So Graham/Cassidy is dead. Hooray! I will have health insurance next year.
But I wanna take a moment to get grounded about the implications of this saga having ever happened at all. Because Graham/Cassidy appears to have largely been performance art, done in service to the Republican base and the donor class:
WASHINGTON — As more than 40 subdued Republican senators lunched on Chick-fil-A at a closed-door session last week, Senator Cory Gardner of Colorado painted a dire picture for his colleagues. Campaign fund-raising was drying up, he said, because of widespread disappointment among donors over the inability of the Republican Senate to repeal the Affordable Care Act or do much of anything else.
Mr. Gardner is in charge of his party’s midterm re-election push, and he warned that donors of all stripes were refusing to contribute another penny until the struggling majority produced some concrete results.
“Donors are furious,” one person knowledgeable about the private meeting quoted Mr. Gardner as saying. “We haven’t kept our promise.”
It would be more pathetic... if it weren’t so vile and life-threatening to millions of people.
I know that everything is happening at once, but I wanted to take a moment to specifically de-normalize what has happened in the last two weeks.
It is not normal for elected representatives to respond to a very public legislative failure of a deadly and catastrophic bill by making an even more destructive attempt that would by reasonable measures be even less popular… and then doing that even moreso all over again.
It is not normal for politicians to attempt to pass ‘reform’ that fundamentally screws up one-sixth of the country’s economy in two weeks, while repeatedly making major changes to that reform in an attempt to stay a moving target.
*hat tip to Silverhuntress: It is not normal for a senator to propose a bill that unavoidably undermines his own constituents to a degree that the Secretary of the Department of Health of his own state writes him a letter about how uniquely threatening his bill would be for the people he claims to be representing in Congress.
It is pretty normal for money and power to be a major influence on a country’s politics - but it is not normal, and is very not-good, that Republican congresspeople were publicly making everything up and going through this violent departure from legislative and political norms for the sake of making fools of themselves to the pleasure of their donors.
It is not normal to have this happen under a president whose incompetence and grave and dire personal issues mean that he is turning in towards himself to the exclusion of his political party and his responsibilities as president of the country.
This is very not normal.
And it’s generally a good idea for you to lose your shit about it sometimes.