Seth Meyers shines a light on Mitch McConnell's health-care bill hypocrisy
The health-care bill drafted by Senate Republicans finally emerged from behind closed doors on Thursday, and with its cuts to Medicaid to fund tax cuts for the rich, the plan is "breathtakingly cruel," Seth Meyers said.
On Thursday's Late Night, Meyers took a closer look at the bill, which Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) wants to have a vote on as early as next week, despite the fact that it was crafted during secretive meetings that were only open to a select group of Republicans. McConnell was "basically writing it by himself behind closed doors and nobody is ever doing anything good behind closed doors," Meyers said. "If your teenage son was locked in his bedroom this long, you wouldn't say, 'Hey buddy, are you doing extra credit homework in there?'"
Even people who were supposed to be writing the bill with McConnell were left in the dark; Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) was a member of the working group that was tasked with putting the plan together, but he said in a video earlier this week that he couldn't answer questions from constituents about it because he hadn't seen the bill yet. "Wait, you're supposed to be writing it and you haven't seen it?" Meyers exclaimed. "That's like your doctor saying, 'I think your liver transplant was successful, but I don't know, I was at the movies.'"
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Meyers also noted how interesting it was that back when ObamaCare was coming together, there were more than 100 hearings and months of debates, but McConnell complained every step of the way, saying things were moving too fast and nothing was transparent. He shared a medley of McConnell's greatest hypocritical hits from 2009 and 2010, and it's almost as if McConnell's accusations against the Democrats and ObamaCare were actually predictions of what he would be doing in 2017 — he said, among other things, that "the bill we're being asked to consider was assembled behind closed doors out of sight without input from the public" and "they're doing everything they can to jam this bill through, and they don't even seem to care anymore about how ugly it all looks." Oh, how times have changed. Watch the video below. Catherine Garcia
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Catherine Garcia is night editor for TheWeek.com. Her writing and reporting has appeared in Entertainment Weekly and EW.com, The New York Times, The Book of Jezebel, and other publications. A Southern California native, Catherine is a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
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