Supreme hackery
by digby
I think Scott Lemieux’s example of conservative movement hackery and scamming is right on point:
Let’s consider another of Scalia’s talk radio soundbites: “This is not the most elegantly drafted statute. It was it was pushed through on expedited procedures and didn’t have the kind of consideration by a conference committee, for example, that that statutes usually do.”
The “expedited procedures” claim is just erroneous; both the Senate and then the House passed the ACA using ordinary procedures, and then there was a set of amendments passed through reconciliation. The implicit claim that the ACA was passed in unseemly haste is a joke to anyone who actually remembers the interminable process. It is true that the bill did not have the usual benefit of being harmonized through a conference committee. But the reason that this didn’t happen is that the Republican minority in the Senate would not have permitted a vote on a new bill.
It’s a neat scam: A Republican minority prevents Congress from functioning properly, and then their political allies on the Supreme Court use this as an excuse to willfully misread the resulting statute, with disastrous consequences for many people. When the same Supreme Court justice to then assert that congressional Republicans would never, ever dream of seeing large numbers of people go without health insurance it just completes the shameless hack cycle.
And let’s not forget the fact that the House Republicans have voted 56 times to kill or scale back Obamacare.
This is how the Republicans deal with being a congressional party. They use every lever of power they hold to obstruct absolutely everything and then blame the President for being unable to get anything done. Their only negotiating stance is to pass their agenda or nothing. And even then they’ll find reasons not to do it. If the Democrats manage to pass anything they then do whatever it takes to disrupt the implementation including running around to the states to persuade them to sign on to something (the federal exchanges) they have every intention of destroying. After which they will blame the resulting carnage and pain on the president and his party for failing to stop them.
As Lemieux says, it’s a neat scam. And it fits right in with the conservative mind. This what they love to do more than anything: screw with other people. It’s enjoyable in a way that tax cuts for the rich never will be.
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