What Went Down On Health Care This Week

Weeks ago, the conventional wisdom had been that the GOP did not want to drag out its work on health care reform. When the Senate took up health care reform in late June, for instance, there was talk that Paul Ryan would keep the House in session to pass whatever bill emerged from the Senate’s deliberations before July 4. The goal was to rip off the Band-Aid, so to speak, and move on to other items on the GOP agenda. Now, the talk is instead that the Senate just needs to pass a bill, any bill, to get to conference, meaning that the goalposts have moved substantially. But why would the Senate and House’s joint negotiators be able to thread a needle that has eluded Mitch McConnell for the past few months? It’s certainly possible that proximity to final passage will give the GOP momentum — and that once key members have cast a vote to repeal Obamacare, they’ll want to see the policy through to enactment. But it’s not a sure thing. Negotiations on the repeal efforts have been described as a Rubik’s Cube or a whack-a-mole game, where any one solution generates a new problem elsewhere. That dynamic is unlikely to get any easier during a negotiation across chambers. The GOP — both its leadership and key swing votes — has a strong incentive to bring these repeal efforts to a close. The fact that they are now talking about punting to a conference committee indicates both how committed they are to repeal and how hard coalescing around any specific proposal has become.

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.