Photo by Andy Feliciotti, Unsplash
Photo by Andy Feliciotti, Unsplash
People are tired of paying everything they’ve got to The Man and watching him get on his Gulfstream and fly off to the Bahamas to count his Ponzi-gotten crypto while he pays a tax rate lower than a substitute teacher.
Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV
Do not pass “Go.” Do not collect $200. Take your anger over the result of this shutdown directly to November, 2026, when we’re going to kick their asses and take back the House and Senate both.
Republicans, following the instructions of Donald Trump as they always do, allowed Democrats to make the fight over financing the government about one issue: Health care subsidies for Affordable Care Act. Trump thought, oh, they want to hold out for a big Obamacare giveaway? Let them. People hate Obamacare!
The people he knows, maybe, but not even all of them. Fifty fucking percent of Republicans favor extending the ACA health care subsidies, according to a KFF poll take during the middle of the shutdown. Democrats? 94 percent, natch. Do you think we might need some votes from independents to win next November? 76 percent of them want the ACA extensions.
With RFK Jr. defunding the CDC, cancelling vaccine research, and promoting cod liver oil to “cure” measles, we own the health care issue. Refusing to vote to reopen the government unless the ACA subsidies are extended is maybe the single most popular thing Democrats have done since…jeez, I don’t even know when. It was smart to begin with, it was smart yesterday, and thanks to blinkered Republican small-minded shitweasal idiocy, it will be popular when they vote against the subsidies in December, it will be popular at the time the same fight comes up in January when we go through this whole charade again, and it will be even more popular by next November after Trump has spent the better part of a year screeching that he wants to kill Obamacare altogether.
Senate Republicans will line up like penguins and vote down the subsidies in December, and the House won’t even bother to hold a vote. By that time millions will have received notices of what their new health insurance bills will be. They will be very, very unhappy consumers of what Republicans are selling to them.
Health care is the one issue that every American has a stake in. Well, not every American. Bezos and Zuckerberg and other trillionaires will have their “concierge” care on their private hospital floors and even on their yachts, so they don’t give a shit. But even ordinary run of the mill millionaires could have an entire lifetime’s worth of savings and current income wiped out if what Republicans want to do with health insurance comes to pass, and they know it.
It’s a fucking gift, is what this shutdown has been. We own the health insurance issue thanks to Barack Obama and every Democrat before him and after him, and you would think that Republicans would take a look at these polls and the way that health care is working for us, and they’d try to find a way in, but noooooo.
Click here to read the rest of this article.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.
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