In what will probably be a frustratingly brief respite from the GOP’s continued attempts to kill everyone in the country, CNN is reporting that the potentially disastrous Graham-Cassidy healthcare bill has died before going to the Senate for a vote. For those who are having trouble keeping up with this stuff, Graham-Cassidy is/was the attempt to repeal the Affordable Care Act and replace it with something that would have essentially made it prohibitively expensive to have a child, get sick at all, or just be a woman in general. It was also the latest Trumpcare bill to draw the ire of Jimmy Kimmel, who has made it his personal mission to use his TV show and celebrity friends to kill the GOP’s spiteful, dangerous healthcare bills.
Famous turtle Mitch McConnell announced this news during some kind of Republican lunch event today, finally confessing that they didn’t have the votes to pass Graham-Cassidy before retreating into the peace and security of his shell. CNN says that the attempt to rally GOP Senators around this bill has been “agonizing” for McConnell, who didn’t want to risk taking the bill to the floor without having the votes because that would’ve opened the door for “political fallout and attack ads”—which basically means that he didn’t want to risk giving the public a chance to further express how horrid this thing seemed to be.
Unfortunately, McConnell also acknowledged that the Republicans will take another stab at repealing Obamacare/the ACA in the future, suggesting that they might even try and “reach out to Democrats” to make it happen. CNN says one strategy could be to tie both healthcare and tax reform to the 2018 federal budget, which is particularly unpopular because of how “messy” it will probably end up being. Meanwhile, Donald Trump has been whining about all of this, saying that he’s “disappointed” in the Republican senators who refused to vote yes and adding, as eloquently as ever, “at some point there will be a repeal and replace but we’ll see whether or not that point is now or whether it will be shortly thereafter.”