Republican Congressman Mark Sanford (R-SC) told an inconvenient truth that most of us knew from the beginning. Obamacare Repeal & Replace was always a fraud on the Republican constituency.
Alexandra Jaffe interviewed the Sanford for a piece on VICE where he made a rather great point that those attempting repeal must heed.
It’s like when I was in Congress in 1994, people talked about the Republican revolution. It was false advertising from the start. Our system is designed to guard against revolutions. It is an incremental process. You can’t have revolutionary change and have a system of checks and balances, the two are mutually exclusive. And so when they talk about ‘full repeal’ -that doesn’t fit with the nature of our political system, unless you were to get a bunch of Democrat votes on board, which wasn’t going to happen.
Full repeal was, in essence, a pipe dream from the very start. And the question is, to what degree could you counterbalance the bill and mitigate some of the parts that you didn’t like within the bill? And again I keep going back to – within the time constraints that we had. It ultimately is my opinion that the most that you’re going to get out of it, from a conservative viewpoint, is the MacArthur amendment. And I’m willing to make my peace with that.
Congressman Sanford also warned that Republicans could lose the House and the Senate. He said he has never seen the type of political energy now on display in the country.
Republicans control the entire government, all branches. They have been screaming for eight years that they had a better health care plan. Now that it is time to lay their cards on the table, it is clear that all they had was a plan to repeal Obamacare taxes. That would cause over 24 million Americans to lose their health insurance. Moreover, those with preexisting conditions would be left out in the cold.
It is clear that Republicans are great at intransigence and saber rattling. What they are unable to do is govern.