On health care, GOP lawmakers launch their own war on the press

On health care, GOP lawmakers launch their own war on the press
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Just days after receiving a round of bipartisan criticism for his tweets attacking Morning Joe cohost Mika Brzezinski on her appearance, President Trump took his war on the media to a new level by posting a gif image of himself body slamming an individual with the CNN logo superimposed over the person’s head.

In the coming days there will likely be another round of criticism from Republican lawmakers over this latest tweet, but there will be no withdrawal of support for the president or his domestic agenda — namely repealing and replacing Obamacare. Some Democratic senators, including Chris Murphy of Connecticut, believe that Trump’s tweets ultimately serve to distract the public from the Republicans’ deeply unpopular health care bill, which the Congressional Budge Office (CBO) projected will cause 22 million people to lose their health insurance.

Journalists have settled in on the tweets-as-distraction-from-agenda theory as well. When Meet The Press host Chuck Todd noted in a tweet that Trump’s tweets have overshadowed bad health care news “every day for the last week”, FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver replied that Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is probably relieved to have the media focus on Trump’s tweets than on the Senate health care bill.

The underlying premise of the ‘distraction’ theory seems to be that if the media were to focus on the health care bill more, Republicans would be forced to confront how bad it is. But whenever they are interviewed about the bill, Republican lawmakers and White House officials make blatantly false or misleading statements about its contents. Two weeks ago, Pennsylvania Sen. Pat Toomey told Bloomberg that the Senate version of the Republican health care bill would make the Obamacare Medicaid expansion in 31 states “permanent”, even though the federal government would significantly reduce the amount of money it pays towards the expansion beginning in 2021. States would be forced to foot more of the costs or end the expansion.

A week ago President Trump’s counselor Kellyanne Conway insisted during an interview with This Week host George Stephanopoulos that the Senate bill does not contain any cuts to Medicaid. While federal Medicaid spending would continue to grow under this bill, the CBO projected that it would not do so at the levels needed to maintain the current number of people covered by the program. As a result, an estimated 15 million people would lose Medicaid coverage by 2026.

All of the lies and misleading statements from Republicans following the release of the Senate health care bill continue a pattern of deceit established by House Republicans after their own version of the bill passed in May. A month earlier on the same news program where Conway appeared, House Speaker Paul Ryan even misrepresented the number of times the CBO had scored the bill that was eventually passed in the House. Rather than force Republican lawmakers to confront the cruelty of their health care bill, media scrutiny has emboldened them to attempt to discredit everything journalists say the bill does.

On the campaign trail, candidate Trump also made a habit of lying to journalists, then decrying “fake news” when any one of them challenged him on what he had said. Ned Resnikoff, senior editor at ThinkProgress, argued last November that the goal of Trump’s deception was not to hide the truth but to destabilize our sense of a shared reality — and ultimately our democracy’s ability to function. “When the truth is little more than an arbitrary personal decision,” Resnikoff wrote, “there is no common ground to be reached and no incentive to look for it.”

Republican lawmakers may not regularly engage in media-bashing the way Trump does, but the secretive and dishonest process by which they have tried to pass their health care bill has done just as much to delegitimize the press and its duty to report on their domestic agenda. By making the president’s pattern of lying a tactic of their own, they have shown the price for their donors’ tax cuts is our democratic norms.

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