The Senate health-care bill is finally here—and surprise!—it doesn’t have as much “heart” as Donald Trump wanted it to.
In his “A Closer Look” Late Night segment Thursday, Seth Meyers described Trump as a president who “campaigned on populist rhetoric but whose policy would cause needless suffering for low- and middle-income people.” There’s “no better example of that,” the host added, than Trumpcare. After “weeks of secretive closed-door meetings,” Republicans in the Senate finally released their draft today “and somehow made the House bill even worse.”
“The process for writing this bill was so secretive that even the people who were supposed to be writing it had no idea what was in it,” Meyers added, including Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT), who admitted that he hadn’t seen it either. For those who are “genuinely appalled” by the bill, Meyers suggested they “actually do something about it” before Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell rushes a vote on it.
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On McConnell’s answer to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer as to whether there will be a hearing on the bill, Meyers said, “I think ‘We’ll have ample opportunity to read and amend the bill’ is the longest euphemism I’ve ever heard for ‘Go fuck yourself.’”
Meyers singled out McConnell for his hypocrisy about the Democrats’ far less secretive process for passing the Affordable Care Act back in 2009. “Republicans can hate Obamacare,” he said, “but they cannot argue that it wasn’t far more open, transparent, and inclusive than the process the Republicans are using now
“What we’re seeing right now is a breathtakingly cynical process to produce a breathtakingly cruel bill,” Meyers concluded.