Was it Trump signing a law – in secret, away from the media – revoking an Obama-era rule that prevented the mentally ill from buying guns? How about the appointment of Scott Pruitt to ruthlessly gut the EPA and eliminate as many pesky environmental rules as possible, rules designed to keep water clean, air breathable and life generally less cancerous?
Nuclear saber-rattling with North Korea? Declaring climate change a hoax, unworthy of serious action? Hiring a democracy-hating neo-Nazi blogger as top presidential adviser? Ripping apart families by deporting innocent immigrants in the middle of the night? Rolling back numerous protections for women, LGBT, minorities? Working to empower the police and the NRA, pushing for re-privatization of prisons and harsher drug sentences?
The list of the ways Trump’s GOP is targeting your very life is staggering, and growing by the minute. But at the moment, they all seem to pale when compared to what might be the nastiest, most mean-spirited law ever passed by a GOP-controlled House in your lifetime: It’s the passage of TrumpCare, AKA the GOP’s heartless rollback of the ACA, replacing it with, well, a nasty, hypocritical grenade of unmitigated hate.
There is simply no other way to describe it. A bunch of wealthy, gloating white males who have free health insurance for life just voted to rip away affordable health coverage for millions of people, out of sheer spite, because the Orange Goblin needed a “win,” and because they all really loathe the smart black guy who rescued the country and made everyone’s lives better for eight solid years.
Did you hear? Upon TrumpCare’s (very narrow) passage, House Republicans laughed, they guffawed, they cheered their only partial “win” to date, even though it does nothing but hurt millions of people and actually kill many more by way of stripping essential coverage from the elderly and the poor, defunding Planned Parenthood, gutting Medicare and makes pre-existing conditions again something that can get you dead. Upside? It lines the coffers of the insurance industry and the wealthy.
Chaffetz is all smiles as he scoots back from a fully-insured surgery to repeal health coverage for millions. pic.twitter.com/XrM8DSQXO2
— Ben Marter (@BenMarter) May 4, 2017
Afterwards? They rolled in cases of Bud Light to toast the fact that they just gave a big, entitled middle finger to pretty much the entire country. The fact that no one in America wanted this rollback, that people actually love their current health insurance, that, despite a handful of easily fixable flaws, Obamacare has generally been a runaway success – not to mention how many states are trying to expand Medicaid, given its wild popularity, even as TrumpCare slashes $880 billion from it and imperils the lives of 14 million more people (4 million in California alone), all to give a needless tax break to the richest .02%? None of this matters in the least. They simply do not care.
Kids with heart defects and women with breast cancer lose their health insurance, while the rich get a tax cut.
That’s #TrumpCare.
— Michael Skolnik (@MichaelSkolnik) May 4, 2017
The House shoved the makeshift law through so haphazardly, many in Congress hadn’t even read the final version. They intentionally hurried the vote so the Congressional Budget Office wouldn’t have time to calculate its official estimate of exactly how many millions will be screwed, and how much it will cost.
This hateful bill now goes to the Senate, which won’t vote until after the CBO report comes it. Read: There is still hope, even with Mitch McConnell’s toxic Senate, that the ACA will survive.
But no matter how you slice it, the fact is irrefutable: There’s a pathological cruelty here, a gloating, addictive misanthropy spanning the entire GOP, a near-genocidal mania wrought of Trump and his crotch-groping, hate-the-world Kool-Aid all Republicans are willing to suck like poison.
How, with any conscience at all, could these men vote for such a heinous law? What is the deeper motivation, beyond power and gloating, to say to hell with children with heart defects, women with breast cancer, pregnant women, the elderly, the working class? How numb, how viciously divorced from kindness and from Source, how desperately addicted to power and to miserable groupthink, do you have to be?
Here are the white men who just made domestic violence, sexual assault, C-sections and postpartum depression pre-existing conditions. #AHCA https://t.co/fzqNmvAejw
— Amy Siskind (@Amy_Siskind) May 4, 2017
@ajjaffe pic.twitter.com/vvv8sfAcrZ
— Tom Bonier (@tbonier) May 4, 2017
Read more here:: All the ways Republicans want you dead
