Too Late - They're Already Pregnant

All but six House Republicans voted to end Medicare:

After House Republican leaders pushed through a budget that contained a politically charged plan to overhaul Medicare, the chairman of the House tax-writing committee suggested Thursday that he did not intend to draft legislation turning the proposal into law any time soon.

The comments by Representative Dave Camp, the Michigan Republican who is chairman of the Ways and Means Committee, coupled with remarks by other top Republicans, suggested that the party’s Medicare proposal was firmly on hold even though lawmakers had taken a risky vote to support it in the House.

At a health policy forum at the National Press Club, Mr. Camp noted that Democrats had resisted the Republican approach and said he was “not interested in talking about whether the House is going to pass a bill that the Senate shows no interest in.”

His statement followed similar comments by other Republicans, including Representatives Eric Cantor of Virginia, the majority leader, and Paul Ryan, the budget chairman who developed the Medicare plan. They both said Republicans recognized that they were unlikely to win approval of their sweeping Medicare proposal in the debt-reduction talks that began at Blair House on Thursday.

No one could have predicted that ending Medicare while lavishing trillions of dollars in tax cuts on millionaires and corporations would prove to be an enormous political pile of shit for House Republicans. Like I said before, these morons got drunk with power off of their electoral success in 2010 and figured they could sell ketchup popsicle to a woman with white gloves. Spoiler alert - they can't, they're now waking up to that reality, and they're terrified of the price they could pay in November of next year. 

All of this is rather amusing to me, because you hear plenty (and I write plenty of it too) about how organized and how politically shrewd Republicans are, and how Democrats are a bunch of feckless, rudderless pussies. And in large part, it is very true. But you would think that Republicans should have seen this one coming. Medicare is an overwhelmingly popular program, and these idiots think that they just need to try a little harder to sell the public on the awesome idea of "premium support" and turning them loose to the wolves in the notoriously dysfunctional and corrupt health insurance industry. They can try all they want, and they can try to shrug their shoulders and walk away and heave deep sighs about how it won't pass the Senate or the White House, but the fact of the matter is that they voted to end Medicare. It already happened. The attack ads will write themselves next fall. 

The fact that it will never pass the Senate or Obama's desk doesn't matter. They voted for it. If that was their calculation, then they never should have brought it up for a vote in the first place. And it also serves as a reminder as to why we should never let these assholes gain simultaneous control of the House, Senate, and White House.