Dear 'concerned' Republican senators: Fight McConnell on Trumpcare, or shut up
Politico remains on the "there's trouble for Obamacare repeal" beat, despite all evidence that Mitch McConnell has no real internal obstacles to getting it done. Politico talks about the "slim prospects," and the senators who are disgruntled over being shut out of the process as if any of them were actually preventing McConnell from shoving this through. The handful of supposedly unhappy senators most definitely have it in their power to do so—it would only take three of them to put it out of reach, and there are more than that among the complainers.
But so far, as Greg Sargent points out in interviews with congressional scholars, there's no evidence they're doing so, and in fact giving McConnell more cover to shove the bill through with a minimum of transparency.
“A private conversation with McConnell in which a senator says, ‘This is really troubling to me and I hope you can find your way clear to do it some other way,’ would be more effective than public complaints,” congressional expert Norman Ornstein told me this morning. “McConnell’s top priority is maintaining his majority, so he’s going to be very sensitive to these senators’ own sense of what’s damaging to them. Leaders have to listen to individual senators.”
That is, leaders have to listen … if individual senators really mean what they say. The Senate is a murky place, where things mysteriously tend to end up happening if individual senators actually want them to, and don’t end up happening if they don’t. The crux of the matter is that, if any GOP senators actually did think of the process as a problem, they could convey that to McConnell, and he would feel a measure of actual pressure to respond to their concerns.
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2017/6/16/1672449/-Dear-concerned-Republican-senators-Fight-McConnell-on-Trumpcare-or-shut-up
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