How messed up are Trump Supporters?

[Angrboda]

Selective memory loss is spreading, and it has become a necessary pre-condition to run as a Republican this year

Is selective memory loss a preexisting condition?

Embattled incumbent Rep. Bruce Poliquin (R-Maine) stands accused of voting against health care for more than 100,000 Mainers. “To clarify,” a reporter for the local ABC affiliate asked Poliquin recently, “did you vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act?”

“No,” Poliquin said. “I voted for a replacement plan.” He went on to claim he was “one of three Republicans in the country” against repealing Obamacare without a replacement.

Alas for Poliquin, the image on screen switched to the House floor, with a voice-over: “Poliquin did vote for the ACA repeal bill.”

Indeed, Poliquin helped the American Health Care Act, the repeal bill even President Trump later described as “mean,” clear the House by four votes. It would have weakened protections for those with preexisting conditions.

It wasn’t Poliquin’s first attempt at airbrushing his past. His website, which in 2016 promised to “end Obamacare,” has now struck that language in favor of “protecting our hospitals and healthcare access.”

Poliquin is part of an elaborate attempt at a midterm hoax: Republicans convincing the public that they did not try to repeal Obamacare and its preexisting-conditions protections, and that they would again not do so if reelected.

With the Affordable Care Act hitting record support in a recent Fox News poll , and preexisting-conditions protections remaining overwhelmingly popular, congressional Republicans have recently sought inoculation by introducing various proposals they say would protect people with preexisting conditions. And they are vigorously scrubbing their records, according to archived versions of their websites reviewed by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Rep. Tom MacArthur’s (R-N.J.) site last year vowed: “Tom will work to repeal Obamacare, but won’t stop there.” Now? “Tom opposed his own party’s efforts at a speedy Obamacare repeal.”

Rep. Ted Budd (R-N.C.), in 2016, had a pledge: “I will do everything I can to repeal every word of Obamacare.” That passage is now repealed from his website.

Rep. Leonard Lance’s (R-N.J.) website, in 2016, boasted that “Lance is on the front-lines in the fight to repeal and replace Obamacare.” Now, that same passage has been rewritten: “Lance is leading the fight for real Health Care Reform.”

Their problem: Of the 73 incumbent House Republicans in competitive races, 67 voted at least once to eliminate Obamacare’s protections for those with preexisting conditions, according to an analysis by the liberal Center for American Progress Action Fund.

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Similar cases have been reported in California, Kansas, Iowa, Illinois, Minnesota, Virginia, Pennsylvania, Indiana, Montana and North Dakota. This raises a frightening epidemiological possibility: Selective memory loss is spreading, and it has become a necessary pre-condition to run as a Republican this year.

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In Texas, where he is trying to beat back a well-financed challenge by Democratic Rep. Beto O’Rourke, Sen. Ted Cruz said in a debate Tuesday that he would “protect preexisting conditions.” Cruz forced a government shutdown in 2013 over his effort to repeal Obamacare.

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The actions of Republicans, including the president, before this election year have not matched their rhetoric over the past few weeks.

For more than eight years, their greatest and most unifying party rallying cry has been repealing Obamacare. When the House passed legislation to do just that, Trump invited Republican members to the White House and celebrated with them in the Rose Garden. (An early sign of Trump’s current positioning came only weeks later, when the backlash from the public intensified and he called the House measure “mean.”)

After Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) voted “no” on repealing the ACA, effectively killing the GOP’s chances to make good on a years-long promise, Trump began deriding him at rallies, a rhetorical device he has continued to use after McCain’s death.

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“The irony is that what allowed the House to pass [the repeal bill] was a proposal to weaken protections for preexisting conditions. This was not an obscure part of the debate,” said Larry Levitt, senior vice president for health reform at the Kaiser Family Foundation.

Washington Post || Republicans race to back protections for preexisting conditions, after trying for years to gut the law that created the protections