Kamala Isn't The Only Phony Opportunist Pretending To Back Medicare-For-All Without Even Knowing What It Is

Ben Ray Luján is running scared. This week he "broke" with Pelosi, his puppet-master, and suddenly called for impeaching Trump. Over the course of the last month or so, he also broke with her on the Green New Deal and Medicare-for-All. And he says he will no longer accept the corporate bribes that have funded his worthless political career. Did Ben Ray Luján, one of Congress' most mediocre, achievement-less members, have a revelation that has turned him into a progressive? He may have had a revelation-- but nothing will ever turn him into a progressive. The revelation was that New Mexico Secretary of State Maggie Toulouse Oliver is going to win the open U.S. Senate seat he wants to step into. Luján is a favorite of Pelosi's and Schumer's and the transpartisan DC establishment. He's the kind of zombie-politician who does what he's told and never rocks the boat and doesn't have an idea in his head. But back in New Mexico, he was on the wrong side of every important issue. He panicked when he realized being a DC Establishment munchkin doesn't win elections in his home state. He read through Oliver's position papers and tried coopting every single thing. Pramila Jayapal was so excited he co-sponsored her Medicare-for-All bill that he previously ignored and refused to back that despite a record as a dull, robotic conservative, she actually endorsed him over Oliver. Yes, Washington DC politics can change people, apparently even someone like Jayapal.

There was a flurry of commentary this week after Kamala's Harris' most prominent trait-- her sheer and overwhelming inauthenticity-- leaked out into the media. Headline: Kamala Harris is telling wealthy donors something different about Bernie Sanders' Medicare-for-all plan. With polling numbers tanking badly, voters seem to have caught on to what kind of a politician Kamala Harris is. One word: opportunist. Maybe she should have been an actress instead of a politician. Tim O'Donnell wrote that "It's still a little unclear exactly where Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA) stands on Medicare-for-all."

At a fundraiser in the Hamptons this weekend, Harris told a crowd of wealthy donors that she isn't "comfortable" with the health care plan espoused by her Democratic presidential primary opponent Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), which Harris once co-sponsored. She did maintain, however, that she is still supportive of Medicare-for-all at large, adding a little more confusion to her policy position.

"I think almost every member of the United States Senate who's running for president and many others, have signed on to a variety of plans in the Senate," she reportedly said at the fundraiser. "And I have done the same. [A]ll of them are good ideas, which is why I support them. And I support for Medicare-for-all. But as you may have noticed, over the course, I've not been comfortable with Bernie's plan, the Medicare-for-all plan."

As recently as April of this year, Harris' office sent a press release saying she had joined Sanders in introducing the Medicare-for-All Act of 2019. So, considering the audience Harris had over the weekend, it might have seemed as if she was backtracking as a result of "political convenience," but her campaign assured the Daily Beast that she reached her current conclusion after having worked on the issue more. Harris does have her own formal health care plan now which aims to phase in Medicare-for-all over the course of a decade and seeks to avoid middle-class tax hikes as a method for funding.

This, presumably, caused the Washington Post's Jeff Stein to tweet, cynically, "What percentage of the Democrats who co-sponsored either the Sanders or Jayapal Medicare-for-all bills would actually vote for them? I would put it at close to 50 percent."

Let's leave the mysterious Senate cesspool-- where everyone thinks they're going to be president someday-- out of this and stick to the House, first in terms of the Jayapal bill and then some other egregious examples. H.R. 1384 is Jayapal's Medicare-for-All bill. It was introduced on February 27 with just over 100 original co-sponsors. Most of them enthusiastically back the bill, the best version of Medicare yet. It includes dental, vision, hearing and mental care and extends Medicare gradually to people under the age of 65 and fixes the disgraceful Medicare Part D pharmaceutical program that was tacked onto Medicare by the GOP to cheat consumers and benefit the party's drug-making donors. In that first group are strong longtime healthcare advocates like Barbara Lee (D-CA), Jim McGovern (D-MA), Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), Ro Khanna (D-CA), Bobby Scott (D-VA), Ted Lieu (D-CA), Jose Serrano (D-NY), Jamie Raskin (D-MD), Raul Grijalva (D-AZ), Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-NJ), Maxine Waters (D-CA), Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX), Judy Chu (D-CA), Mark Takano (D-CA), Matt Cartwright (D-PA), David Cicciline (D-RI) and Jerry Nadler (D-NY), as well as a number of freshmen who ran on Medicare-for-All last year, like AOC (D-NY), Rashida Tlaib (D-MI), Ilhan Omar (D-MN), Ayanna Pressley (D-MA), Andy Levin (D-MI), Joe Neguse (D-CO), Deb Haaland (D-NM), Katie Porter (D-CA), Chuy Garcia (D-IL), Veronica Escobar (D-TX), etc.Jahana Hayes (D-CT).

It's not always easy to assign motives to people but I will say that some pretty conservative members either with or fearing primaries also were original co-sponsors:

• Eliot Engel (New Dem-NY)
• Mark Veasey (New Dem-TX)
• Tim Ryan (D-OH)
• Adam Smith (New Dem-WA)
• Jimmy Panetta (New Dem-CA)
• Carolyn Maloney (D-NY)
• Brian Higgins (D-NY)
• Ed Perlmutter (New Dem-CO)
• Gregory Meeks (New Dem-NY)

After the original co-sponsors, a few more trickled in in March, April and May. Luján asked to be put on the list in June when he saw sky-high polling numbers in New Mexico and realized Maggie Oliver was a real threat. A couple of weeks ago, another corrupt conservative Dem-- with a primary from the left-- Juan Vargas signed on as well.

Let's look at David Cicciline's bill to ban the sale of assault weapons, H.R. 1296. It was introduced a week or two before Jayapal's Medicare-for-All Act and came too life with 190 original co-sponsors. That's HUGE-- and it it included not just progressives but even some pretty conservative Blue Dogs from the Republican wing of the Democratic Party, members like Max Rose (NY), Stephanie Murphy (FL), Charlie Crist (FL), Jim Costa (CA), Dan Lipinski (IL), Jim Cooper (TN), Mikie Sherrill (NJ), Ed Case (HI), Lou Correa (CA).

The bill sat there, languishing in committee with no hearing scheduled, for months. Between February and the 3 right-wing domestic terrorist massacres in Gilroy, El Paso and Dayton the bill seemed dead-- on orders of Pelosi-- and with just one single new co-sponsor. Then a half year later came the massacres. During the summer recess 10 members who had chosen not to sign on started called Cicciline and telling him they were co-sponsoring the bill including unlikely champions like New Jersey Blue Dog Josh Gottheimer. The bill even picked up it's first official Republican co-sponsor, Peter King (NY).

The bill could be passed by the House in an hour if not for Pelosi, who is now slow-walking it to death so that some of the cowards in the freshman class who are both afraid to vote yes and afraid to vote no, don't have to commit themselves. This is not just immoral; it is also idiotic losing strategy since this is exactly what voters want to see passed. Has Pelosi has lost her mind? Or are some of these members just on the list of co-sponsors for appearances' sake? Maybe a few-- like perhaps Tennessee Blue Dog Jim Cooper-- but the conservative Democrats I've spoken to have told me that, unlike in the cases of Medicare-for-All and the Green New Deal, this is not an example of co-sponsoring just for the sake of avoiding a primary or anything or the sort. Pretty much everyone who signed on-- all 210 members want to vote YES on this bill. Pelosi is screwing up but pushing the weak background checks bill first and leaving this much more significant bill as an after-thought that the House Judiciary Committee will consider a few weeks later, presumably when emotions over the most recent spate of shootings has died down. This is another one that will never be voted on in the Senate and never have to be vetoed by Trump, who has now stopped bloviating about pushing for a bill to protect Americans from gun violence.