.
All of these claims are absurd in their own way, but they add up to a big bundle of unified nonsense. Yet McConnell is now laying waste to this entire story-line. McConnell’s argument to fellow Republicans — that failure means talks with Democrats over the ACA’s future — concedes a number of points. It concedes that, despite Trump’s claim of a desire for talks with Democrats, Republicans
cannot work with Democrats, as long as Republicans remain wedded to their own priorities — that there is simply no bipartisan consensus possible, as long as Republicans are hellbent on cutting health spending on poor people by hundreds of billions of dollars to finance an enormous tax cut for the rich. After all, McConnell is arguing that
passing a bill that does this, on a purely partisan basis, is the only way to avert any need to dilute the GOP’s devotion to those priorities.
McConnell’s argument to Republicans also concedes that the ACA exchanges do not
haveto continue struggling; lawmakers can act to prevent this. And it concedes that Republicans will not
want that to happen and will feel pressure to do something about it (presumably because, as
a recent Kaiser poll suggested, they risk taking the blame for it). McConnell is basically conceding that Republicans can’t just let the ACA implode, as Trump seems to believe.
