McCain’s Odd Definition of ‘Leading the Fight to Stop Obamacare’

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National Review

McCain’s Odd Definition of ‘Leading the Fight to Stop Obamacare’

by JIM GERAGHTY July 28, 2017 9:32 AM From the last Morning Jolt of the week:

Obamacare is failing Arizonans. First, a massive rate hike more than twice the national average. Then, America’s largest health insurer abandoned Arizona’s failing Obamacare exchange. That’s devastating – especially to rural counties. Congresswoman Ann Kirkpatrick bragged about her Obamacare vote, saying “it’s also the one I’m most proud about..” While Kirkpatrick’s “proud” of putting us at risk, John McCain is leading the fight to stop Obamacare.

 “John McCain is leading the fight to stop Obamacare.” Plenty of other McCain ads and campaign events and messaging pointed to stopping Obamacare as a big reason, perhaps the biggest reason, Arizonans needed to return him to the Senate.

Then, last night, push came to shove. The options were clear: vote for “skinny repeal” and get that version of the repeal bill to conference committee with the House of Representatives, where negotiators from the House and Senate could revise the bill further, or vote it down and effectively end the process, as no version of repeal legislation could reach 50 votes.

McCain made his choice:       ( And think he was our Standard Bearer at one time )

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7/28/2017

Quick Hits: Skinny Repeal Was Not Repeal; Scaramucci Is Insane

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:24 am

Do I blame John McCain, Lisa Murkowski, and Susan Collins for killing ObamaCare repeal? Why, sure I do! But not for last night’s vote. Rather, for their disgraceful vote against the same repeal bill they voted for in 2015 (with the exception of Collins). Which means I also blame the other people responsible, whom I have already named: Lamar Alexander, Rob Portman, Shelley Moore Capito, and Dean Heller.

I will never forgive them. They are dead to me. And I will work to defeat Heller, who is the next one up for re-election, in the primaries.

But skinny repeal was crap and deserved to go down. Last night’s vote was not the death knell. That already happened a couple of days ago. (And don’t talk to me about just sending a bill to conference. If they can’t agree amongst themselves, how is going to conference going to fix anything?)

Meanwhile, I see some people trying to blame Trump for this. Nah. I don’t see it. He would have signed anything. This is squarely on the shoulders of the turncoats who switched their votes.

Meanwhile, how about that batsh!t insane Scaramucci guy? Ryan Lizza has a piece in the New Yorker that Scaramucci has functionally admitted is accurate, by saying he made a mistake trusting a reporter. The piece makes for delightful reading from start to finish.     http://patterico.com/2017/07/28/quick-hits-skinny-repeal-was-not-repeal-scaramucci-is-insane/ 

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The Maverick shoots down any chance of Obamacare repeal

Posted by William A. Jacobson    July 28, 2017 at 8:30am

Time to burn the Republican Party down, or a 2010-style Tea Party insurrection?

Overnight the Senate failed to pass a so-called “skinny” repeal of Obamacare, when three Republican Senators (Collins, Murkowski and McCain) voted against the measure.

Whether the “skinny” repeal was an actual repeal was doubtful. As unveiled late last night, it removed the mandate, the medical device tax, and defunded Planned Parenthood, but it was something of a charade. Several Senators voted for it only after Paul Ryan gave some assurance that the Senate bill could be subject to a conference with the House, and would not be passed by the House as is.

But passing the “skinny” repeal kept hope alive that there might emerge some meaningful form of Obamacare repeal. The defeat of the bill killed any form of Obamacare repeal for the foreseeable future.

(more…)                        

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Repeal Fails

Editor / Ricochet Editors' Desk / July 28, 2017 / 5 COMMENTS

 The Republicans have failed once more to keep their long-made promise to repeal Obamacare.

 Updated 3:10 a.m. | In a dramatic early Friday morning vote, the Senate voted down the Republican effort to overhaul the U.S. health insurance system, 49-51, with GOP Sen. John McCain of Arizona’s dramatic “no” — to gasps in the chamber — providing the key vote to send the bill to defeat. Lobbying from top GOP leaders, McCain’s colleague from Arizona Jeff Flake, Vice President Mike Pence and a swath of Republicans were not enough to sway McCain. Pence himself spent more than 20 minutes trying to get McCain to change his mind.GOP Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine were expected to vote “no,” but Republicans were confident shortly before the vote they could get to a 50-50 tie, and bring in Pence to break it. Before he cast his “no” vote, McCain had gathered with a sizable group of jovial Democrats on the other side of the Senate chamber. He returned to the Republican side, walking right past Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.      

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It Is Time to Move On

By Erick Erickson  |  July 28, 2017, 09:30am 

They exposed themselves. For seven years, Republicans in the Senate have promised to repeal Obamacare if we gave them the House, the Senate, and the White House. They structured legislation to ensure it could not be filibustered. And they themselves could not deliver the necessary votes.

In the end, they offered up a skinny repeal that did not repeal Obamacare and would have necessitated a bailout of Obamacare within six months — something it is obvious enough Republicans would have been glad to do with Democrat assistance.

We should remember that this is the logical outcome of Mitch McConnell repeatedly siding with liberal and moderate Republicans. It was Senator McConnell who sided with Lisa Murkowski after she left the GOP. McConnell aligned the NRSC against the Republican candidate against Murkowski. It was McConnell who turned the NRSC into an incumbent protection service that tried to even get Charlie Crist elected as a Republican.      http://theresurgent.com/it-is-time-to-move-on/   

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What a FAILED ‘Skinny Repeal’ means to the public

By Herman Cain

Many of us were not big fans of “skinny repeal” to begin with, but at least it was a step in the right direction. Forty-Nine Republicans in the Senate reluctantly agreed with that line of thinking. Sadly, Senators Murkowski, Collins and McCain (consummate RINO’s all) decided to protect Obama’s ‘signature legislation’, along with forty-eight Democrats.        

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After the Stab in the Back, McStains Twists the Knife; Votes No on "Skinny" Repeal

  

 

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PDT ReacTweet: "3 Republicans and 48 Democats Let the American People Down"   

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Hollywood celebs hail John McCain as ‘hero’ for voting no on Obamacare repeal

John McCain, Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins may have alienated conservative GOP primary voters with their defections on the so-called skinny-repeal of Obamacare, but the three Republican moderate senators are finding themselves on the receiving end of adulation from liberal Hollywood celebrities, according to Variety.
The Hollywood trade newspaper sampled tweets from a diverse array of players in the industry from director Rob Reiner to pop star Cher to former “House of Cards” screenwriter Beau Willimon.

“An act of heroism,” Mr. Willimon wrote in a tweet, which included video of “The moment @SenJohnMcCain voted “No” on #SkinnyRepeal.”
“@LisaMurkowski & @SenatorCollins are also heroes tonight,” he added.

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John McCain, a Bright Star in His Own Mind, Saves Obamacare

JeffHawkins /  July 28, 2017 / 21 COMMENTS

 

I wouldn’t call myself a John McCain completist in terms of knowing every detail concerning his career as a politician, but in my time following him he has always had two lingering issues that bothered me. The first is his seeming optimistic fantasy that the Senate is an upper class, more polished chamber of well-intentioned enlightened men and women who will rigorously debate issues and eventually come to a compromise for the betterment of humanity. This majestic chamber built out of refinement, where officials give impassioned grandstanding speeches, a place where our differences were only philosophical but never personal, as if politics was your third grade civics class’s version of the Continental Congress. The second, be it from a place of neediness, a contrarian streak, or an eye to personal legacy is his confounding need to make the story about him, usually as the hero of the story. He is always going renegade against conservative principles in the name of compromise while letting you know in no uncertain terms that the same compromise was all because of the efforts of John McCain.                 https://ricochet.com/445008/john-mccain-bright-star-mind-saves-obamacare/     

 

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Once a RINO, Always a RINO – McCain Sinks Obamacare Repeal

By Chip McLean

They say a leopard never changes his spots, and with that being a given, you could also say that a RINO never loses his horn…

John McCain has made a career out of cultivating an image of being a “maverick”, or at least that’s what the mainstream media likes to call him. To anyone on the right, he’s nothing more than an egotistical blowhard who loves being a thorn in the side of his own party.               

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The Republican ObamaCare Crack Up

The party had a historic chance to act in the public interest. It failed.

By 

The Editorial Board

July 28, 2017 6:21 p.m. ET

798 COMMENTS

After promising Americans for seven years that it would fix the Affordable Care Act, the Republican Party failed. This is a historic debacle that will echo politically for years.

A divided GOP Senate could not muster a majority even for a simple bill repealing the individual and employer mandates they had long opposed. Nor were they able to repeal the medical-device tax that some 70 Senators had gone on record wanting to repeal in previous Congresses.

The so-called skinny bill that failed in the Senate would have gone to a conference with the House, which had signaled its willingness to work out a compromise. That arduous process is the way the American legislative system works. A strong majority of the GOP caucuses on both chambers supported the effort to repeal and replace ObamaCare, but that was undone by an intransigent and petulant minority.

Where to begin in comprehending John McCain’s last-minute defection? Early Friday morning Senator McCain turned his thumb down on the bill, which doomed this long effort. Explaining that vote,          https://t.co/tr7SylnIPq 

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Paul LePage Op-Ed: Maine’s Senators ‘Let Us Down’

State governor blasts Sens. Susan Collins and Angus King as 'out of touch' and 'downright dangerous'

by Kathryn Blackhurst | Updated 02 Aug 2017 at 11:07 AM

Republican Maine Gov. Paul LePage penned a blistering rebuke of his state’s U.S. senators Tuesday evening for their refusal to vote in favor of the GOP Senate leadership’s latest effort to repeal and replace Obamacare last week, calling them “out of touch” and “dangerous.”

In a Wall Street Journal op-ed entitled “Maine’s Two Senators Let Us Down,” LePage struck a strikingly different tone from many of the country’s other governors when he lashed out at Sen. Angus King, an independent, and Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican, for their repeated refusals to support legislation seeking to eliminate or reduce the Affordable Care Act’s regulations and mandates.

Accusing Collins and King of choosing “to preserve the status quo while pushing an irresponsible Medicaid expansion here in Maine,” LePage issued a withering indictment of the Maine senators who are “out of touch” with their constituents’ needs.      http://www.lifezette.com/polizette/lepage-op-ed-maines-senators-let-us/