Why the GOP just can't quit its ObamaCare suicide mission

Do Senate Republicans have a political death wish?

Do Senate Republicans have a death wish?
(Image credit: Illustration by Lauren Hansen | Images courtesy Orlando Florin Rosu / Alamy Stock Photo, iStock)

In the beloved 1993 comedy Groundhog Day, Bill Murray's weatherman is stuck in an endless time loop where he lives the same banal day over and over again. Eventually he decides to see if killing himself will allow him to escape from his temporal hell. He gets into a bathtub with a toaster. He steps deliberately in front of a truck. In an homage to Vertigo, he plunges artfully out of a clock tower. In another scene he reprises the denouement of Thelma & Louise by driving a truck off a chasm and plummeting to his presumptive doom. Yet each time, he wakes up undead in his rural Pennsylvania hotel room to the same aww-shucks radio morning crew driving him insane.

I can't help but think of Murray's will to self-obliterate every time the GOP tries to revive its regressive, fantastically unpopular ObamaCare repeal scheme, which Senate Republicans are trying to do once again with the so-called "Cassidy-Graham" bill, a monstrosity likely to throw even more people off their health insurance than previous iterations of the repeal effort.

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David Faris

David Faris is an associate professor of political science at Roosevelt University and the author of It's Time to Fight Dirty: How Democrats Can Build a Lasting Majority in American Politics. He is a frequent contributor to Informed Comment, and his work has appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times, The Christian Science Monitor, and Indy Week.