What Went Down On Health Care This Week

I’m multitasking or somesuch, watching CNN on TV, the U.S. Senate’s online feed on my computer and monitoring Twitter. At least among the people I follow on Twitter, which I acknowledge includes a lot of policy nerds, there’s a lot of chatter about what Trump is doing — particularly his new ban on transgender Americans serving in the military. But there’s also a lot of health care in my Twitter feed. Obviously, the Senate online feed is about health care. But CNN is full of Trump. The banner as of this writing is “WHITE HOUSE: TRUMP ‘VERY CLEAR’ ABOUT FEELINGS ABOUT SESSIONS.” I will leave it to others if they want to criticize CNN’s coverage decisions. (I think the Trump-Sessions-Russia dynamic is a big story, as is the health care bill vote, as is the transgender policy, and all deserve extensive coverage.) What I think this reflects is how Trump defines or redefines “news.” Think of the first three letters in the word “news.” It is highly unusual for the president to go on a public campaign trashing the attorney general. A messy congressional process on health care is not that unusual; it happened in 1993 and 1994 and again in 2009 and 2010. This bizarre health care process would have been THE STORY at almost any other time, as long as the U.S. was not at war. But Trump is doing so much — and so much that is kind of weird at times and alarming at others — that he even takes attention away from a hugely important health care policy bill that will affect millions.

Now that we’ve gotten definitions out of the way, let’s get serious: This is not the first time a sitting congressman has singled out female GOP senators this week. In today’s world, where half of all female homicide victims are killed by intimate partners, these statements, however tongue-in-cheek, seem inappropriate at best.

According to Matthew Cooper of MSNBC, Georgia Rep. Buddy Carter just said someone ought to “snatch a knot” in Lisa Murkowski’s (or perhaps the Senate in general’s?) ass: No one in the FiveThirtyEight newsroom was familiar with that particular phrase. But according to an Urban Dictionary post from 2005, it’s a real thing. The site’s definition:

To hit someone, usually used in a threat of punishment or retribution. A knot is generally snatched in one’s ass, though variants include the neck and the head.

[Editor’s Note: Health care expert and former rural Virginian Anna Maria Barry-Jester clarifies that she was in fact familiar with this phrase.]