The Children’s Health Insurance Program or CHIP is a program that provides health insurance to 9 million children whose parents are too rich for Medicaid but too poor for anything else. It is the other hostage in the debt crisis. It easily could have been funded way back in September with a clean bill and overwhelming bipartisan support. It could be passed today as a clean standalone bill. But that isn’t how the GOP rolls. They call themselves pro life but they hold these children and their families hostage, leverage in a fight that isn’t even about these children.
It is amoral to do this.
The maddening thing is, Trump could have had it all. He could have gotten 1.6 billion for the stupid boondoggle wall. He could have saved the hostages, the children and the Dreamers. Even on Friday in a one on one meeting with Chuck, he was going to get this bill of love and his precious wall/fence/flight of fancy. But he says one thing, then he talks to xenophobic nativists and sows enough confusion that there is clear evidence you simply can’t negotiate with him.
So Chuck Schumer is negotiating with terrorists. He was nice enough to compare them to Jell-O, but I am not. The nativist wing of the GOP is pulling all the strings. These people are terrorizing immigrants who came here at the average age of six years old. They have lived here for decades. They are simultaneously terrorizing millions of poor children and their families who receive letters threatening the loss of healthcare for their beloved child as an early Christmas present. Chuck and Dick before him think they have deals, and then hours later, the president is singing a markedly different tune.
Paul Ryan isn’t in the business of passing bills the Senate would clear because he has an unfortunate medical condition of been not born without a spine. Mitch McConnell isn’t interested in putting clean DACA or CHIP bills or even a bill to protect military families and death pay during the shutdown because he has the unfortunate medical condition of being born without a heart.
There is one party and one party only who believes there are valuable government solutions to the plight of regular Americans and who fights to protect social programs that elevate the poorest among us. The other party decries the futility of government solutions and makes its bread and butter on lamenting its lack of function. Give them unfettered control, and look what they do: create facts on the ground.
These people can’t be trusted. Let’s wave them goodbye from Congress in record numbers in 2018, so their fearless leader can get evicted in the next.
#electionshaveconsequences