[direwolf]

Excellent piece from Vox today on the GOP's Obamacare repeal fiasco.

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-polit...e-repeal-lying

Republicans are making life-or-death policy for millions of Americans with less care, consideration, and planning than most households put into purchasing a dishwasher.

But the deeper problem — the one that will continue to corrode the system long after this debate resolves — is the role that deception has played throughout the process.

This has been a policymaking process built, from the beginning, atop lies. Lies about what the bills do and don’t do. Lies about what is wrong with Obamacare and lies about what the GOP’s legislation would do to fix it. Lies about what Republicans are trying to achieve and lies about which problems they seek to solve.

This isn’t just a moral offense, though it is that. It is a profound challenge to the policymaking process.

Senate Republicans look to be ending their process with a bill that mainly repeals the individual mandate, and thus sends far more markets into collapse. And so the one vaguely real problem they identified and repeatedly promised to solve they are now making much, much, much worse.

This is not normal. It is crazy-making. It’s a debate where words have no meaning, promises have no value, noise carries no signal. A functional policymaking process cannot survive in this environment for long.

Skepticism is healthy in politics. But this era requires more than skepticism. This is a total collapse of the credibility of all the key policymakers in the American government. Our political system is built on the assumption that words have some meaning, that the statements policymakers make have some rough correlation to the actions they will take. But here, in the era of bull#### politics, they don’t. If this becomes the new normal in policymaking, it will be disastrous.