Republican Senator gets shellacked after bragging about Trumpcare bill
With the Republican Party leadership trying to figure out how to ram through its disastrous “Trumpcare” health care bill with as little discussion or exposure as possible, it probably wasn’t Republican Senator John Cornyn’s best move to try bragging about the bill – particularly when he focused in on a jarringly stupid point. That led to Cornyn getting promptly shellacked by all sides.
It all started when the GOP leadership finally released the Senate version of the Trumpcare (AHCA) bill. Cornyn quickly took to Twitter to brag that “Obamacare was 2700 pages long; R draft bill is 142 pages” (link). He seemingly thought that the relative brevity of the disastrous bill would impress anyone involved, and that no one would catch on that it’s shorter because it merely makes (uniformly negative) changes to the original ObamaCare text, instead of starting over. Cornyn swiftly found out he couldn’t pull a fast one, based on the fast and furious negative responses hurled in his direction.
“Bumper sticker thinking gets you bumper sticker legislation,” tweeted bestselling author Rachel Caine. Affordable Care Act enrollment expert Charles Gaba tweeted “If I write a 300-page novel & you make 10 pages of edits, does that mean you’ve written a better novel? These edits make the novel far worse..but even if they were improvements, still stupid to claim “our edits are shorter!” as selling point.” Craig Bellinson went for the jugular: “But the Bible has about 1,200 pages, and Mein Kampf has only 720. Oh well! I guess I shouldn’t make major decisions based on page count!”
Twitter users continued to pile on. Dennis Perkins of the AV Club quipped “That’s because you’ve shaved ‘health care’ down to ‘padding your pockets & killing poor people.’ Shame on you.” Meanwhile, Sally Ray looked to the future: “Looking forward to moving to TX soon, where I will campaign for, donate to and vote for any viable candidate who opposes you.” John Cornyn isn’t up for reelection until 2020, but his Republican Senate counterpart in Texas, Ted Cruz, can be bounced out of office in 2018.
