I went over to RedState.com today for a little schadenfreude reading, and I found a doozy. Headline: “GOP Lawmaker: Previous ObamaCare Repeal Votes Were A Fraud” (remember, this is a conservative website!).
The basis for the article is this tweet, from TalkingPointsMemo’s reporting on a statement by GOP Rep Joe Barton (R-TX) as he was leaving the conference meeting:
Text in image:
Reporters asked why, after Republicans held dozens of nearly-unanimous votes to repeal ObamaCare under President Obama, they were getting cold feet now that they control the levers of power.
“Sometimes you’re playing Fantasy Football and sometimes you’re in the real game,” he admitted. “We knew the President, if we could get a repeal bill to his desk, it would almost certainly be vetoed. This time we knew if it got to the President’s desk it would be signed.”
That’s right, as we must never let Americans forget that, contrary to Ryan’s protestations that this failure reflects “growing pains” of a brand-spanking-new majority party, they’ve had the majority in the House since 2011 and in both houses since 2015. The House has successfully voted, nearly unanimously (within their caucus), to repeal Obamacare no less than 30 times (at least 6 times in its entirety, and others in more piecemeal ways). But of course that was when it was only for show, with the cover that Obama’s veto would save them from facing sick and dying de-insured constituents. In other words, those votes were all frauds, something that, amazingly, did not escape RedState’s notice.
RedState called Barton’s statement “about as blatant an admission of political fraud as you are ever likely to see,” and then unleashed a stream of descriptive nouns: “Frauds. Charlatans. Liars.”
It's offensive that Barton would call a vote to repeal ACA a game, even if a “real game” instead of a pure fantasy one. Only someone with guaranteed fantastic coverage for life and little capacity for empathy could say that.
RedState wraps up their post with this video of one of Trump’s many promises that replacing Obamacare with something “amazing” would be “so easy”:
Enjoy the schadenfreude, friends. Tonight may be the first time I’ll be able to rest well since at least November, worrying a little less that my son’s congenital health issue will again preclude us from getting insurance, as it did prior to ACA. #ThanksObama, seriously.