Sure Mitch, I’ll advise you on what you can and can’t do.
We desperately want the federal government’s takeover of healthcare, Obamacare, undone. But what we have now is the sinking feeling that the “staged” repeal and replace, as anything that comes from Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, will merely bastardize the situation. They can’t be trusted, only monitored and pushed.
The proposal on the table at this time, the “mark-up bill,” is their baby. It has some improved aspects perhaps, but we don’t trust that the inadequate particulars are forced by anything other than McConnell’s predilections with Ryan’s consultation, cooperation and coverup. It is simply that when it comes to big-spending big-government programs these guys cannot be trusted.
To the extent that Trump, and his administration, including Pence and HHS Secretary Price, the later two we understand to know the implications of continued heavy federal government involvement, are buying into this staged process is not comforting if it relies a whole lot on what McConnell and Ryan are telling them.
The main argument for the staged process as Ryan describes it is because of the so-called reconciliation process, now of lore, to get anything past the big bad Senate filibuster rules. It is to the effect “gee wiz our hands are tied.” The other two stages are administrative leeway allowed Price and other legislation not subject to “reconciliation, both down the road.
The Washington Examiner article we link to below is about the Senate’s current parliamentarian / gate-keeper, a position and person that serves at the pleasure of McConnell. We believe it will help you understand our distrust about the necessity of this staged process. We also understand that parliamentarians do not rule, they advise, the Chair ~~ McConnell rules. Read this important article. We will post later some links to analysis of the Ryan/McConnell bill as proposed in the House.
Is this little Senate lawyer scaring Trump’s Republicans away from Obamacare repeal?
DLH and R Mall
An editor’s aside: In my humble opinion the whole filibuster thing is a joke, it is an extra constitutional construct that never stopped anything the powers-that-be wanted to happen and only protected policies they were never serious about ending. Who believes that the Democrats would let the filibuster get in their way for one minute on anything they felt key to their agenda if they still had the majority?
I look at this as akin to my mother’s rendition of how my grandfather sitting in the comfort of his chair kidded her as a young child into doing an errand for him into the cellar, (probably to get him a beer). She would balk and he would say “you will have to because I can’t, I have a bone in my leg.” And so we were similarly kidded to do some small errand for her. It was a charade for generations between loving parent and child. But misdirection that worked on five-year-olds should not control undoing the Obamanation. We remember all those unanimous Republican votes to repeal Obamacare. Repeal it and replace it with prejudice. R Mall
