Charlie Pierce has an excellent post up over at Esquire: The Resistance Cannot Wait Until 2018. It addresses a thought that occurred to me while watching (with disgust, and only until I located the remote!) the Republicans high-five and swill Bud Lite to celebrate the House passage of Trumpcare and rip healthcare away from tens of millions.
My thought was: “I know they’re cruel, but are these motherfuckers stupid?” I was seeing the visions of attack ad story boards dancing in Democratic ad makers’ heads, juxtaposing shots of photogenic families facing medical bankruptcy, plutocrats wallowing in piles of cash and those gleeful Republican assholes high-fiving.
But Pierce is right — the GOPers aren’t worried about what normal people think of all this shit. If they were, they wouldn’t have passed a bill that has a 17% approval rate:
And, as much as I hate to doubt the good heartland people who voted for this guy, I think they’d react worse to losing an illusory victory over Them than they will to losing their actual healthcare. For the foreseeable future, Republican politicians, House and Senate, remain more threatened by the wrath of The Base than they are by any unfortunate mother and child who pop up on the local news. Whatever emerges from this process will be a Republican bill, thickly coated in banalities about freedom and marketplace solutions, but with nothing resembling a commitment to the same goals that animated the passage of the Affordable Care Act.
Sounds about right. We’ve got to make the bastards fear us, and as Pierce notes, a win for Ossoff in Georgia and Quist in Montana would be a good first step. Swing Left just blew past $1 million in contributions since the GOP healthcare atrocity yesterday:
We just hit $1 million! This movement is amazing. Keep it up and let's take our country back: https://t.co/IrBD3TYfoW pic.twitter.com/6KXuIlARgP
— Swing Left (@swingleft) May 5, 2017
Pierce is correct: 2018 will be too late. We’ve got to make it sting for these evil shithooks every single day between now and then. I certainly plan to devote myself to that task.