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As the Senate races to deliver its mystery health-care bill before anyone- including the Senators who must vote on it- can study its contents, let’s consider how far outside the norms of governance this is. Set aside the policy questions and think about the process: Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell decided to bypass the regular order of committee hearings, mark-up, floor debate, opportunities for Senators to offer amendments, and scoring by the Congressional Budget Office, and opt instead for a bill drafted in secret by a small group of Senators to proceed directly to a floor vote. The irony is that Republicans have often decried the “top-down” approach of having the Federal government determine policy for the states; McConnell has gone one step further, to “tip-of-the-top-down”. The Founders’ vision of the Senate as a deliberative body has been unceremoniously replaced by the grotesque image of our elected officials engaged in a cynical orgy of virtual fellatio of wealthy donors and special interests.

Another shibboleth of Republican orthodoxy is that the “states are the laboratories of democracy”, the locus of trial-and-error policy-making. This is the Federalist position, heard most recently as the counter-argument to Democratic policies during the Obama Administration. GOP messaging about the primacy of state governments has ranged from false claims of Federal bureaucrats making personal health-care decisions to (and this is among my favorites) the U.S. Army’s 2015 exercise, Operation Jade Helm, being a pretext to impose martial law on Texas.  

So, it is a further irony that a bipartisan group of governors (six Republicans, seven Democrats) are making the contravening argument to the McConnell-care bill. Earlier this week, acting under the aegis of the National Governor’s Association, they released a statement detailing their priorities for health-care reform. These include strengthening the State-Federal Partnership, stabilizing private markets, maintaining Medicaid expansion, and dealing with public health issues. The ultimate irony is that none of these governors were given the opportunity to testify before a Senate committee.

Perhaps the Senate should be investigating who put the plug into that drain in the swamp.