It Sure Looks Like Paul Ryan Wants Ryancare To Fail - Michael Tomasky

It Sure Looks Like Paul Ryan Wants Ryancare To Fail

Caught between a repeal rock and a replace hard place, the Speaker sure looks like he wants to say he fought the good fight and lost, while passing off the blame.

MICHAEL TOMASKY

03.08.17 3:02 PM ET

So it seems clear—not just to me, but to most other journalists and health wonks I’ve communicated with over the last two days—that Paul Ryan has introduced a bill that he doesn’t want to pass.

This seems crazy on its face. Destroying Obama has been the core aim of conservatism for the better part of a decade. The Tea Party movement sprang to life opposing it, during those ferocious town halls of 2009. Congress voted who knows how many times to repeal it. Repeal was the one pledge every single Republican candidate made, from Donald Trump on down to poor Jim Gilmore. And I’m sure if you asked your average Limbaugh fan or InfoWars devotee “what’s the one thing the Republicans should do above all else?”, the answer would surely be repeal Obamacare.

And yet, Ryan and the House Republicans have put forward a bill that everyone has attacked from all sides, and astonishingly, they did so without laying the very basic groundwork you lay before putting something like this out there. The tip-off to me came Tuesday around noon, when Heritage Action, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation, issued a tweet condemning the bill. If Ryan didn’t even bother to grease this with Heritage, he’s just not being serious.

But you will ask me: How could he want it to fail? He’ll have millions of furious conservatives on his hands. He’ll look weak to your average voter. And most of all he’ll look weak to Trump and Steve Bannon, who are not big fans to begin with and are presumed to want him out of the way (he’s too “liberal” for Bannon, you see).

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