This weekend, Democrats and 56 percent of the American people won a huge victory with the withdrawal of the American Health Care Act, a bill which would ultimately have left 24 million people high and dry. Since then, everyone involved with the bill has been scrambling to blame everyone else involved. Who sunk the bill? Depending on who you ask, the answer might be Paul Ryan, Democrats, the Freedom Caucus or, if you ask Donald Trump, all of the above.
He hasn’t officially issued a statement (or a tweet) about Paul Ryan, but many people have speculated that his tweet calling for his followers to watch Judge Jeanine’s show before she went on air and called for Ryan’s resignation was a characteristically unsubtle way of throwing the Speaker of the House under the bus. The White House has categorically denied it, saying that Judge Jeanine is just his friend and he wanted to do her a solid. Then again, their friendliness could help explain how he would have known Jeanine’s program’s content, in the case that he was using the show as a whip to crack over Ryan’s head.
If everyone trying to point the finger is honest, there’s plenty of blame to go around on the failure of the ACHA. The Democrats didn’t really need to do anything to capsize it, but the Freedom Caucus certainly was responsible for sapping the bill of the votes to pass. But you can really only place a technical sort of blame on them — yes, they did withhold their votes and cause the bill to be pulled, but they had stated concerns, and it’s the job of representatives not to vote for concerning bills. So while they were responsible for the mechanical act of the bill failing, it’s not really fair to call it “their fault.”
The truth is that it was a stupid bill — conservatives and liberals alike agreed on that. Whether or not I agree with their reasoning on why the bill is stupid, I’m glad the Freedom Caucus didn’t decide to toe the party line and pretend it wasn’t.
For that, some fault has to rest with Paul Ryan, who, if he didn’t actually write the ACHA, did have his name all over it. Some people even called it “Ryancare” in a half-hearted attempt to imitate the hit-job Republicans did on the ACA by calling it “Obamacare.”
It was a $600 billion tax cut for the top one percent un-cunningly disguised as a health care bill, which promised to pull the rug out from under millions of people. It viciously slashed Medicare’s budget, despite Republicans’ complaints about Obama’s attacks on Medicare. It was not bipartisan, although the GOP had been smearing Obamacare for not having Republican support since its birth. It would defund Planned Parenthood, which is a major provider of contraceptives and women’s health services, therefore probably increasing unplanned pregnancies. And anyway, it wasn’t fiscally conservative enough for the fiscal conservatives.
Long story short, there was something for everybody to hate in the bill, and a nice healthy dose of hypocrisy running through its bloodstream. None of this is to mention that if Republicans think Obamacare was rammed down their throat — the bill was not unveiled until July of 2009 and it didn’t pass in the House until Nov. 2009 — the three-week window between the ACHA’s introduction and its tragic end must have left some heads spinning.
It was a rushed, shambling mess of a bill. Everyone kind of expected better, since “repeal and replace” has practically become a GOP rallying cry and they’ve had seven years to come up with something better — seven years in which they’ve apparently been twiddling their thumbs, complaining incessantly and doing not much else.
And now it seems their efforts are ending, for the time being. The Obamacare repeal train has ground to a halt on the tracks.
So who sunk the bill?
If you ask me, a winning combination of a lazy, disinterested president, a Republican party that is used to not governing instead of just holding up everyone else’s attempts to govern and a Speaker of the House who is either unintelligent enough to think that his plan was desirable or soulless enough not to care about the millions of people who depend on Obamacare to keep them alive.
The Democrats didn’t even have to be the iceberg for this bill — the ACHA's backers put enough holes in it to leave themselves drowning.