Well, it was a bill that moved Obamacare in a conservative direction, so you couldn't count on a single Democrat vote. Which meant they were 25 votes out of 237, not 435. So yes, they did have the ability to kill the bill.
Trump may be a crappy leader, but he wasn't allowed to cast a single vote on this bill. That was all on Congress.
Neither, for that matter, was either chamber of Congress. More's the pity, the primary challengers could have had a head start.
As for the RINO's....the reason they're not getting as much blame is because what they did at least makes logical sense from their own perspective.
What the Democrats did to the health care system in America made sense from their perspective, too.
They'd prefer ObamaCare to a complete repeal with no replacement, so if a partial repeal is off the table, they'll stick with Obamacare and let the bill die.
Ask them how many of them want to keep going with obamacare. I'd bet the answer is zero. But what is the point of voting for a Bill which only piddles with an impotent fraction of the ACA, in an ongoing effort to fine tune crap. Anyone who has ever worked on vehicles can tell you they often reach a point where there is just too much to replace. We call those 'parts cars'. Obamacare is not even that, what would you keep? What of the whole ACA do you think is a good idea, keeping in mind that it is being micromanaged by a government whose office holders are exempt?
Want to fix it? Remove that part. Make everyone in Congress and their staffers subject to the provisions of the legislation they dumped on the rest of us. Let them have a slice of the same cake they prescribed for the rest of America.
I don't agree with them as a matter of policy, but their actions make sense given their views.
If you knew something wasn't going to do much, and that for only a limited amount of time, would you sign off on it when you were sent by your constituents to be rid of that thing once and for all? If someone parks a junk car in your drive way would you be content to have it carted off a few nuts and bolts at a time?
What some of us are struggling with is the sense that the FC is saying "If we can't have total repeal (or close to it), we won't agree to anything." If the result of them taking that position is that ObamaCare either stays intact or moves in a more liberal direction, then they seem to have cut off our noses to spite our faces.
And what the rest of us are struggling with is that those who were in full support of repeal when it would never pass the President's desk, now refuse to gut the ACA when that measure would likely be signed. Why the left shift?
What is the sudden refusal to get rid of this bad legislation, to at least beef up this 11th hour bill and make it acceptable to more of the FC, instead of saying 'that's all you're going to get, take it or leave it'? When the GOP is more willing to seek the approval and compromise of the Democrats than conservatives, they have lost any claim to calling themselves "conservative."
If none of this (as I have seen claimed) would pass through the Senate, then why even bother going through the ineffectual motions of offering a half-assed mess and not even voting on it? Kabuki, that's why.
