House Freedom Caucus chair admits GOP has bupkis, demands full, immediate repeal anyway

Over at CNN, MJ Lee reports that the Republican natives are getting restless:

Republicans begin to grumble: Why haven't we repealed Obamacare yet?

...The sentiment is beginning to simmer within the influential conservative wing of the Republican Party and hints at what could be the opening of an intra-party rift as the GOP's mission to overhaul the country's health care system appears to be losing steam.

...That shift in tone has irked other Republicans who are eager to take a swift vote to roll back as much of Obamacare as possible. Their fear: their conservative constituents back home won't settle for anything else.

"For goodness sake, we should be able to put something on President Trump's desk that's at least as good as what we put on President Obama's desk. Not something watered down," Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told CNN in an interview. "Let's repeal it. Let's do what the voters sent us here to do."

Their "fear" took on more validity the other evening when Donald Trump himself basically admitted that they're gonna be treading water until 2018 at the earliest:

President Donald Trump said the process for coming up with a replacement for the Affordable Care Act could stretch into 2018, a longer time frame than he previously indicated.

Trump’s comments came in an interview with Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly that aired on Sunday during the Super Bowl pregame show. O’Reilly asked the president whether he would introduce a health plan this year to replace Obamacare, which Trump has long vowed to quickly repeal as one of his top priorities.

“Maybe it’ll take till some time into next year, but we are certainly going to be in the process,” Trump said in the interview. “I would like to say by the end of the year, at least the rudiments, but we should have something within the year and the following year.”

Of course, when it comes to Trump, anything he says now could easily change 5 minutes later, so who the hell knows?

This is the part of the CNN story which really caught my eye, however. Mark Meadows is the chair of the "Freedom Caucus", basically the ultra-Tea Party wing of the GOP:

"I don't know that there's any new revelations that are going to come up by waiting 60 to 90 more days," Meadows said. "We're making the whole idea of repeal and replacement far more complex and laborious than it needs to be and I think it's time that we just make some decisions and move forward with (the repeal bill)."

On considering anything less than what was voted on in 2015, Meadows quipped: "You don't get any credit with any of your constituents if you do that."

As I noted a week ago, the Republican Party is finally starting to realize that when it comes to a real replacement for the ACA, they don't have a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of. That's why they're scrambling to come up with something, anything that resembles a coherent "plan" and can't even decide on which word to use to describe whatever it is anymore.

But that's not gonna stop Rep. Meadows, no sirree!!

"So what if pushing 20-30 million people out of an airplane without a parachute is a terrible idea! So what if most of them are the ones who voted for us! They demanded that we push them out, so by God, let's do so!! That way they'll "give us credit" as they plummet to the ground!"