Kim Field

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How a bill does not become law

The GOP House wrote their "health care" bill in one month with no public testimony and the rejection of 100 Democratic amendments, then they had to pull their first bill because they couldn't get enough votes from their own party members, then they passed a second version that was passed by one vote after adding language that the GOP claimed would protect people with pre-existing conditions, so then Trump declared that this was "a great plan," but the CBO said that it would result in higher premiums and 24 million Americans losing their health insurance and it turned out it didn't really protect people with pre-existing conditions and the bill turned out not to be a health-care bill at all but instead a big tax refund for the super rich, so only 17% of Americans approved of it, so then Trump said that it was "a mean bill," so the GOP Senate said that it would write their bill from scratch, so thirteen male Republican Senators wrote a bill in secret in six weeks leveraging large parts of the House bill, but this version couldn't get enough GOP votes because the CBO said that it would raise premiums and cause 32 million Americans to lose their health insurance, so the vote was delayed until John McCain could return to Washington, then Trump threatened GOP Senators at a really nice White House lunch that they had better not leave town until they had passed some kind of bill, so a new version of the bill was presented and a vote was taken on whether to bring the bill forward, so then Murkowski and Collins voted against that, but then John McCain arrived to cast the deciding vote to begin debate, and then McCain announced that he would vote against the actual bill, so a bill "repeal and replace" new bill was distributed to Senators and voted on 90 minutes later, but it failed even though McCain reversed himself and voted FOR it, so then the Interior Secretary threatened Murkowski with the state of Alaska's financial ruin and Trump told the Boy Scouts that DHS Secretary Price would be fired if the GOP bill didn't pass, and then the Senate voted on the same "repeal now and replace later" bill it had passed in 2015, but this time six Republican senators who had voted for the bill in 2015 changed their minds and voted AGAINST it, so that bill also failed, so then McConnell decided to create a fake bill called a "skinny bill" that was only created so that it could be sent back to the House so that the House GOP could conference with the Senate GOP and create a whole new bill that would be the real bill that Trump would sign into law, so then the CBO came out and said that the "skinny bill" would raise premiums and cause 11 million Americans to lose their health insurance, and the top health insurers and the AMA begged the GOP to kill the bill, but then GOP Congressman Mark Meadows told Senator Lindsay Graham that there was a danger that the House would just skip a conference and pass "skinny" into law, so then Senatots Graham, Johnson and McCain held a press conference saying that the "skinny" bill was "a fraud" that would lead to a "disaster" that the GOP would be blamed for, and then they said that they would vote "no" on the "skinny" bill until Paul Ryan gave them an ironclad guarantee that the bill they were trying to pass would never actually get passed, so then Ryan said he would do that, but he said it in a way that didn't seem ironclad, and Ryan also demanded that the actual real bill that Trump would sign would have to be written by the Senate GOP and not the House GOP because he knows that he can't tell the GOP Senate what it wants to actually pass, so then the Senate GOP produced the actual text of the "skinny" bill, which was voted on three hours later, but then McCain voted against the bill and it was defeated, and McConnell said he was disappointed and Schumer said they should work together to fix Obamacare, and then all the senators went home at 2 a.m.