After both Trump and Ryan had promised a vote on the Republican bill on Friday, it was pulled from the floor, in a "humiliating" loss, just minutes before voting was to begin, as Republicans failed to muster the needed votes for passage. Trump blamed Democrats for his failure to deliver on his own long-held promise to immediately replace ObamaCare with something that is cheaper and provides better coverage for more people. (The GOP bill he had hoped to see pass would have resulted in premiums rising and some 24 million Americans losing coverage over the next 10 years, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.)
We're joined today by Jacki Schechner who served as the National Communications Director for Health Care for America Now, the nation's largest health care reform campaign, during the Democrats' 2009 and 2010 passage of Obama's landmark health care insurance reform bill.
"I'm not gloating, because I wouldn't put it past the Republicans to come up with some alternate shady plan, but I do feel like we got a little stay of execution today, and that part feels good," Schechner tells me. We discuss, among many other things, the politics of the remarkable GOP failure, Trump's press avail afterward, why they couldn't pull it off, some of their many years-long lies about ObamaCare and some of the very real problems that still need to be fixed in the Affordable Care Act.
In response to Trump's assertion that there is nothing to be done for health care now other than wait for ObamaCare to, in his word, "explode", Schechner notes: "I think it's incredibly traitorous for the President of the United States to say 'well, all we can do now is just wait for stuff to fail'. I mean, aren't you supposed to work for the benefit of the country?" She also argues that Trump had simply no clue how health insurance actually works, or the difficult politics behind reform. "He doesn't really care how the sausage is made, he just wants to eat sausage."
But the week wasn't entirely a disaster for Republicans. Just mostly. In the Senate on Thursday, the GOP won passage of a bill set to allow Internet Service Providers to sell your online behavior and browsing habits to commercial advertisers. And, today, Trump officially gave White House approval for TransCanada's controversial KeystoneXL pipeline, set to ship dirty tar sands oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico for export — maybe. But, as the President seems to have learned today, even that may not go as smoothly for him as he thinks.
Finally, Desi Doyen joins us with the latest Green News Report on Trump's ill-informed push to "bring back coal", his hopes of dashing Obama's climate policies, and how the world is moving towards reducing carbon emissions whether he likes it or not.
You can find Brad's previous editions here. And tune in to radio Sputnik three hours a day, five days a week, at 5 pm GMT.
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