Senator McConnell speaks the truth on the conservative agenda

A guest host was sitting in for Rachel Maddow tonight on her show. He went into why he likes Senate minority leader McConnell because he doesn't beat around the bush with the usual highfalutin conservative spin machine that attempts to make out their agenda as something it is not. He gets to the point and makes no bones about their real agenda. For example, in October 2010 he said: "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term President." This agenda has been carried out to the letter, with Republicans thwarting every bill and idea, even ones they themselves created. Including many of the elements of the Affordable Care Act, like the mandate.

In January 2011 McConnell again told it like it was: "We worked very hard to keep our fingerprints off of these proposals, because we thought...that the only way the American people would know that a great debate was going on was if the measures were not bipartisan." Hence despite whether they agreed with any element in a bill, every their own proposals, he led his faction to not sign on to any of it. This would create the sense that the President was the partisan, despite his bend over backwards efforts to compromise with them. Whereas in reality it was the conservatives that were so partisan as to accept no compromise whatsoever.

Then he highlighted McConnell's interview with Fox News last weekend (previously discussed) where again he revealed their agenda. When asked repeatedly about the Republican plan to replace the Affordable Care Act and how it would deal with the 30 million uninsured the ACA addressed, McConnell replied: "That is not the issue. It is already the finest healthcare system in the world." It is clear they don't want to change it much.

This theme was reiterated by House majority leader Eric Cantor said last Friday that their current replacement plan was what they already suggested back in 2009. So the host downloaded this plan (HR 3962) and it is minor tweaks to the system as it was before the ACA. And these tweaks do not address the issue of covering the currently uninsured. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that this plan would have covered by 2019 about 3 million of those currently uninsured, compared to the 30 million the ACA will cover.

McConnel was right again, that the uninsured is not the issue and they pretty much like things the way they were before the ACA. Is that good enough for the rest of us?