Reince Priebus: Repealing Obamacare Is Not Off The Table

Apparently, neither is repealing Reince Priebus . . .

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Trump just made clear in his latest tweeting that he intends to pull the federal funding. Could be finished as quickly as next week, since the current funding was only set to go through the end of July.

Yeah, we knew this already.

By all accounts, McCain’s long-term health prognosis is poor. When he resigns or passes, the AZ Repug Governor will appoint a hard-core Repug to McCain’s seat. That’s the 50th vote. Dense Pence then breaks the tie. Obamacare is out and Trumpcare is in. Tough cookies for the 15 million who will lose their health care.

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.

By all indications, the Pence White House is not going to wait for the Senate to return to this matter in the fall. They want the ACA dead, and they want that done as soon as possible. And they have a simple way to accomplish it – Pence will simply discontinue the federal subsidies for the exchanges. As the linked article in this piece shows, Pence can do that by dropping the Obama Administration appeal of the Right Wing court ruling saying that the funding had to be specifically approved by Congress. Once Pence drops the appeal (or simply turns off the spigot), the funding stops. When the funding stops, the insurers will immediately leave, since they can’t be required to lose money on a program like this. When that happens, the ACA will become an unfunded program – it will exist on the books but it will do nothing. One Right Wing friend of mine actually believes this is a much more satisfying method of yelling “F You!” to all the people who wanted to expand health coverage in this country.

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.