Today’s word is schadenfreude: “taking pleasure from another’s misfortune.”
I’m absolutely delighted to see how terrible the Republican party is at governing. It validates most of my prejudices, which probably is bad for me, but I find myself giggling randomly.
Look at TrumpRyanCare. After a couple of part-time week’s work, they gave up, lamenting that it was much harder than they thought.Imagine that! An industry that’s a sixth of our economy, provided by a swarm of small and large providers, broken across all fifty states, each with different regulations and markets split between federal, state, business and inidividuals, all that was complex? Who knew?
Look, I suck at work estimates, too. It’s harder than it looks. But really, if it took the last guy six months of intensive work to finish, even a hack would give themselves more than a couple of weeks. Ryan managed to punt.
The myth of Ryan as a Big Thinker? The hand-wave TrumpRyanCare bill was an empty exercise. Where were all those ideas he’s been promising for the past six years? We got sixty-something pages, and with six pages detailing how to ease the 4 future lottery winners off Medicaid, leaving around 54 pages to describe the plan for the other 357,999,996 of us.
They couldn’t just crib something from the Heritage Foundation?
Ryan as legislative giant? He couldn’t find a constituency for an ACA repeal bill that Republicans have passed over 60 times before now. That’s a new level of incompetence.
Trump as a world-class negotiator? Rather than work to the middle, Trump spent what little time he did work trying to woo Tea Party zealots by making the unpopularly conservative bill even more conservative. To appease people who hate Trump. These are Freedom Caucus true believers who know their only risk is if they ever vote ‘yes’. Didn’t Ryan mention that part to Trump? Did Trump not watch any of the news coverage of the angry town hall meetings?
Trump as a master dealmaker? Please! After two weeks of half-hearted work, he got bored and let Bannen try to force a roll-call vote. It would have been suicide for anyone stupid enough to show up. Even if they liked him — which they don’t — Trump gave House Republicans no choice but to bail. The only reason I’m not suggesting Trump engineered his own failure is because I doubt he has that kind of guile.
Trump as party leader? He threatened the Freedom Caucus with primary challenges. They have safe, gerrymandered districts.
They don’t care. Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) said “Most people don’t take well to being bullied. It’s constructive in fifth grade… [but] that’s not how our government works.”
So he threatened the people he’ll need to pass any partisan, brain-dead, numb-nut bills he’ll propose in the future. (Which is the only kind Trump proposes.) That’s carefully planning in action!
Then he appealed to Democrats. Like that was going to work. Paul Ryan was so aghast, he completely forgot all the times that he’d promised to work across the aisle, too.
And now we have Bob Corker (R-Tenn) — the Republican Senate Foreign Relations chair — tweeting:
We have come a long way in our country when the speaker of one party urges a president NOT to work with the other party to solve a problem.
–Senator Bob Corker @SenBobCorker, 5:55 AM, 30 Mar. 2017.
Really, they just can’t do it. It’s just painful to watch, but you can’t look away, either, as they twist in the wind.
So, yeah, cringe worthy, but I’m kind of enjoying myself.
