We begin today’s roundup with The New York Times and its editorial on yesterday’s votes in the Senate:
The majority leader, Mitch McConnell, browbeat and cajoled 50 members of his caucus to vote to begin a debate on health care without even telling the country which of several competing bills he wanted to pass. Vice President Mike Pence provided the tiebreaking vote. The proposals vary in severity, but all of them would leave millions more people without health insurance and make medical care unaffordable for many low-income and middle-class families. It is clear that Mr. McConnell does not much care which of these proposals the Senate passes; for whatever reason — pride, White House pressure, sheer cussedness — he just wants to get a bill out of the Senate. It could then go into conference with the House, which passed its own terrible bill in May.
Here’s George Zornick’s analysis at The Nation:
The pure absurdity of this situation is largely by design. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell needs confusion to get an Obamacare repeal over the line: confusion about what’s being voted for, who is supporting what, and what the legislation will do to people. (The House of Representatives is already moving to gut the CBO and replace it with a small agency that will simply aggregate the findings of DC think tanks, many of which are funded by deeply ideological conservative interests.) McConnell also needs to rely on procedural radicalism—this level of chicanery and deceit has never been seen before in the Senate.
