I won’t bore you with yet another take on Trump-Ryan incompetence and how Tom Price is going to screw people over anyway and Democrats should now make a big deal about offering genuine productive ACA reforms etc etc etc. You’re welcome … but not off the hook! Because now I will bore you with some other thoughts about one of the greatest, by which I mean most humiliating, legislative debacles in the whole history of ever.

• Yes, Trump has no ideology; all he cares about is him. But let us not forget that a majority of House Republicans were willing to vote for a bill that would have killed people, in large part because of GOP faith in the magical power of markets to fix every conceivable problem. Ryan & Co. were constantly preaching about “restoring” “consumer choice” and “free market principles” to the health care system. When market magic works, goods and services, on the one hand, and prices, on the other, meet at a rational place and innovation is sparked and the quality of life is improved and people are hired and wages go up and yippee chalk up another win for civilization and material progress. But for all their magical powers, left to themselves, markets, in point of fact, fail all the time, Exhibit A being the failure of market forces to provide working people with a living wage. The concept of market failure is foreign to Republicans — and for that matter, most Democrats — and as a former colleague of mine used to like to say, “that’s a problem that’s going to be a problem” certainly for the rest of my life and probably the rest of yours too.
• Yes, Hooray for Mark Amodei, Nevada’s Republican “moderate” congressman who declared he was voting against the health care bill. Up until two or three days before the thing died I was predicting on dumb twitter, wrongly, that Amodei would vote for it. I suspect I was guided by cynicism (not unprecedented), though in my defense I may have been influenced by the multiple times Trump’s Nevada campaign chairman voted to repeal Obamacare in the past.
• Yes, second only to the people who will not lose their health care and die to satisfy Republican market worship, the happiest person in the U.S. about the demise of Trumpcare is Sen. Dean Heller, because he won’t have to mess with it in the Senate anytime soon, and he’s a noodle. To be fair, Heller raised grave concerns about the legislation. To be even more fair, Heller raised those concerns only after Brian Sandoval publicly opposed the bill and thus demonstrated for Heller’s handlers what Heller’s position should be.
• Speaking of Sandoval… Yes, he was the first Republican governor in the nation to expand Medicaid under the ACA and yes he issued the aforementioned statement opposing Trumpcare. So saintly, our Sandoval. So does that mean it is rude to remind everyone that if Sandoval had got his way, the U.S. Supreme Court would have overturned the ACA and the thousands of Nevadans who would have lost coverage under Trumpcare would have never been covered in the first place?
• A large portion of the populace has found comfort in Trump’s alternate realities and yes, let’s hope the profundity of the Trumpcare farce will help start washing away that shitshow and move society on a path toward restoring some semblance of collective cognitive functionality.
• Yes, the legislative branch of the U.S. government did not do whatever the executive branch said. The judicial branch has also shown a penchant for self-preservation. It is perhaps impossible to overstate how crucial these demonstrations of separation of powers are, given that the president is an incompetent yet empathy-free authoritarian ass who has surrounded himself with neo-Nazis and other reactionary ultra-zealots.