McConnell: If Trump wants to make the GOP the 'party of health care,' he's more than welcome to author the plan

It’s tempting to say, hey, you can’t really blame McConnell for not wanting to get caught up in this wrestling match again.

Trying to tackle health care brought nothing good for congressional Republicans in 2017, after all. If the White House wants SCOTUS to throw out ObamaCare in its entirety and kick the issue back to Congress, why would the Republican majority in the Senate want to go through another cycle bogged down with the same issue, especially with a difficult Senate map coming in the 2020 elections?

But when the nation is stuck with bad and/or unconstitutional laws, unless I missed something somewhere it’s the job of Congress to fix that. Don’t want that job? Don’t become Senate Majority Leader. Yet McConnell sure doesn’t sound like he wants it:

Mitch McConnell has no intention of leading President Donald Trump’s campaign to transform the GOP into the “party of health care.”

“I look forward to seeing what the president is proposing and what he can work out with the speaker,” McConnell said in a brief interview Thursday, adding, “I am focusing on stopping the ‘Democrats’ Medicare for none’ scheme.”

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The Senate majority leader spent untold weeks and months on the party’s health care quagmire in 2017, when the GOP controlled both the House and the Senate and still failed to repeal Obamacare. The episode caused endless headaches for Republicans as their replacement plan fell apart first, followed by the so-called “skinny” plan they slapped together at the last minute.

Now in divided government, with the Senate majority up for grabs next year and McConnell himself running for reelection, another divisive debate over health care is the last thing McConnell needs. But that’s exactly where Trump is taking Republicans after his administration endorsed a wholesale obliteration of the law in the courts earlier this week.

So the Kentucky Republican and his members are putting the onus on the president to figure out the next steps.

So sorry another health care debate is “the last thing McConnell needs.” The last thing the country needs is to keep living under the dumpster fire that is ObamaCare.

There is a lot of sentiment among establishment Republicans that this is a no-win fight, and that it’s better to let Democrats own health care by yammering on about single-payer. Not only does that reveal their true socialist tendencies (as if that was much of a mystery to anyone anymore), but it also reveals that even they know ObamaCare isn’t good policy and isn’t working.

Because if it was, why would they want to replace it with something else? (The answer to that, of course, is that their standard isn’t whether something is working, but whether it maximizes government power over everything that happens in the country.)

So sure, let Democrats own health care, slam their ideas, and maybe you’ll manage to keep the Senate and win back the House. But what good does that do if, once you’re back in control, you still don’t want to take on health care because it’s a “divisive issue” and you see it as a political loser? What exactly is the reason we’re all trying so hard to put you back in complete control of Congress, if you’re not going to fix the things that need to be fixed?

This is the same reason a lot of conservatives aren’t happy with the Trump Administration siding with the 20 Republican state attorneys general who want ObamaCare completely thrown out. If SCOTUS actually does it, then you force Congress to tackle health care again, and that gets politically messy.

Fine, but the problem is that ObamaCare actually is unconstitutional and deserves to be thrown out. It’s not the Supreme Court’s job to only deal with such things when it’s politically palatable for the party with which its majority aligns ideologically. The Supreme Court’s job is to protect and defend the Constitution, and leaving ObamaCare in place to spare Mitch McConnell and election-year headache is not consistent with that.

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As it stands, I’m sure Trump and his policy team will come up with some sort of proposal. We had better pray it’s led by the brighter lights in the administration who understand free-market economics, lest we end up with yet a different take on the same ideas that make ObamaCare such a disaster.

But we already know Mitch McConnell doesn’t want to do the work, so let’s skip the fruitless task of convincing him and move on to someone who really wants to make health care better.