So-called “principled” Republicans, Maine Senator Susan Collins and Tennessee Senator Lamar Alexander, today betrayed the values they pretended to uphold, when they caved on their demands that the Senate maintain important aspects of Obamacare that would protect poor families.
Both Senators voted for the tax scam that gives 83% of all revenue to the wealthiest 1% of the country, hurts the poor, sick, young, old, and disabled, and balloons the debt by up to $2.7 trillion.
The worst surrender of all is that both Senators Collins and Alexander have confirmed to Sam Stein of The Daily Beast and MSNBC that the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) — created by Hillary Clinton when she was first lady, as a means to provide free medical care to the nation’s poorest children — will not be renewed in 2018 and possibly not in 2019, either.
So Collins and Alexander confirm that CHIP, a program that gives health care to 9m kids and whose money expired in Sept, won’t be renewed this year. Maybe next year.
9 million klids.
— Sam Stein (@samstein) December 20, 2017
Senator Collins went ahead and voted for the Dickensian tax bill, despite her own constituents begging her to do the opposite.
Many had held out hope for her principles after her vote defeated Trump’s attempt to repeal Obamacare and after she fought for measures to mitigate the individual mandate repeal in the Republican tax bill.
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Alas, she betrayed them.
One of the measures Collins supported was the bill Senator Alexander sponsored with Democrat Patti Murray to maintain healthcare subsidies for the poor and give states flexibility around how they implement Obamacare.
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Ultimately, both Collins and Murray accepted weak “promises” from Trump and Republican leadership that laws stabilizing Obamacare markets would pass in exchange for their votes. But, unsurprisingly, they are already reneging.
To keep the government open, Senate Republicans are reneging on a promise to address the health care markets before year's end. https://t.co/cYRBkqNwFC
— Andrew Desiderio (@desiderioDC) December 20, 2017
It almost appears as if the Republican hold-outs were only making a show of fighting for working Americans, when in fact they intended to cow-tow to their corporate donors all along.
In 2018, voters will remember the treachery of Republican lawmakers, who have in recent weeks delivered the one-two punch of supporting a child molester and then robbing average Americans to further enrich the very wealthiest people.
Between now and then, we must daily remind each and every voter of how immoral Republicans sacrifice every value to which our nation aspires at the altar of big business.
