To Your Very Good Health

Y'know, just thinking in retrospect, after watching John McCain's vote to kill TrumpCare, but maybe Trump's whole, "I like people that weren't captured" line during the primaries wasn't such a great idea, after all.

And watching Lisa Murkowski's vote to kill TrumpCare, maybe when the Republicans wanted Lisa Murkowski out of the Senate and ran a Tea Party candidate against her in the Alaska primary and beat her -- only to have her run as a write-in candidate and win, that might not have been such a great idea either.

And maybe having the Secretary of the Interior thrilled to be able to swagger with the awesome power of the presidency behind him and call United States Senator Lisa Murkowski up to threaten the entire state of Alaska, that doesn't seem all that great of an idea looking back.

Who knew?  The old bromide, "Be careful what you wish for, you just might get it" actually has a lot of truth to it.  Go figure.

By the way, I'm not saying that their remembering slams of the past is what caused anyone to vote the way they did.  Though I suspect that if there was any uncertainty in a person's mind how to vote and "party loyalty" and "loyalty to the president" were being pushed on them, then my sense is that they weren't as strong arguments as might have been otherwise...

Important and terrific as it was that the horrific TrumpCare bill didn't pass, it's critical to always keep in mind that it shouldn't have come this close.  Forgetting even the damage that this bill would have done, to have almost passed a bill that wouldn't impact one-sixth of the U.S. economy and which pretty much no one knew what was even it is a shameful, reprehensible way for elected officials to act, whatever the bill was about.  And it seems to have probably been done not because of the merits of the bill -- again, most senators didn't even know what was in the bill until just before, and even once they knew, hardly time to study it -- but rather out of spite against Barack Obama because he...well, who knows?, because he was Barack Obama.  Perhaps being different is enough.  Being different seems to be a scary thing in the very conservative Republican Party.

Did the bill fail just because John McCain came down with a horrible, life-threatening diagnosis the week before and he faced mortality and the consequences of healthcare and voted "No"?  Is that what saved healthcare of tens of millions of people?  And saved the lives of unknown many?  Would he have voted "No" anyway?  Unless John McCain explains the answer, we don't know.  All we know is that it came down to one vote, and that may well have been the vote.

It seems that this ill-conceived action of pushing TrumpCare may well backfire profoundly on the Republican Party. On the one hand, the base will be furious that the party couldn't repeal that healthcare bill by the black guy, despite controlling the White House, Senate and House, after seven years of promising.  And on the other hand, the 83% of the rest of the country who hated the TrumpCare bill will hate that the Republican Party tried to pass it and came within a vote of doing so.

And I suspect that the GOP is still going to keep trying to pass it again, in same harmful form, for soul-crushing reasons known only to them.

But at least for now, they lost.  And all 46 Democrats, along with both Independents, and three Republicans were responsible, 49-51.

The Tweetstorm awaits.  Followed by the next Anthony Scaramucci meltdown.