"Get Obamacare repealed and replaced, get tax reform passed. You control the Senate. You control the House. You have the presidency. There's no reason you can't get this done. Get it done and we'll open it back up."--Doug Deason, rich Texan and conservative donor to Republicans through assorted Koch brothers' organizations, as quoted Monday by The Associated Press.
Contemporary Republican politics in the Citizens United era has never been expressed so clearly.
Billionaire conservatives gave massive amounts of money to Republicans to facilitate the GOP's takeover of our government. These rich conservatives did so to invest in the greater goal of getting their general high-end taxes reduced.
They also invested in these Republicans--invested being a kinder word than might be used--so that they could achieve an ancillary greater goal. It was to take health insurance away from poor people through Obamacare repeal so that the money used to treat boo-boos on the riff-raff could be transferred to them through the abolition of taxes targeted to high incomes contained in Obamacare.
This fellow was saying two things. One was that rich people bought from Republicans in Congress a political result that hasn't been delivered. The second was that rich people will cut off money for Republicans henceforth until they deliver what was bought, by which he means lower taxes for the rich in general and repealed taxes on the rich in Obamacare specifically.
Billionaire donors are saying, essentially, that, even now, if the Republicans deliver lower taxes and Obamacare repeal, they'll pay bonuses.
Republicans are working in Congress on a commission basis. But they're not doing it well. Thus, no commission.
They can't turn their attention to tax reform until they pass something--any blamed thing--that they can call a repeal of Obamacare whether it is or isn't.
Just on Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had to postpone a procedural vote on taking Obamacare away from poor people because three or four GOP senators in his caucus must not have been in on the deal with rich people.
And there was another interesting angle to that on Tuesday.
U.S. Sen. Rob Portman, Republican of Ohio, started to look a tad wilted under intense pressure from his heroically decent home-state Republican governor, John Kasich, to back away from the repeal's phasing out of Medicaid expansion for the states. Two other Republican senators--Dean Heller in Nevada and Bill Cassidy in Louisiana--had already openly expressed the same concern about their states losing a lot of money and jerking a lot of people off health insurance.
The New York Times said McConnell was openly frustrated with Portman for signaling such a concern because he had worked hard to keep expansion-state Republican senators quiet about those worries until he could take his best shot at passing the bill.
He wanted them to shut up, vote for repeal to keep the rich investors at bay, and see what could be done quietly for their expansion states in the conference committee reconciling the Senate and House bills.
That explains why the Arkansas Senate GOP phenom, Tom Cotton, wouldn't answer any questions--not just mine, but anybody's--about whether he wanted to protect Medicaid expansion as embraced by his home-state Republican governor. It would seem to explain why the state's other Republican senator, John Boozman, was evasive as well.
They were going along with their party's interest to oblige a rich Texan so that a majority leader from Kentucky could deliver passage of a bill to take health insurance from a quarter-million poor Arkansas people.
It looks like the poor people of Arkansas are going to have to ante up.
And there was another little gem of a factor in the Republicans' embarrassing retreat on Tuesday from billionaire-service. It was an article in Politico asserting that McConnell had "warned" President Trump that, if the Republican Senate can't push through this billionaire-serving Obamacare repeal, then they'll be "forced" to negotiate with the Democrats.
Can you imagine?
What an affront--having to sit down with dirty-fingernailed Democrats and let them have a few things in order to achieve a form of bipartisan consensus on fixing one of the biggest public-policy challenges of our time.
That rich guy in Texas is going to be high-peeved for sure if, after Republicans fail to deliver what he bought, he catches them trying to do real Senate work for non-rich people.
Finally, I repeat my assertion that the 48-member Democratic caucus in the Senate should write a credible Obamacare-fix bill and reach out for negotiated compromise to the moderate Senate Republicans who balked on the McConnell effort to pay off the billionaires.
They say it's a futile tactic because McConnell would never permit such a compromise's advancement.
I say it's the right thing.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 06/29/2017