Seth Meyers’ “A Closer Look” segments on Late Night With Seth Meyers have been consistently strong, affording the former Saturday Night Live fake newsman with a real opportunity to flex his political comedy muscles while simultaneously keeping things tight with his signature smiling outrage. Last night’s episode saw Meyers going into combat against Senate Republicans’ transparently ugly whack at replacing Obamacare—the so-called Better Care Reconciliation Act—with the practiced ease of one who smells blood in the water. Mainly because Republicans, according to Meyers, are ready to spill some actual poor people blood in pursuit tax cuts for big Republican donors, medical insurance corporations, and a lot of people who need a few hundred thousand extra bucks a few hundred thousand times less than millions of American citizens need life-sustaining medical care.
The Republicans—whose Lex Luthor-like secrecy, hypocrisy, venality, cruelty, and callousness in drafting their bill have been the talk of the late night comedy crowd for weeks—have chummed the water pretty thoroughly themselves. (Five Republican senators have come out against the bill already, putting the whole abominable cash-grab in serious jeopardy.) As Meyers showed via the heroically dirty comedic practice of “using Republicans’ own words against them,” and “reciting cold, hard, irrefutable numbers” (as outlined in the Congressional Budget Office score), Senate Republicans are taking their House colleagues’ hidden ball trick on healthcare and stuffing it even further down their spandex by holding off on the whole “letting the American people, Democratic lawmakers, and even their own Republican pals see the thing” thing because, as Meyers put it with effectively restrained anger, the BCRA couldn’t be more villainous “if it mandated tying damsels in distress to the railroad tracks.” Still, if there’s one thing comic book geek Meyers knows about supervillains, it’s that they’ve always got a backup plan, so Meyers ended swinging for the knockout. Comparing the Republicans’ plan to a Slipknot lower back tattoo, the host landed the roundhouse, “You definitely want to hide it. And the people who’ve seen it are terrible people.” Bang! Pow! Call your senators!