Projection is a Hell of a Drug Republicans Want You to Pay For

One of the most ridiculous of ridiculous Republican lies is back:

The bigger point is that what might undo Republicans isn’t policy so much as politics. This is where they’d do well to reflect on all that President Obama did wrong. Long before ObamaCare cratered on the merits, it had failed in the court of public opinion—because of both the manner and the means by which it became law. The first test for Republican lawmakers and the Trump administration is whether they prove foolish enough to repeat those obvious mistakes.

Senior Democrats crafted ObamaCare in lobbyist-filled backrooms, forgoing hearings, markups, even input from their own colleagues—much less Republicans. It was an exercise in secrecy and control.

The idea that the Affordable Care Act — which got a House majority and a Senate supermajority after an interminable process of negotiation in which many concessions were made to moderate Democrats and prominent congressional leaders begged Republicans to ask for concessions long after it was clear that no Republican would vote for anything — was quickly RAMMED DOWN THE THROATS of the American public after emerging whole from a room that isn’t smoke-filled and might have even a vegetable tray because Michelle Obama is a public health liberal fascist is a remarkable inversion of the truth. And yet it’s a very persistent one. This anti-fact about the ACA’s passage was a central part of the campaign to sell the Supreme Court on the antithesis-of-the-truth that Congress intended for the federal backstop it established to fail, beloved by the late Antonin Scalia. The Republican campaign against the ACA is like the confluence of the Monongahela, the Allegheny, and the Ohio, if they were all rivers of mendacious bullshit.

But there’s a darker irony here. As Chait observes, what was ludicrously false about the ACA is certainly true about Republican efforts to destroy the ACA, replace it with worse than nothing, and sneak off like thieves in the night:

But the claims that conservatives have falsely made about passing Obamacare provide a true description of the Republican plan to undo it. They are rushing through a bill to repeal it with maximal speed, and no public deliberation. That might be defensible if Republicans had promised the public that electing them would mean simple repeal and a restoration of the health-care system as it existed before 2010. The conservative health-care journalist Philip Klein laments that Republicans are “having a tough time stating a simple truth, which goes something like this: We don’t believe that it is the job of the federal government to guarantee that everybody has health insurance.’”

A small-government conservative party with Klein’s honesty would have made the case that they simply don’t believe the federal government has a responsibility to assure access to medical care for all. The argument framed by Klein does describe the actual policy agenda of the Republican Party, which has worked for years to eliminate or minimize the government’s commitment to expanding health coverage. But Republicans haven’t run on a promise anything like this. Instead, they have insisted since the outset of the debate that they, too, wanted reform. Donald Trump repeatedly promised that his health-care plan would “take care of everybody.” “We don’t want anyone who currently has insurance to not have insurance,” says senior Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway.

So how do they solve the problem? By promising that after Obamacare is repealed, and only then, they will show the country the wonderful system that will replace it. “We have a plan to replace it. We have plenty of ideas to replace it. And you’ll see as the weeks and months unfold, what we’re talking about replacing it,” promises Paul Ryan. Asked if his plan will cover everybody, Ryan demurs, “Look, I’m not going to get ahead of our committee process. We’re just beginning to put this together.” Ryan insists they have a plan, and also insists he cannot describe the plan because it is just beginning to take shape. The “plan” exists rhetorically for the purposes of assuring people there is a plan. But Ryan and his party are unwilling to produce anything that can be compared to the status quo.

Republicans say you have to vote to wreck the status quo before they will tell you what comes next. That is why they are rushing a repeal bill through, without any hearings or deliberation, or public accountability about their plan. All the untrue things they said about the passage of Obamacare are true of the passage of their plan. After screaming about the use of a filibuster-evading reconciliation bill to pass minor changes to Obamacare, Republicans plan to use reconciliation for the entirety of their repeal. It is a naked abuse of the legislative process. You have to pass their bill to find out what’s in it.

None of this should cause any journalist to re-think their commitment to the narrative that Paul Ryan is a bold, wonky truth-teller devoted to the poor, of course.

I’ll give the final word to Cohn:

The story that Obamacare opponents tell about its enactment is that backers conceived the health insurance proposal in secret, misled the public about its provisions, and passed it without thinking through the consequences.

That’s a totally accurate account ― of what Republicans are planning to do right now.