OPINION

JOHN BRUMMETT: A telling turn of events

Here, in one splendidly simple story, is the dreadful state of your national leadership and your representation in Washington.

The commentary lies in the mere telling of the story, though I reserve the columnist's license to add a little.


On May 4, the U.S. House of Representatives, needing 216 votes and getting 217, all from Republicans, passed a bill supposedly to repeal and replace Obamacare.

President Trump called for a celebration in the Rose Garden, though the bill hadn't been enacted. The U.S. Senate's disposition was yet to come. But Trump was anxious to show a legislative accomplishment, even if he hadn't any.

With House Speaker Paul Ryan and leading House Republicans beaming beside and behind him, and with Steve Womack of the 3rd District of Arkansas visible in the joyous assembly, Trump called the bill "great" and "very, very incredibly crafted."

He said he must be doing well as president for such a victory to have been achieved. He turned to the Republican chorus for verifying applause that was obediently forthcoming.

Our state's other three Republican congressmen--French Hill, Bruce Westerman and Rick Crawford--had joined Womack in voting for the bill. It would phase out the Medicaid expansion that has saved both the state budget and rural hospitals, and been embraced, with some cosmetically conservative touches, by Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson.

The press reported that the bill the president and Republican House members were buoyantly celebrating would likely be dead on arrival in the Senate.

Fake news, you know.

So, on Tuesday, the House bill was dead in the Senate. It had been dead ... since its arrival.

Eleven white male conservative Republican senators--with Our Boy Tom Cotton among them--have been meeting to try to come up with a more serious bill than the one from the House over which Trump spiked a deflated football.

Amid trouble in fashioning a bill certain to get enough Republican Senate votes to pass--and only two can be spared, and then only with Vice President Mike Pence's tiebreaker--Trump invited a dozen key senators to the White House for lunch Tuesday.

The ever-reliable Associated Press first reported--and assorted other news outlets followed--that sources at the lunch said that Trump called the House bill "mean." They said he wanted the Senate to produce something more "generous" and "kind" to which unspecified additional amounts of money would be added.

No one at the White House has denied that. Nor has any senator who was in the room denied it. A senator or senators presumably leaked it.

Let's briefly recap in case you missed something.

The House passed a health-care bill. All the Arkansas members voted for it although it was punitive to Arkansas. The president threw a party upon passage and called the bill great. Now, six weeks later, he tells senators the bill was mean.

Again--that's the bill he celebrated and hailed himself for on May 4.

Trump was right just this once. By abandoning Medicaid expansion, reducing premium subsidies, basing those subsidies on age instead of income and allowing states to craft their own spotty plans for covering pre-existing conditions, the House bill--the one our state's four Republican Trump toadies supported--was indeed mean.

It was especially so toward the state represented by that previously referenced toady quartet, last seen crawling from under the Trump bus.

Again, the story is its own commentary. But in case you might like some additional analysis:

The story reveals Trump--perhaps more vividly than ever--as wholly and only interested in the glorification of himself, of declaring a win for the sake of declaring a win.

Trump forever says shallow superlative things that provide noise but amount to nothing beyond the self-aggrandizement upon which he seems to draw his life blood.

Barack Obama was not born in Kenya. The Obama administration did not bug Trump Tower. There is no tax-reform bill even filed, much less moving along in Congress. This administration has zero legislative accomplishments. James Comey did not lie. There probably are no tapes. And the House health-care bill was neither great nor incredible, but a ridiculous charade designed merely to let Trump pat himself on the back.

Calling the House bill mean may have been the first truth of the Trump presidency.

Wanting the Senate to craft a bill less mean would be encouraging if we could believe he meant it, or anything firmly.

Meantime, our state's four Republican congressmen insult you by surmising that you are so snowed by Trump that you don't understand what they're doing to you in their weak fealty to him.

They deserve their indifferent betrayal by the clown-king and man-child before whom they kneel.

But you need something better.

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 06/18/2017

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