t do that within the Constitution and that he should have just faced the wall for the rest of his tenure and done nothing. Obviously that was a nonsensical position, but the GOP would like you to think it was somehow reasonable. And we should remember that President Obama’s adjustments were intended to be ratified by Congress, particularly when saner people came into those seats and stopped just playing repeal games. Sadly, that will not happen in time, and the Right Wing will finally succeed in killing this program.

People like McCaughey are trying to present a smiling face about a fairly vicious action that the Right Wing is inflicting here. Fox News is fully aware that there will be no Congressional fix for the ACA, because the Right Wing GOP members will never vote for such a fix. Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Mike Lee and many others are sworn to destroy the ACA and they’re not going to compromise. They want it dead, and the easiest way to do this is to play Trump’s current game – implode it from within and watch it die. In the end, there may still be a program on the books, but it will have no funding and the Right Wing will have obtained their scalps. Their intended lesson for Obama supporters is a simple one – keep your head down and don’t ever try this again. (I note that Trump went off on a rant today about how he intends to cut many more people out of welfare programs since they don’t deserve it – and I believe him to be serious about this.) My hope is that Dem voters are taking this opportunity to learn a much more important lesson – SHOW UP AND VOTE. Had 2-3 million Dems in the swing states bothered to come to the polls last November, we would not now be having this ridiculous discussion.