AHCA Whip Count

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

Interesting that Trump is roughly paralleling Obama. Entering office with a majority in both houses, immediately pivoting to healthcare, putting together a compromise bill that no one likes and spending an inordinate amount of political capital on it. (The possible difference being that Obama did get something passed.)

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

Meadows is truly embarrassing - it looks like the Freedom Caucus is going to cave.

They Tea Party Republicans have always come to heel when their corporate paymasters whistled.

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

FWIW:

Edward-Isaac Dovere‏ @IsaacDovere  21m21 minutes ago
Sean Spicer, on the possibility of canceling the Obamacare repeal vote: "nothing leads me to believe that that's the case"

Mark Murray‏ @mmurraypolitics  5m5 minutes ago
"It's going to pass. So that's it" -- Spicer on what happens if House bill doesn't pass tonight.

Ryan has a death wish. Maybe Trump put him up to this so he'd fail.

Guessing this is one more example of Trump's reality denial / Dunning-Kruger in action, and he forced Ryan to go ahead with the vote (via threats and whining, he obviously can't actually order it). Presuming that Ryan & Co can't beat enough votes into line, it will be very educational to see what happens when it fails. (I'd expect an epic meltdown on twitter.)

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

Trump just said that he is looking forward to the house vote today.

who is going to tell him?

No one. The tweets and comments about the great things "his" non-existent healthcare law is doing should be entertaining.

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

So much winning!

Let's not get too cocky. We can wait 48 hours before mocking them.

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

Time to write a new bill, there's plenty of time, take an Easter break and start over again. Better a good solution after a failed start than a bad solution causing problems in the Midterms.

That sounds entirely rational, I'm skeptical President Pussygrabber's poor fragile ego can take such a devastating blow. The resulting epic tantrum could destroy what cohesion the GOP has left.

Although I suppose it might be possible to distract him with something big and shiny and then get a little governing done while he's occupied.

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

Rofl, left excitement because of a NY Times story. Some will never learn... #FakeNews

Very clever done by Trump: Negotiate, make concessions, changes and make clear that either THAT will become law or nothing will change and Obamacare will stay in place.

The people see that it's not the Presidents fault but the Congress fault and a lot of GOP voters will be furious with their Representatives but not with him.

Indeed, very clever.

What still is embarrassing is the amount of ill-preparation by the GOP Leadership. Talking for 7 years but not capable of making a bill that gets broad support. Ryan has to go, what a clown.

Trumpot  could walk out onto the White House lawn, douse himself with gasoline and strike up a match, and before the fire was out his cultists would be blaming oil companies poor safety record and Obama's lousy maintenance of the White House sprinkler system.

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

Hearing from multiple GOP sources that leadership is desperate to pull this bill.
https://twitter.com/jonathanvswan/status/845340361698541568

Nothing is stopping Ryan from pulling the bill. It's ultimately his decision, not the President's.

They're damned if they do and damned if they don't. If Ryan pulls the bill, Trump will blame him. If they hold a floor vote and it fails, Trump will blame Ryan anyway. Trump has already committed to throwing Ryan under the bus, easy to do since Breitbart and Co. have been setting him up as a fall guy for months.

I can't tell if trashing Ryan like this would be a brilliant bit of political backstabbing (removing a prime alternative locus of power to Trump in the GOP), or a self-destructive side-show that does the party lasting damage with no real return (the equivalent of a man setting his house on fire as a distraction from the fact that he just crashed and destroyed the family car).

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

Is he going to follow through on his threat? Or claim he never made it to begin with? Or will he just do the used car salesman dance and try to weasel out of it?

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

https://twitter.com/philipaklein/status/845359201249607680

You must be logged in to read this quote.

Let's not give Trump ideas. He has too many bad ideas as it is.

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

Trump isn't bringing up healthcare again anytime soon per @costareports
https://twitter.com/KatyTurNBC/status/845361697099517955

Of course not. He has a long, long history of running from failures and then either spinning them or trying to pretend they never happened. He won't be able to do that with health care. "Obamacare" is now going to be an albatross around the necks of the Trumpublicans.

Obamacare keeps working: they tried to kill it.
Obamacare fails: they failed to replace/fix it.

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

Congressman Joe Barton (R-Tx)


https://twitter.com/AliceOllstein/status/845373755136380929

"We never really wanted to repeal Obamacare. But aren't you glad we lied to you all those years, voters?"

Good thing they've cultivated the moron half of the bell curve. Any party with remotely perceptive voters would be dead after this. Then again, if they had voters capable of independent critical thought, they wouldn't be the GOP we know and loathe.

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

Trump's not totally wrong though: The massive premium hikes are not going over well with the working class and it will depend on how effectively Republicans and Trump will tie this to the Democrats before the next elections. If Democrats don't find a proper message on their own they cannot simply rely on the Republicans to implode. They need to work for it and the best way to do so would be to find a bipartisan way to reign in the premium hikes. Otherwise it will really explode on the Democrats sooner or later because they are the architects of this ...

Blame Trump, the GOP, and deregulation.

"Your health care would still be cheap if Hillary won and we had a D majority in the Senate! Trump and the GOP sold you out to Big Insurance!"

That truth doesn't matter with Trump voters is a double-edged sword. That the Dems can add a second cut of, "Why didn't the GOP and Trump fix it?" is just frosting.

[Absentee Voting Ghost of Ruin]

Blame should lay with Paul Ryan trying to sell a literal turd as a healthcare bill.

Why? The GOP doesn't seem to have any problem with having one as President.