Should-Read: Joe Barton: “Sometimes you’re playing Fantasy Football and sometimes you’re in the real world…”

Should-Read: It was always just dingbat kabuki all the way down:

Joe Barton: Representative, R-TX: “[Asked by] reporters… why, after Republicans had held dozens of nearly-unanimous votes to repeal ObamaCare…

… under President Obama, they were getting cold feet now that they control the levers of power. “Sometimes you’re playing Fantasy Football and sometimes you’re in the real world”, [Rep. Joe Barton R-TX] admitted. “We knew the president, if we could get a repeat bill to his desk, it would almost certainly be vetoed. This time we knew if it got to the president’s desk it would be signed.”

It has, as far as the Republican congressional caucus is concerned, always been dingbat kabuki–at least, ever since Gingrich’s revolt against George H.W. Bush at the start of the 1990s, if not ever since the passage of the Reagan “none of us really understands what’s going on with all these numbers” tax cut in 1981.

David Brooks: “Any large vision…

…was beyond the drafters of this legislation…. They were more concerned with what this internal faction…. In 24 hours of ugly machinations, the Trump administration was willing to rip out big elements of the bill and insert big new ones, without regard to substance or ramification. House members were rushed to commit to legislation even while major pieces of it were still in flux… when the Congressional Budget Office had no time to score it, when the effect on health outcomes of actual Americans was an absolute mystery….

This House Republican plan would increase suffering, morbidity and death among the middle class and poor in order to provide tax cuts to the rich. It would cut Medicaid benefits by $880 billion between now and 2026. It would boost the after-tax income for those making more than $1 million a year by 14 percent…. This bill takes the most vicious progressive stereotypes about conservatives and validates them…. This bill has just a 17 percent approval rating….

If we’re going to have the rough edges of a populist revolt, you’d think that at least somebody would be interested in listening to the people. But with this bill the Republican leadership sets an all-time new land speed record for forgetting where you came from…. The Republicans can’t run policy-making from the White House because they have a marketing guy in charge of the factory. But they can’t run policy from Capitol Hill because it’s visionless and internally divided…. The politics driving the substance, not the other way around. The new elite is worse than the old elite—and certainly more vapid.