What was the rush to pass the Republican “health care” plan?

…the GOP didn’t want to let a detail like tens of millions of people losing their health insurance get in the way of two tax cuts for the rich.

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Anyone, you see, can pass a tax cut that expires after 10 years. But if you want to make it last — and you don’t have 60 votes in the Senate — then you need to find a way to pay for it (or at least look like you did). Taking health insurance away from poor and sick people would have done just that for the Obamacare taxes, which primarily hit people in the top 1 or 2 percent.

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Now, the crazy thing is that this first tax cut for the rich (in the form of Obamacare “repeal and replace”) would have made a second one (this one coming in the form of “tax reform”) look more affordable.

Huh? Yep. If you want to make tax cuts permanent you have to show you won’t lose tax revenue beyond ten years out. The thing is, though, if they’d cut the ACA taxes by the $1 trillion they wanted to then that trillion wouldn’t have to be compensated for when calculating whether the tax revisions lose money in the 10-year window.

It’s abstruse and it has to do with parliamentary rules in the Senate, so I imagine that SOB McConnell could try to change them if he really wanted to do so, but the Democrats would surely have made even more of a fuss if he did.