David Brooks excoriates GOP health-care fiasco: 'This bill is pure swamp'

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published 24 March 2017

Conservative commentator David Brooks had some harsh words for Republicans in his column Friday in The New York Times. Underneath a headline declaring the "Trump elite" to be like "the old elite, but worse," Brooks argued the GOP health-care bill is "not molded to the actual health-care needs of regular voters." "It was written by elites to serve the needs of elites," Brooks wrote. "Donald Trump vowed to drain the swamp, but this bill is pure swamp."

The bill, Brooks said, appears to have been written only because the new GOP leaders "needed something they could call ObamaCare repeal — anything that they could call ObamaCare repeal," and because President Trump "needed a win":

They were more concerned with bending, distorting, and folding the bill to meet the Byrd rule, an arbitrary congressional peculiarity of no real purpose to the outside world. They were more concerned with what this internal faction, or that internal faction, might want. The result was a pedantic hodgepodge that made no one happy. [David Brooks, via The New York Times]

While Republicans may feel caught between supporting party leaders and opposing a bill that's widely disliked and "bad for most voters, especially Republican voters," Brooks warned: "This bill takes the most vicious progressive stereotypes about conservatives and validates them."