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After seven years of Ryan harping about repealing Obamacare and Trump using it as one of the signature promises of his illustrious campaign, Trump and Ryan utterly failed to repeal and replace. It was so bad that Ryan pulled the bill off the floor of the House and told Trump it was a non-starter, that the bill would fail miserably.

Trump blamed the democrats which is ridiculous since they are a pretty pitiful minority in Congress and there were easily more than enough republicans to push the bill to the senate. It was the republicans themselves who killed the bill--particularly that part of the House known as the Freedom Caucus. These are the hardcore conservative representatives that opposed everything Obama proposed. They didn't wield great power under Obama and were largely symbolic but they have FAR more clout under a republican president and they know it. Today, they let Trump and Ryan have a good dose of it.

Trump and Ryan thought they had browbeat every republican rep into toeing the party line but they were wrong. The Freedom Caucus isn't even the tiniest bit afraid of either one of them. Funny to see the Freedom Caucus and the dems on the same side. But really, while the Freedom Caucus may be a bunch of pigheaded assholes, who could blame them for not endorsing this bill? Obama spent a lot of time putting the ACA together--well before he even announced a run for the presidency. He, Emanuel, Axelrod and other staffers went out and spoke to doctors, surgeons, nurses, hospital directors, pharma, medical suppliers, lawyers, insurance companies, patients, the disabled, etc. They worked 16-hour days 7 days a week on that bill trying to cover every base. Then they'd run it past consultants who suggested revisions and then they'd revise and keep doing this until most everybody was happy. Then they already had a working model to observe in action--in Massachusetts under Mitt Romney's governorship. By the time Obama got into office, he had invested years into crafting the ACA. By contrast, his opponents in Congress did no such background work. After 7 years, nothing. Then suddenly, they offer up a plan in 6 weeks??? Sorry, won't work! Who could they have talked to in that time the way Obama's team did? Nobody. Just a hastily thrown together pile of garbage. Hell no, the Freedom Caucus wasn't going to endorse that crap even if they supported a govt-run healthcare system, which they don't and never will.

The fault is squarely on Trump. He pushed and pushed for a fast replacement clearly not understanding the kind of work that has to go into crafting such bills. They tried to tell him it can't work that way but he didn't want to hear it. So they threw it together. What a joke! No way was any responsible congressperson going to vote for a piece of legislation that ill-conceived, ill-prepared and cynical. Down it went in white-hot flames and now the issue is dead-in-the-water. Obamacare is the law of the land and Planned Parenthood will not be defunded this time around. Aww, too bad!

Trump is now saying the ACA is "imploding" and soon to die anyway. My advice to him is this: DO NOT let it die! YOU will be held responsible. You can't watch it die and refuse to intervene or you are NOT doing your job and the People will let you know that in 2020--assuming you last that long which I seriously doubt. The People do not want a new healthcare system, they want you to plug any holes in Obamacare and keep it running. If you fail to do that, you will be called to account not Obama--YOU!! Part of me hopes Obamacare is dying. I will enjoy watching you and Ryan being forced to rescue it. Oh, how degrading that will be for you both!!!

And don't be so quick to slam the democrats, Mr. Trump. You will need them for any future endeavors you will be pursuing such as tax reform. Yes, you will be forced to compromise with them because they are not going to just let you do whatever you want but--hey!--you're Mr. Deal-maker! Work with it! The ones you can't work with is the Freedom Caucus because they are extremely pigheaded and unbendable. You have to do everything their way or no deal. The dems otoh will bend for you if you bend for them. The way you praise your deal-making abilities, that should be a piece of cake for you so start opening lines of communication to the dems and make nice. YOU need them; they don't need you. And your own party doesn't want to play and they ain't scared o' you!

Trump might start by offering an olive leaf to Mr. Obama. Oh, who am I fooling? He won't apologize. He never apologizes. He doesn't know how. He never takes blame. The failure of repeal and replace proves that. Besides, an apology to Obama over the wiretapping is too little too late. There are consequences for what he did and the die has been cast. The process will have to run its course. It has taken a toll on Trump already. He has lost a lot of cred and is not seen as trustworthy. When he says Obamacare will implode soon, should we believe him?? He lies about everything else, why not this too? And that's the essence of the problem. No one will take him seriously when there is a real national emergency for which prompt action is paramount. He stupidly threw away his political capital in one fell swoop and he has no one to blame but himself. Perhaps Robert Tulip will insist that this is a brilliant ploy of some sort but I think we are well past that now. Trump has cooked his own goose because he just can't stop running his mouth--or should I say his Twitter feed?

Then there is the Russian scandal. Is it real? I have to think it is. Devin Nunes has seemingly ruined his career over it and he may take Paul Ryan with him. This doesn't happen because there is nothing to the accusation. Take Benghazi. Hillary was getting lambasted by it but who threw themselves between her and her antagonizers to protect her? Nobody. Why? Because it was a made up scandal. Even a committee of republicans found her innocent. There was no crime or negligence could be hung on Clinton. There was no necessity for anyone to try and protect her. Yet, here Nunes learns something and goes first to Ryan who tells him to go to Trump and brief him about it. Now both men have to know that Nunes can't go and discuss Russian scandal evidence with the man that's being investigated by the very committee he chairs. On top of that, he spoke to nobody on the committee about it at all. That should be enough to get rid of Ryan and Nunes right there. Don't be surprised if Ryan resigns or is forced out in the coming weeks. Regardless of what Nunes learned--damaging or not--he had no business going to Trump and Ryan had no business telling him to do so. The committee is now tainted and John McCain's demand that this committee shut down and let an independent select committee take over is underway.

Basically, the wheels are coming off the Trump clown mobile. A lot of people are going to get hurt in the ensuing crash. Funny thing is, it's taking a lot longer than I expected.

I credit the Dems, for having the gonads to pass a bill (ACA) knowing full well the fall-out would be a loss of congressional seats. This week their gambit paid off. It seems the GOP was not willing to make the same risk.

I was at my Reps town hall several weeks ago, It did not go well for him. He had his supporters there but the over-all crowd was not his. There was push-back towards the GOP agenda and I think that should come as no surprise. My rep proved that for him there was no compromise. If that is an indication of the GOP in general then I think weeks like this past one, will be a common scene we witness coming out of the national capital region. The GOP is not even willing to compromise among themselves.

When it comes to their own skin the GOP isn't willing to risk a nick. 2018 looms large in their psyche.

The Republican exercise was ridiculous on several levels, I agree. Most obviously, the bill they came up with implicitly acknowledges that some features of Obamacare are what the people want, and these features require that the government be involved in enabling people without employer health plans to buy good insurance that they can afford. But the Republicans can't admit this, because to do that would be to credit the demon Obama with some good ideas, and to admit that healthcare delivery isn't best left to the free market to figure out. Considering the uncontroversial existence of the government-run systems of Medicare and the VA, why the Republicans continue to hold on to the delusion that we can't go down the "socialist" path of medicine is beyond understanding.

There are a large number of Trump voters who dodged a bullet with the failure of the Trump-Ryan bill. The bill would have been especially bad for many of them. They may not want to admit this, either, though, and so the disillusionment with their hero might be put off for a while. If much of the Trump budget and tax plan go through, those citizens will wake up quickly to the real nature of the "populist" they helped elect.

For 7 years Republicans made promises about repealing the Affordable Care Act, and today they could not deliver. They had 7 years to come up with their so-called ‘better way’ and now it turns out they’ve been bluffing all along.
- Linda Sanchez, Congresswoman

She put it very succinctly. It's flabergasting that after 7 years, they gave up after less than 3 weeks?

Remember when they sent that repeal bill to Obama and he vetoed it and they foamed at the mouth about it? Well, now we know it was all show. They not only knew Obama was going to veto it, they were counting on it. They didn't want it to pass. It was all show. Now with a republican president, they can't even get a bill to the senate much less to his desk--and let's be clear about this: that bill never would have made it out of the senate even if it had getten through the house.

Mr. Deal-maker was so eager to show everybody what a master of deal-making that he is that he pushed too hard and it fell through. Most presidents would learn something valuable about this but will Trump?

What most amuses me most was how his idiot supporters laughed and high-fived over the way Trump ignores decorum and the political rules of Washington and did it the way he wants to do it and doesn't care what anyone thinks: "Yeah! My MAN!!!" But that decorum and set of rules are there for a reason--they are time-tested, party-tested and they work. Whether they are good or fair makes no difference--ignore them at your peril.

Trump is like that rookie pitcher who goes out on the mound time after time his first season and shuts em down. He starts thinking, "What's so hard about this? Pffft! Piece o' cake, man!" And then the other teams start making adjustments in the off-season. They study the tapes, analyze the numbers, dissect his delivery and realize it's different from other pitchers but also easier to hit once you realize how it works. When the guy goes out on the mound again--BAM!--he gets walloped all over the place and they pull him in the 3rd inning. In start after start they keep having to pull him by the 5th inning and then send him packing for the minors. Suddenly, he's just a flash-in-the-pan. That's Trump. His iconoclast style may have helped him into the White House but now it's going to help right back out.

Heh well on your last paragraph Trump may be more like the rookie pitcher who bombs his shoulder in the first game and is out for the season.

This No Deal shows Trump's real estate deal making "skillz" do not translate to politics. He is used to negotiating with people who work FOR him or WITH him to either MAKE MONEY or get SCREWED by his lawsuits and bankruptcies. Modern hyper-partisan politics / legislation is nothing like that...

To make a deal in business, everybody at the table WANTS to make a deal. If they don't, you cut them out. They don't want to be cut out, that's why they are there--they want to make a deal. In politics, not everyone at the table wants to make a deal and you still have to put up with them. They are there whether you like it or not because voters put them there and if you can't appease them, they shut the deal down and walk away.

Trump showed not only no familiarity with the bill he was trying to get passed (one thing that killed him was that it was obvious to the reps he was trying to get on his side that he had NO knowledge of what was in the bill or how bills get passed), he shows no familiarity with the entire political system. He obviously thought the Freedom Caucus was his. It was not. He should have used his time as president-elect to make nice with the democrats and talk about unity and his empathy for a lot of what they want to accomplish and promise not to leave them out. But he did absolutely nothing during that time. He let the losers stew in their own juices and chuckled to himself--rubbed it in even. As I said, there are a set of rules in Washington that all presidents have followed because it works and that's one of them--make nice with your opponents while you are president-elect because you just might need them.

Then to blame the democrats for the defeat and bitterly laugh that it's Pelosi and Schumer who really lost not him shows me he is simply not very smart. When a president gets walloped, he always publicly admits it. When democrats lost the majority in '96, Clinton publicly said that was a real wake-up call and he was going to heed it. When the republicans lost the majority in 2006, Bush said publicly that they got shellacked. Never try to deny it when it happens. What does Trump do? He denies it. "It wasn't me who got his ass kicked! THEY got their ass kicked--haha!" No, stupid ass, you got seriously, seriously whacked by your own party and you better learn what that means but you won't because you don't learn.

Name a president in your lifetime who lost his first major piece of legislation. I can't. Until Trump. Clinton's legislation was harsh and bitter for the democrats. Clinton was raising taxes and slicing up their favorite programs. Clinton called them together and begged them to understand, "We have to get the spending down and the revenues up or were going to eat it in a few years time! We need to do this! And the silver lining of this dark cloud is, one we have a budget that's under control, the People will back us on whatever we want to do because we've showed them we're responsible! Whaddaya say? Don't leave me hangin' in the wind, fellas! I need this vote. WE need this vote. Work with me."

The dems HATED this legislation and didn't want to vote for it but they gave in. It passed by one single vote! that was all that was needed. The dems came together because if they left Clinton hangin' in the wind, they would have completely neutered his presidency. He would be done and gone in four years. Instead Clinton did two terms and left with a surplus on the books. In spite of his stupid womanizing, he will go down as one our better presidents and it was Congress that helped him get there.

By contrast, what did the republicans in Congress just do to Trump? And don't think they aren't aware of what they've done. They KNOW they just neutered his presidency--relegated it to irrelevancy. They just don't care because they also know he isn't worth a shit. The Twitter storms they all feared before have now been destroyed by Trump's incredibly stupid accusation of wiretapping by Obama. The public no longer gives a damn about his stupid tweets. He's just a childish little liar. Nobody's scared of him now. All the corporations that were scared of Trump's tweets also now don't care what he says now. they were walking on eggshells but they don't care now. He's wrecked his presidency. Even if he doesn't get impeached or forced to resign, he's done anyway.

My guess is now he gets forced out somehow and Pence is put in the big chair and he is much more a team player to get their agenda accomplished. But, as I said, this will be a rough four years no matter what.

in response to a reporter's question on his false claims of being wiretapped, Trump replied, "I'm president, and you're not." He's taking this "the rules don't apply to the president" thing to new and absurd heights.

This just in: the bill for travel and protection for Trump and his family is expected to be $525 million over his first term. Trump won't deign to use Camp David--too rustic and without any gold brocade, so he decamps to Mar-a-Lago almost every weekend at a cost to taxpayers of $3 million per trip. As Dana Milbank wrote, he "campaigned as a populist and governs as a plutocrat." It's disgusting, really. While campaigning Trump said he would rarely leave the White House, because there was too much work to do.

It seems to me, Trump decided Presidency was too much actual work, Dictatorship was undesirable because no one actually likes a Dictator, so he has settled on Monarchy. How does "King Donald" sound?!

Yeah, Trump has no idea how much work it takes to be a good president. He touted himself as the deal-maker and he's easily the worst deal-maker I've seen yet. His presidency gets more disastrous by the day. Now he's going after the Freedom Caucus for neutering his presidency and on his Facebook page there are a bunch of conservatives posting comments telling him he'd better lay off or they'll withdraw all their support. There are some cheering him on but most are warning him to leave the Freedom Caucus alone or face grave consequences in '18 even though the Freedom Caucus DID indeed sink the Trumpcare bill. So his presidency is nearing an end. I still can't see him lasting until the end of this term.