When historians look to mark the day that everything went
off the rails in the United States of America, a very reasonable pick is October
23, 2010. That was the day that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of
Kentucky said in an interview that “The single most important thing we want to
achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
There is no record of McConnell
hastening to qualify this statement by noting that “of course I meant to say that this objective comes after ensuring the defense
and safety of our nation, serving the needs of my constituency, and supporting and
defending the Constitution, as I swore to do when I took the oath of office of
the United States Senate.” No, job #1 for the Senator from Tennessee was to
focus every fiber of his being on obstructing, fighting, and undermining the
freely elected leader of his own country.
McConnell was true to his word,
leading his party on a kamikaze raid on the Obama White House, triggering the
mutually assured destruction of the daily civility, bipartisan cooperation, tough but open-minded
negotiation, and endless horse trading that had miraculously enabled Congress to
function more or less as the founding fathers had intended for more than 200
years. McConnell’s philosophy metastasized and became Patient Zero in the death
spiral of dysfunction that gridlocks our government today. In his signature act, McConnell was able to
deny a sitting president his right to fill a vacancy in the Supreme Court with
a brazen middle-finger salute to the obvious intent of the framers of the Constitution.
It was Mitch McConnell who
mainstreamed the notion that being a Republican was more important than being
an American, and who turned us from a nation of patriots into a nation of
partisans.
In what must be considered
plutonium-grade irony, the electile
dysfunction in Washington, D.C. borne of McConnell’s mission of obstruction caused
many Americans to lose patience with government, enabling Donald Trump to storm
to the presidency by railing against the ineffectiveness, inaction, and swamp
of self-interest in Washington, D.C. That is to say: the
Republican candidate for president campaigned directly against the Republican
Party philosophy as articulated by one Mitch McConnell.
Of course, Mitch McConnell did
not succeed in achieving the central organizing mission of his life’s work.
Barack Obama won a second term, and, indeed, emerged at the end of his eight
years in office as one of the most popular presidents in decades.
But the metastasized cancer of
McConnell’s core objective did not wither and die as Obama prevailed and served
successfully. Rather, cancers lie hidden and dormant as they tinker with
mutations that enable them to roar back with murderous rage. When McConnell failed
to terminate Barack Obama’s full terms in office, the cancer mutated and took
on a different objective: to obliterate, after the fact, each and every
accomplishment of the Obama administration.
This, in good measure, explains
the unending and relentless assault that the Republican Party has mounted in
order to be able to claim that it has delivered on its promise to “repeal and replace ObamaCare.”
Last week, a confluence of
forces – Donald Trump’s increasingly desperate need for a single legislative
triumph, the Republican Party’s desperate need to claim fulfillment of at least
one campaign promise, Paul Ryan’s desperate need to restore his credibility as
House Speaker, and the Republican Party’s need to eradicate the Obama legacy,
came together to produce a Rube Goldberg construct that barely passed in the
House of Representatives. The bill remains so flawed that there is
talk of simply having the Senate rip it up and start over. ObamaCare is still the law of the land, and there are many hurdles ahead before the Republicans can achieve their goal. But to a party and a president consumed with optics, sound-bytes, and symbolism, the mere passage of the bill in the House was ample reason to celebrate.
The reason the bill is such a monstrosity
is that it was conceived with no specific objective other than to enable
Republicans to claim that they repealed Obamacare. In practical terms, this
meant that this was no criteria for success other than passage in the U.S.
House. The Republican goal was not to create something that was better than ObamaCare, it was to create
something that could pass in the
House of Representatives.
The reason it took three tries
to even meet that standard is that Republicans themselves were in split in diametrically
opposite positions about Obamacare. The right-wing Freedom Caucus essentially
views any form of state-sponsored guaranteed health coverage as creeping
socialism and wants to take the federal government out of regulating
healthcare to the full extent possible. Centrist Republicans in heavily
contested congressional districts could clearly see – in countless town hall
meetings -- that their constituents found certain aspects of ObamaCare to be
very compelling. The most popular
components of ObamaCare were the right to keep children up to age 26 on the
parent’s plan, and the language preventing insurance companies from either
charging exorbitant premiums to persons with “pre-existing
conditions,” or denying coverage entirely.
Using the criteria of “what can
pass?” rather than “what is good?” the Republicans threaded the philosophical
needle by abdicating, foisting off
the question of whether insurance companies must offer insurance to people with
pre-existing conditions to the individual states. The states, in turn, would
have the option to allow insurance companies to charge exorbitant premiums,
which is exactly where the hypocrisy hits the fan. The state can “require” an
insurance company to offer insurance to all persons with pre-existing
conditions, but the insurance company can determine the cost. If a cancer
patient has to pay $150,000 for health insurance, then it is a sham to pretend
that the ObamaCare requirement has been preserved.
This solution provided just
enough of a coating over the bullshit to enable both wings of the party to go
back to their constituents and say that the new health plan meets all of their
requirements. More important, it allowed everyone to say that they had met
their promise of voting to repeal ObamaCare.
What lies ahead is the matter
of what bill – if any – ultimately emerges from the Senate.
In the short term, Republicans
could all claim a desperately needed victory, the photo op, and the pretension
of a George Dubya caliber “mission accomplished.” Paul Ryan was no longer flat-lining, Donald Trump’s
presidency was temporarily out of the ICU, and Republican Representatives in
the House of Representatives could pretend that they had provided their
constituents with some vestige of healthcare that barely clears a bar of human
decency.
Sure, if this bill were ever to become law, it would cost poor people more, be more expensive for older people than younger people, result in millions of people losing insurance coverage, and -- because of the failure to provide guaranteed coverage for pre-existing conditions -- those most at risk will be in the most peril of being
abandoned. Taxes on the super-rich will be reduced. Once again, the very people who voted Trump into the White House will be sucker-punched.
But hey, the Republicans can say that they actually succeeded in a vote to repeal and replace ObamaCare,so they are content that they have achieved their only real objective.
What might be of interest to
Republicans is to look at healthcare from a different point of view, a
perspective that is not informed solely and wholly by Mitch McConnell’s singular
life goal of eradicating the legacy of Barack Obama.
Perhaps Republicans could look
at health care from the perspective of those who provide it.
Interestingly, doctors are
also administered an “oath of office." The difference is that doctors, unlike
our politicians, actually read the words and take their oath seriously. Most
people think that the Hippocratic Oath is centered on the idea of “do no harm.”
In fact, those words do not appear at any point in the text.
What does appear, however, are
these vows:
Yes, doctors are bound to
reflect on the humanity of the persons they treat, the potential economic
burden of their care, and to be vigilant about how that treatment affects the
patient’s life and the lives of all those he or she holds dear. Wouldn’t it be
something if our Republican representatives held themselves to such a
standard? If they arrived at their decisions based on the impact on the
constituents rather than on the donations of those who fund their re-election
campaigns?
Our Republican members of
Congress might be wise to reflect on the vows that physicians make, as well as
on the oath that they themselves took upon taking office.
If their only goal in life is destroy the
opposition party, they have lost sight of their vow to protect and
defend the Constitution.
They are not serving their
constituents if they are content to draft weasel language that protects their
own jobs at the expense of the health of the people they serve.
The only creed that they are living
by is the natural extension of the oath first uttered by Mitch McDonnell: “The single most important thing we want to
achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.” When out of power,
the Republican Party became “the Party of No.” Now that the Republicans have a
hold on every branch of government, they have simply become “the Party of
Undo.”
We still have little idea of
what Republicans actually seek to achieve, only what they seek to destroy.
And their oath of fealty to
McConnell’s commitment stands in precise
and direct opposition to the very oath they took when they entered Congress.
Leave it to this Republican
administration of fake news, lies, deception, and distraction to try to solve
healthcare with a hypocritical oath.
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