Uh huh. Sexism! I don’t believe this. She’s got to be kidding.
She sets herself up as a hero, a Reasonable, Compassionate Conservative, then stabs us all in the back, over the strenuous objections of her own constituents, then whines about SEXISM? OMFG.
Listen Susan Collins: if you’d presented yourself as a typical, greedy, stupid, grasping, thoughtless and hypocritical Republican like Orrin Hatch we’d never have noticed you in the first place. You wouldn’t have been a Hero Of The Republic, a last hope, a finger in the dike.
But no. You and your cohort Murkowsky, Corker, Flake, McCain and that WORM Lindsay Graham allowed us to believe that a few noble Romans stood between us and complete disaster and YOU FAILED.
Yes. You caved bigly when the stakes were highest, when you KNEW there were provisions in that bill allowing the desecration of the environment, attacks on women’s rights, and crippling Obamacare which you’d seem to defend so there is NO EXCUSE for pretending you aren’t harming us now. Yes harm. This tax bill is an assault on the American people and many of us will die prematurely, become homeless and sick, and the environment will suffer, and the rich will get richer, and corporations will pad their already overflowing bank accounts and build more factories in China or simply go to 100% robots which we’re already seeing here in the US. All this nonsense about trade when the real problem is automation but of course nobody talks about THAT.
Meanwhile, wages have not risen in real terms since the 1970’s, even as the costs of housing and health care soar through the roof; and the rich are so obscenely wealthy and powerful they’ve bought the government and NOTHING protects the people from their ravages now — so what do you do? You stab the people in the heart. In the heart!
Then you whine about SEXISM?????
Give me a break.
More from Jennifer Rubin, equally disgusted,
No, Collins is unique. She is the only senator who staked her continued presence in the Senate (forgoing a run for governor) on bridging the divide between the parties and who vowed to protect the Obamacare exchanges. What she got was a promise from Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) to pass two partial offsets that would mitigate some of the harm done by repeal of the individual mandate. She also at the time stated that she’d have a vote on those bills in hand before voting for the tax bill. She doesn’t have that promised vote and likely won’t get the bills through the House (which objects to anything shoring up Obamacare). Collins nevertheless will vote for a bill that included repeal of the individual mandate without receiving any offset. Her vote in that regard is no different from that of other Republicans who vowed to rip up Obamacare root and branch. Her constituents and local media are understandably very upset with her.
She might not like the characterization that she was “duped,” but there is no other way to describe the “deal” she made to secure her vote on a bill that does harm to many of her constituents, perhaps pricing them out of the individual insurance market.
Collins wants praise for pressing for unrelated tax changes (e.g. deductibility of state and local property taxes up to $10,000) that she thinks helps her constituents. Those changes have been noted in most stories concerning her vote but do not in any way mitigate the accurate charge that in the tax bill she is voting to inflict damage on the exchanges that she vigorously fought against in the Obamacare bill. It’s for this reason that some have concluded she was “duped.” (She has not helped her cause by falsely citing economists for the proposition that tax cuts would pay for themselves or for incorrectly claiming that the two health-care bills would more than make up for repeal of the individual mandate.)
Listen, if it makes her feel any better, Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) has been getting plenty of criticism, too, for reversing himself on the bill. If Collins is upset by her fall from grace and loss of the applause she received for defense of the Obamacare exchanges, she has no one but herself to blame.
www.washingtonpost.com/…