The Big Nothing: Ladies and Gentlemen, Your Senate

What a week it was, at least for the future of health insurance in the USA.

I followed it all, from the courageous return of a very ill John McCain to Washington, to his depressing decision not to assign the Obamacare repeal/replacement effort to a House/Senate conference committee and being the swing vote dooming that effort.  I guess it was a mixed week for the senator as well.

You know, after self-questioning my loyalty to the party that intends, and sometimes pretends, to advance conservatism, I have to question a lot more things.  First on the list is whether the Republicans in the Senate even want to govern.

That was a pretty pathetic display last week.  Right at the top is John McCain's performance on the so-called "skinny repeal" bill.

Let's try to understand this, although I'm sure you already do, at least most of it.

Obamacare was rammed through without any Republican support.  Since Ted Kennedy had died in office in late 2009, Massachusetts needed a special election for a new Senator.  When Scott Brown, a Republican, won the seat, the Democrats lost their filibuster-proof majority to pass whatever Obamacare version they wanted.

Accordingly, they turned to the arcane congressional process called "budget reconciliation" to ram through Obamacare, and shoved it through both houses.  What reconciliation hath wrought, reconciliation could fix -- its simple-majority rule allowed passage in the Senate.  But reconciliation can only be used for certain things, at least in the hands of people who, you know, follow their own rules.

So the first stage of dumping Obamacare was to put as much repeal and replace as could be done through reconciliation, and do that.  The House passed such a bill months earlier, and was waiting for the Senate to pass it and get it onto a willing President's desk.

No such luck.  The Senate was not happy with the House bill and crafted their own, which failed.  Then they put together the "skinny repeal" bill.  I have no idea what was in it, but the purpose was to pass it, send it back to the House and then work in a joint House-Senate conference committee to craft a bill that could be, you know, passed.

Of course, some Republicans did not like the skinny repeal bill, but they held their noses and voted for it because they knew it would not become law.  It was going to the House and then right to the joint committee to align with what the House had passed.  Both houses would then have a chance to work on negotiating a real bill, however long it might take.

The nose-holding Republican senators, of course, trusted that Speaker Paul Ryan would not call a vote on the skinny repeal bill; rather, he would send it right to conference, as the plan was to go.

Except for John McCain.  McCain insisted that Speaker Ryan publicly acknowledge that he would have the House go straight to conference and so there was no chance the bill would pass as it left the Senate.  Ryan shrugged and said "OK, we are not going to vote on skinny repeal, and we are not going to vote on a bill before a conference committee gets to work on it."

Or words to that effect.  I heard him, and he said what McCain wanted to hear, at least we all thought.

Except that when the vote was called in the Senate, McCain joined two other senators and voted "no", which doomed the bill and doomed any chance of getting a joint conference committee to attack the problem of a health insurance law that is strangling millions of Americans.

Bad on you, Senator McCain.  I certainly heard you the first time; you would not vote for the bill unless Speaker Ryan assured you in public that he would send it straight to committee.  He did, and you flunked your end of the bargain.

I don't know what party you belong to, Senator, but either you have left mine, or the party has left me.  If that's what honor now means to you, you may need to think about whether you want to continue in that once-august body.

Copyright 2017 by Robert Sutton
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