I know. What I'm saying is almost the same strategy. Pass a terrible bill that you know won't become law. Last time it was passable it because you know it will be vetoed. This time you can pass it because "moderate" republicans know enough dems and republicans have to get together and pass Obamacare light. Tea party republicans have to vote for the reconciliation bill and can vote against the replacement. Republicans who vote for the replacement bill can say they repealed Obamacare without having to deal with the fallout of an actual healthcare bill that Mike Lee or whoever would vote for.

I'm sort of not following closely enough perhaps, but how would they 'pass a terrible bill that they know won't become law'? Last time it was passable for the GOP because they knew it will be vetoed. This time it's the opposite.

+1

-1

Indefinitely dangling a bill that hurts over 80% of the public is a great way for the GOP to hold the American people hostage while Trump so blatantly pursues an anti-US, Kremlin backed agenda. This is the single biggest reason people don't care about Russia the way they should. Just sayin'.

Besides the VP, exactly how many Congressional Republicans has Russia hacked again? Just curious.

And why are these guys spending so much time making fine tuned adjustments to a bill that the country won't stand for even if there were major changes? Just wondering.

Lastly, why do so many of them seem unconcerned about losing a free and fair 2018 reelection? JUST ASKING.

Mitch McConnell was aware of all this early enough to threaten Obama not to go public on any Trump/Russia related national security issues last summer. It's deeply concerning and I'm deeply concerned.

Probably a few, Russia hacked the RNC too.

Trying to make sense of the word salad a few posts up, maybe he's talking about the Senate passing a bill with tons of ponies like tax cuts and dumping MORE money into Medicaid/exchanges knowing Ryan will laugh at it.

On the losing an election, voter supression aside, it was actually a motivational point for the Obama administration that Democrats were passing something significant and so even if they lost their seats they could at least say they tried. Republicans, I imagine, are in the same boat but with different moral imparatives. See Paul Ryan's dreaming of this since doing keggers in college quote to see how reducing entitlements and giving tax cuts to the rich is, to a large portion of the GOP, their raison d'être

I understand what they have been trying to accomplish for years. That doesn't mean a monkey wrench wasn't thrown into their plan once they decided to accept Donald Trump & his decades of Russian baggage over the last year or two.

They have a stated goal for healthcare entitlements and tax cuts. But the way they are going about it doesn't seem to match up. They could pass a slightly less bill in a heartbeat to avoid Democrat involvement if they wanted to, and probably would already have done so without the Russian monkey wrench.

Once again, like with Trump's obstruction and witness tampering or Jr's and Jared's attempts at espionage or honestly filling out clearance forms, the GOP is being laughed at for their stupidity, naiveté and inexperience.

The only problem is McConnell and others in charge of this bill are NOT naive, inexperienced and stupid.

Russia Russia Russia. Let's keep our eye on the ball because that ball is greatly damaging foreign and domestic positions all around the civilized world.

Yeah, Trump snap-signs literally anything that passes both chambers and sets up a big showy photo-op. Unless Max somehow means "passing" a bill as having it run into a filibuster and fail or something. That's not passing anything.

I mean the whole Gordian knot for the GOP here is that they are terrified to pass anything. I think their fears are reasonable. Don't see a "this one weird trick" way out of it for them. I'll admit I didn't really understand ecriture's point but whatever it was seemed too clever by half. And the GOP, while holistically very dumb -- they are justifiably beset by no good options right now, and their behavior is indicative of that, those are reasonable concerns for a political party in their position to have, and there's no simple way out of this one.

Keep up the phone calls, the pretend moderates are caving left and right.

No just a standard poison pill that gets rid of parts of Obamacare starting in 2018. After you pass that, you have 6 months or whatever to bring back as much of Obamacare as you can with votes from dems as they can't just vote no on something clearly better than the poison pill.

https://www.google.com/amp/m.huffpos...587d63018a/amp

The Trumpcare bill will probably go through

http://www.12news.com/news/politics/...peal/456232935

So all the yes voters are still showing their support for the main function of this bill, which is the filthy rich cannibalizing the poor, crippled, elderly and mentally disabled people who don't have the capacity to fight back? And if they do happen to try, they end up hurt or in jail.

Meanwhile, they have everyone else in the country so petrified that the bill might pass that they have no time, money or energy left over to devote to the Trump-Putin takeover of everything else we hold dear.

Welcome to Russmerica I guess.

So the Cruz amendment came out and it looks like everyone is saying it's a disaster. Instead of making pre existing conditions waiverable it's explicit, the subsidies go to everything instead of dedicating more money to the 'high risk pool' so basically if your young and healthy you'll have light but really cheap heathcare and if you have diabetes or something you'll have astronomical healthcare. Plus a lot of gaming where people who want to have a kid will jump on a plan with maternity care and then jump off. They keep some taxes that they were going to repeal so they have more money to buy votes now.

The weeds analysis is that we'll go back to risk selection gaming by insurance companies, basically the old deny everyone for everything that we had before with high payment for everyone but the young and healthy.

I refuse to be optimistic, but Flake was never a big factor in the Do They Have The Votes calculus, so "probably" seems unwarranted.

It's dead. Collins, Heller, Paul staying no.

Obviously Rand Paul is on a world of his own, but aside from him, I wonder if any of these Republican Senators look at all of these polls, CBO scores, media commentary, rebukes from the medical community, and on and on, and have a moment where they think "Oh, we're actually terrible. Our policies are terrible." Like, I fully expect them to forget that **** the next day and get on with the business of cutting taxes for millionaires, but do they even have the moment?

the disgusting part of the cruz amendment is that its coverage does not count as continuous coverage so if you ended up needing more coverage, have fun waiting 6 months!

portman et al for sure have had this. Which makes the decision to play for the team even that more despicable if they go that way.

Aptly-named senator Flake was always a yes. He was trying to act all independent because his is one of the three seats the Senate is defending next year.

A possibly brilliant way to get around the non-partisan CBO: Let the obviously-partisan HHS dept do the scoring

Too long, lol. Like it's a burger drive through.

The sooner you finish cleaning your room the sooner you can go outside and play with the neighbor children. Let's not forget that RECESS HAS BEEN PUSHED BACK so time is of the essence.