Remember: they’re doing this for you.

Republicans struggle with a reputation for being heartless.  Hard rep to avoid, what with their work on limiting unemployment, cutting aid to the poor, fast-tracking foreclosures, rewarding and protecting shady financiers, and especially, today’s vote throwing Kimmel’s kid out of the neonatal ICU.

So I can see why people gravitate to that reputation, but I don’t think it’s deserved.  I certainly don’t think it’s true for the vast majority of actual Republican voters.  The people I know who vote Republican are trying to be fair.  I don’t even think the current Republican representatives in the House and Senate are entirely heartless, for all of their pretense to be.

I do wonder if they’re headless, though.

I appreciate the machinations – the political theater – of the “Repeal Obamacare!!!” sideshow.  Sure, the House just voted to doom tens of millions of Americans to a new level of despair, focusing the worst harm on the poorest and powerless, while cheapening everyone else’s life a little.  (I say almost, because the rich, of course, won’t suffer, and Congress wrote the repeal law so that they are specifically exempted, and get to keep full Obamacare.)

But I’m pretty sure Republicans only gutted healthcare on the assumption the Senate Democrats will derail their vote. How sweet; they want President Obama back!  Anyway, they get to hold another pretend vote, so they can appease the wingnut end of their ‘base’, without actually doing evil.

“And we’d have gotten away with it, if it wasn’t for those darn kids.”

So I say screw it: let them win.  Vote in the Senate, but promise not to filibuster the bill provided Republicans change the bill so that all the changes take effect now.  None of this “Delay the ugliest effects until after the midterms” nonsense.  Uh-uh.  you want the bill, you wrote the bill, you get it all.

Let the Republicans explain how the entire Republican party (a 100% party-line vote) decided that leaving poor people starving themselves to pay for medicine for their kids was somehow the morally correct answer.  Hey, y’all! Kiss Medicaid and special education goodbye, and say hello to lifetime caps and endless new exclusions.  Nope!  No more healthcare for you!

All right, all right; maybe not.  I don’t want to win that badly.  And I don’t want Republicans to lose.  That’s not what I’m shooting for.

I want the Republican Party to regain who they were.  The actual Republicans I know aren’t the pinched and sour ideologues I see spouting lies in the House and Senate.  The people I know personally are ordinary people.  My neighbors.  Many of them are nicer than me (admittedly, not a high bar to pass). We disagree and bounce off each other, but in the end, we’re still neighbors.  Citizens.  Countrymen.

Americans.

We hang together, by and large.  My neighbors don’t lust for my death, and they don’t cast aside their morals just to reap my destruction.

(I don’t think.  Although maybe I should wait and see how that ‘speed bump’ initiative works out….  No, no; pretty sure they don’t.)