OPINION:
If the Republicans in the U.S. Senate were a baseball team, they would be the 1962 New York Mets. The Mets won only 40 games that summer, losing 120, the most inept performance since 1899 when a team called the Cleveland Spiders also won only 40 games. As the Mets stumbled to the end of the disastrous season, their manager, Casey Stengel, cried out in desperate frustration: “Can’t anybody here play this game?”
Indeed, no one could, and the Republican senators can’t play their game, either.
Their manager, Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, threw up his hands Tuesday in Stengel-like frustration, after his last-ditch Hail Mary long-ball stratagem of repealing Obamacare without replacing it, failed, just as an earlier attempt failed to repeal and replace with a reasonable substitute.
These are the worthies who amused themselves over the eight Obama years by voting to repeal, with many brave and heroic speeches, when they had no prospect of repealing because the Democrats controlled the Senate and Republican boasts and votes were irrelevant. This enabled them to view with alarm knowing they would never have to come up with something to which they could point with pride. Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, one of the three Republican senators who went over the hill Tuesday to vote against Mr. McConnell and their party, gleefully boasted, in so many words, “I told you so.”
“I said back in January that if we are going to do repeal then there has to be replace,” she said. “There is enough chaos and uncertainty already.” So she, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine and Sen. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia added a little more chaos and uncertainty, just for good measure.
President Trump, taking unaccustomed care not to fire broadsides at anyone in his party, said Obamacare must collapse, as it is showing every sign of doing, before it can be replaced. “As I have always said,” he tweeted, “let Obamacare fail and then come together and do a great healthcare plan. Stay tuned!” (And this time only one exclamation point.)
“We were let down by all of the Democrats and a few Republicans. Most Republicans were loyal, terrific & worked real hard.” Reprising MacArthur on leaving Corregidor as it was about to fall to the Japanese in 1942, the president added: “We will return!”
Nobody likes Obamacare, and Americans are fleeing the failing scheme by the thousands, many insurance companies are leaving the field and those remaining are doubling premiums, up by a hundred percent in some places with the expectation that premiums will rise again next year. The Republican alternatives, American Health Care Act in the House and the Better Care Reconciliation Act in the Senate, were regarded as not much better, but were good enough that a well-disciplined Republican majority would have passed something, understanding that the administration needed a victory to establish the momentum that would have enabled other things, such as a tax cut. The Democrats are determined to smash that, too.
Mr. Trump thinks that when Obamacare collapses into smoking ruins the Democrats will “own it,” and be blamed for the scheme they enacted without a single Republican vote. But if he really thinks that he should put on his shock absorbers for another jolt. Backed by a compliant combine of the big newspapers and the major television networks, the Democrats will charge ahead with the narrative that “Obamacare needed a few tweaks to make it work, but the president and the Republicans wouldn’t do it because they’re heartless and like watching the suffering of the poor, the helpless, the homeless and the wretched refuse on the shore, yearning to breathe free.” And so forth and so on. The Republicans will get the blame, and wonder how it happened.
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