The GOP leadership cannot please these people and simultaneously placate the handful of sober moderate voices in the party who say — quite reasonably — that while ObamaCare is miles from perfect, it would be politically suicidal and cruel to cleave out its most helpful measures in the name of tax-cutting or deficit-reducing.
And there’s the bind. For right-wingers like Ted Cruz, or libertarians like Rand Paul, the Senate’s bill contains a series of quasi-Stalinist intrusions into the ancient liberties of free men enshrined in our glorious Constitution, the sort of tyranny in defiance of which men bled at Bunker Hill and Yorktown (though Cruz will probably end up supporting it anyway, especially if it’s clear that it’s a dead letter). For moderates like Susan Collins, the bill is capricious, cruel, and unnecessary.
The gap between these two groups is unbridgeable, and unless Democrats lose an extraordinary number of seats in 2018, passing anything that would amount to the repeal of ObamaCare is going to be impossible as a matter of simple arithmetic.
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