Earlier this year, as the Russia scandal heated up, a number of commentators bemoaned Washington’s “obsession” with the story. The Independent’s Andrew Buncombe, noting that “there remains no evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with the Russian government to influence the election,” wrote that “the Siberian Candidate theory is so dangerous is that it is a distraction from more pressing issues. Based on Trump’s first weeks in office, it is clear he is a threat to many things that Americans value.” That complaint persists on the left—and, in a different form, on the right. “Right now the distraction of all things Russia, and all things Trump-Russia, is distracting us from everything right now,” Senator Rand Paul told Reason last week. “I think it has been overplayed.”
As Vox’s Sarah Kliff reported on Monday, “Senate Republicans began to coalesce around the framework of a plan to repeal and replace [Obamacare] last week. Their plan would, like the bill the House passed in May, almost certainly cause millions of low-income Americans to lose coverage by ending the Medicaid expansion. It would help the young and healthy at the expense of the older and the sick.” Later that day, Axios reported that Republicans had no plans to release a draft of their bill. “We aren’t stupid,” a GOP aide said.
Come Tuesday, America’s four most influential papers featured stories about anti-government protests in Russia, Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s then-upcoming Senate testimony, and the possibility that President Donald Trump might fire special counsel Robert Mueller, who is leading the Justice Department’s Russia investigation—but nothing about Republican senators’ coalescing around a health care bill to deprive many millions of Americans of insurance.
So from a liberal perspective, while the Russia story isn’t precisely a “distraction”—the word implies there’s nothing to see here, which is false—it certainly has overshadowed other “pressing issues” that merit widespread attention, the most urgent of which is the Senate’s secret health care bill. From a GOP perspective, though, the Russia story is precisely a distraction—and Republicans are taking advantage of it by trying to sneak this bill through the Senate before anyone notices.
It's going to sneak through while they're still focused like a laser on Mueller and the self-assured knowledge that on this try, they're finally going to get him, destroy the Presidency, win the '18 election, impeach him and ride that wave of popularity to victory in '20...
Of course, by then, the tax cuts will have begun to take effect (they won't notice them either) and Pence will be reminding the voters,
It's all about the economy STUPID!
(As it was in '16, but Democrats never picked up on that because they kept telling themselves how great the economy was in their 146 counties where most of them live. Hat tip: VDH at NRO this morning)
