MCCAIN’S PYRRHIC VICTORY

Sen. John McCain’s gigantic eff you to Donald Trump ultimately may benefit the president.

Senate Democrats were giddy when Maverick and nominal Republicans Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska joined all 48 of them to block even modest changes to Obamacare.

McCain is the greatest senator since…Ted Kennedy, said Democrat leader Chuck Schumer.

Since so few study history, I doubt many Dems know what a “Pyrrhic victory” is. They may find out.

He was “leading the fight against Obamacare,” McCain said during his re-election campaign last year. But his anger at Trump for belittling his heroism during the Vietnam war was more important to him than keeping his word to his constituents.

Early next year when premiums spike again and more insurers drop out, it will be obvious Obamacare is in its death throes. Millions more Americans will be in a world of hurt.

The critical vote came before McCain’s celebrated flip flop, when seven GOP senators who voted to repeal Obamacare in 2015 voted against “clean” repeal. That doomed meaningful reform.

The “skinny repeal” bill McCain, Murkowski and Collins voted against would have removed some of Obamacare’s most objectionable features, but left most of it intact.

“Skinny repeal” would have made Obamacare less awful. But it would be like treating brain cancer with aspirin.

Obamacare has done so much harm that even if Congress passed the perfect repeal/replace bill (whatever that might be), it would be too late to prevent substantial additional short term pain next year.

Had “skinny repeal” become law, Democrats and the Lying Swine would blame that pain on Republicans generally, President Trump in particular.

But because the Senate has voted to do nothing at all to fix Obamacare, that’s not credible.

Americans screwed by Obamacare are going to be mad. Thanks to Maverick, they’re likely to be mad at the people who screwed them rather than at the President who the people who screwed them want them to be mad at.  Namely:

*Republicans in Congress who promised to repeal Obamacare, then reneged.

*Democrats, who imposed Obamacare unilaterally, and who – despite its obvious failures – refuse to make changes.

There’s a great deal President Trump can do by Executive Order, or just by changing  administrative rules, to ameliorate or postpone Obamacare’s ill effects.

Hundreds of times the poorly drafted law says “the Secretary will direct.” The Dems who wrote it didn’t anticipate that one day the HHS Secretary to whom they gave so much discretion would be Tom Price.

Trump and Price, quietly, already have begun to roll Obamacare back.

Trump could instantaneously adjust attitudes on Capitol Hill if he revokes the exemption Obama gave to Members of Congress and their staffs. The subsidies Zero directed the Office of Personnel Management to give them are of dubious legality.

A financial hardship for some lawmakers, having to buy health insurance on Obamacare exchanges would be devastating to their staffs. Only a handful of Congressional aides (like, say, the Awan brothers) make good money. Most work for relative peanuts, for the glamour, the proximity to power.

The number of staffers for the US Congress, Senate and House combined, is enormous.  17 years ago it was 24,000, and certainly larger now.  Note the Wikipedia entry for Congressional Staff refuses to give numbers beyond the year 2000:

“In the year 2000, there were approximately 11,692 personal staff, 2,492 committee staff, 274 leadership staff, 5,034 institutional staff, and 3,500 GAO employees, 747 CRS employees, and 232 CBO employees.”

Lawmakers would seethe (and you can imagine how much their staffers would seethe at them), but wouldn’t complain publicly, because roughly 90 percent of Americans think Congress should live by the laws it imposes on the rest of us.

As the pain Obamacare inflicts increases, the president can publicize steps he takes to ameliorate it. And each time Trump issues an Executive Order to fix something obviously wrong with Obamacare, he can remind Americans Congress voted to do nothing.

Although Trump can do much to mitigate harm, we can’t get all the reforms we need to make things better without additional legislation.

This probably won’t happen in this Congress. There are too few Republicans in it, too many of them are squishes, and all the Dems are Hell-bent on obstruction.

But if Trump – and you and I — prepare the battlefield properly, great things can be accomplished after the midterm elections.

What’s most important is that we don’t get mad. We get even.

The seven GOP Judases should be staked face down over anthills. But 45 Republican Senators kept their word. We mustn’t blame all Republicans for the sins of a few.

Only one Judas – Dean Heller of Nevada –is running for re-election next year. We must defeat him in the primary, pour encourager les autres.

McCain will be dead soon. My first wife, Holly, died of glioblastoma. It’s an aggressive cancer for which there is no cure.

We’ll have to wait until the other Judases are up for re-election before they get what they deserve.

But 25 Democrats who voted to keep Obamacare as is will be on the ballot in the midterms,10 from states President Trump carried.

Obamacare’s effects have been especially pernicious in Red states – probably by design. Their votes to preserve Obamacare should doom Joe Manchin in West Virginia, Joe Donnelly in Indiana, Claire McCaskill in Missouri, Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota.

The GOP should be at least even money in Montana and Michigan, have good shots at pickups in Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida…if we nominate qualified candidates, and give them the resources they need to prevail.

Now it seems as useless as a two-legged stool, but there isn’t much wrong with the Senate that can’t be cured by putting 4 or 5 more Republicans in it.

Living well isn’t the best revenge. Winning is. If we focus on winning, the last two years of President Trump’s first term can be spectacular.

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret, and was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force during the Reagan Administration.  Until his retirement in January 2017, he was the national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.