MGB:_With Mitchy, you can never tell if he is failing or taking a fall. There have been times when he has quickly moved things through the Senate, like the 2010 and 2013 tax bills (probably the most important legislation of each year, especially the latter) or the Budget Control Act, when the real goats were Eric Cantor and the Tea Party (who cost an historic lowering of the national bond rating). Sometimes politics is Kibuki theater.
One has to consider that McConnel is taking a fall to preserve the ACA because people need it and the proposals to replace it are really bad. Indeed, he likely realizes that the ACA, or Romneycare, is as close to universal health care we can get in a voluntary plan with premiums. Indeed, it is Medicare for All if you like how Medicare currently works with premiums, copays and denying coverage to undocumented immigrants.
Sanders plan would turn Medicare into something more like Medicaid first and then transition private insurace into it by age group, funding through monopsonistic savings and payroll taxes (I prefer a VAT). The GOP won’t pass that. They won’t even pass a Pubic Option, which would actually make the last bill work, or maybe it would. The problem is not that the Majority Leader is incompetent, it is that the President truly is and the President could not act his way out of a paper bag.
