Call your Senators today! Call them every day! Stop the GOP from destroying healthcare!

I don’t live in the US but I wish all speed to your dialing fingers, all strength to your voices and a last spark of life to whatever faint fragments of conscience remain in the depths of the senators you ring. Good luck!

Best of luck to those with GOP Senators. California has only Democrat Senators but best of luck to Kamala Harris and Dianne Feinstein in helping us all oppose the GOP deathcare bill.

@Citizen Rat
We’ll need it. Right now there are 52 people saying No. They need 50/100 votes to pass the bill. So even if all of the remaining GOP decide to say kill the poor, sick and downtrodden, they won’t be able to pass the Trumpcare bill. Even so better to have more GOP members to say No to solidify the idea that this bill should die and stay dead. Also I don’t trust the 4 GOP Senators to keep saying No, but that’s just me.

Just called. My senator’s Portman so perhaps I should remind him of all the Medicaid money his district will miss out on to combat the opioid crisis.

Well, I called Portman. It’s really the first time I’ve ever done such a thing, but what hell, I’m a voter. I didn’t vote for him and don’t trust him, but I called.

If you’re in California, you should also be calling your state senator and assemblymember to tell them to support SB 562.

My guess is that, even if there are enough “No” votes to stop it, McConnell will just pull his anti-democratic “Nuclear option” bullshit again.

Can the UN step in? There’s no way this isn’t legally genocide.

@ Scented Fucking Hard Chairs

The “nuclear option” is eliminating the filibuster (endless talking to delay a vote). The filibuster isn’t being used here; the vote is happening, and if 51 senators vote against it, it’s dead, at least for the moment.

That said, it’s not likely that 51 senators will vote against it. People like Cruz are merely unhappy that the bill isn’t murderous enough, so after some tweaking, they’ll get on board. The “moderate” Republicans are going through a charade that they have gone through many times before. As Charlie Pierce put it a few days ago:

Here’s what I think will happen: McConnell will roll out his bill on Thursday. It will suck gallons of pondwater, as expected. It will be transparently a vehicle for shoving the nation’s wealth upwards and only incidentally a bill concerning America’s healthcare system, which it will make immeasurably worse for the great majority of the people in the country. All of these things will deepen the concern and more deeply trouble the “moderate” Republicans, who will be very public in their deep concern and in the depths of their troublehood… Susan Collins and Rob Portman will find themselves sniffing great bouquets of microphones over the following several days.

At some point, the Congressional Budget Office will release its score for the bill, measuring precisely how many gallons of pondwater the bill sucks. Meanwhile, back on Capitol Hill, McConnell and his leadership team will paint pretty flowers on the uglier parts of the bill and, one by one, enough of the “moderates” will pronounce themselves satisfied that their deep concerns have been satisfied most deeply, and that they no longer are as deeply troubled as they once were. A couple of them—Collins, say, or Lisa Murkowski—even will be allowed to vote against the bill, provided the winning margin of 50-plus-Pence is in the bag.

Ted Cruz promised he’d repeal the Affordable Care Act without any plan to replace it. That would mean the entire individual plan non-employment private health insurance market would collapse. He’s scary.

It’s important to call GOP senators and representatives if you live in a swing district, even if they won’t budge on the issue. He or she might become a bit more centrist around the next election cycle if there are lots of messages from addresses in the electoral district.

Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski have both said they strongly support disability rights, so they’d better vote against any bill that weakens protections for people with pre-existing or ongoing conditions. Maybe start caucusing with centrist Democrats at some point.

I love being reminded, daily, that enormous amounts of people think I deserve to die because I’m disabled.

Genocide indeed.

If this bill passes, within 3 years the death toll will have exceeded US casualties in Vietnam. But it will be hidden. We won’t be seeing war footage, or body bags on the nightly news. Just millions of families, struggling to keep their loved ones alive and not go bankrupt.

Why people aren’t rioting in the streets, I don’t know. Literal Death Eaters have taken over all three branches of our government, and 35% of the population is fine with this. It defies explanation.

@Axe

White nihilism, yes. That 35% will torch the entire world, and themselves, before they’ll allow the uppity folk to gain even an inch of progress.

Somebody posted on Twitter earlier today that right-wing rage gave us the KKK, while left-wing rage gave us the weekend.