The other night, someone clued me into an insane Las Vegas show called “Jubilee,” an artifact of the early ’80s featuring an incomprehensible extravaganza of showgirls and ludicrous costumes and nonsense-kitsch. (The clip below seems to capture a taste of the glitz.)
And that’s what came to mind when I read that congressional Republicans have passed an Obamacare repeal bill in an elaborate ceremony that is a work of madness and completely disconnected from reality.
Obviously, the latest Obama-repeal bill isn’t going any further. Obama’s already vetoed it, and Republicans don’t have anywhere near enough votes to override. But just imagine what would happen if the president was a Republican.
So is that the point of this whole charade? Are they just play-acting at what life would be like under a Republican president? This probably isn’t a sincere effort to repeal anything; it’s simply a vignette to demonstrate their first order of business if Cruz or Rubio or, God help us, any of the other jackasses win.
“We now have shown that there is a clear path to repealing Obamacare … Finally, we cracked the code,” Paul Ryan said of the bill’s passage, feigning victory moments before Obama vetoed it. In this context, “cracking the code” means slipping the repeal past Democrats in Congress with a sneaky procedural trick that skips the possibility of filibuster.
So what would this bill actually do, if Obama hadn’t vetoed it? Well, it turns out, their “Obamacare repeal bill” doesn’t actually repeal Obamacare. Because of the one weird trick they used to get the bill past Democrat filibustering, the “repeal” bill can only affect laws that would have an impact on the federal deficit.
And the deeper you look into what the Republicans just passed, the messier it looks. In fact, it’s pretty clear that they never intended for it to pass, because it would completely break the health-care system. For example, it would remove the requirement that all Americans have health care, so only sick people would have insurance. That means premiums would have to be insanely high in order to cover the cost of care. And as much as Republicans want to see Obamacare fail, I can’t imagine they’d be so dumb as to pass a bill that would draw a direct line from their party to stupid-expensive premiums.
(The bill would also have defunded Planned Parenthood. You’re welcome, women.)
So even if we had a Republican president, it’s unlikely Republicans would pass a bill that looks anything like the broken one they just passed. They’d have to try to pass some kind of Obamacare-replacement program, something they’ve long promised but have never quite been able to describe.
Nevertheless, Republicans are acting like this latest passage is some kind of win for them, and they held a big ceremony to celebrate Paul Ryan’s signature on the doomed, stupid legislation. No word on whether any of them were wearing elaborate Bob Mackie headdresses.
