It isn’t all that often you see 217 allegedly intelligent men and women paint targets on their backs, put a noose around their respective necks, and then go the White House Rose Garden to celebrate having inflicted the greatest risk of their political lives upon themselves.

          It isn’t all that often, but it does happen, and it happened last Thursday, as the victors gathered to nervously reassure themselves they had not just signed their own political death warrants.

          The Twittermeister-in-chief, whose day job is president of these United States, gave a ringing endorsement to the passage out of the House of the American Health Care Act of 2017 (HR1628), by an overwhelming majority of one vote, demonstrating once again the depth of his knowledge of the legislative process. The vote is only the first step. Essentially, all those 217 Republicans had done was pass a hot potato along to a Senate that wasn’t all that enthused about receiving the potato, hot or otherwise, in the first place.

          And who can blame them?

          The original version of this bill had an approval rating of around 17 percent. The legislation it was intended to “repeal and replace,” the Affordable Care Act, according the Gallup polling folks, currently has the approval of a majority of Americans. When the original version of the bill was scored by the Congressional Budget Office, that independent organization opined that, should it be enacted into law, 24 million Americans would lose their health insurance over the next decade. The proposal stripped out most of the revenue-enhancing content in the ACA necessary to fund its operations. It failed to adequately safeguard some of the more popular features of the so-called “Obamacare,” doing away with lifetime caps on coverage and prohibiting denial of coverage on the basis of “pre-existing conditions.”

          Not to beat a horse that should be long since dead, the original version could not attract enough votes to pass, and so was withdrawn from consideration.

          Rather than allow this abomination to quietly molder away, Republican leadership in the House, aided and abetted by the incumbent tenant at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, in desperate need of a “win,” decided to double down and resurrect the AHCA for one more try.

          This time, they went, hat in hand, to the so-called Republican Freedom Caucus to cut a deal. The Freedom Caucus has little to do with freedom, other than the freedom to obstinately obstruct with predictable, and often mind-blowing, regularity. These ultra-conservative commandoes had opposed the original version for not being draconian enough. The price of their support was to turn a bad bill into something even more twisted – a transfer of wealth from older Americans, middle- and low-income Americans, and Americans with pre-existing conditions, to insurance companies, the already wealthy, and 21-year-old non-smoking hard bodies on a Mediterranean diet eligible to form a risk pool acceptable to the health insurance industry.

          Let’s be clear. Very little about any of this has to do with the future physical health of the American people. It has a whole lot to do with current Republican politics and the dystopian view of the world currently espoused by its leadership.

          Most of those folks whistling past the graveyard on the White House lawn last Thursday have been running since 2010 on the promise that, once in power, they would do away with the Affordable Care Act on Day One, or Day 105, or whatever day Thursday was on the presidential bulletin board.

          The Affordable Care Act is not perfect. It needs significant revision. It can be made better. But that’s not what is of concern to the folks in the Rose Garden. The fact the ACA is increasingly acceptable to more and more Americans is, likewise, irrelevant, even though it means the facts on the ground have materially changed since the ACA’s less than perfect launch.

           The real concern to these 217 lemmings is that they can now point to their vote last Thursday as a fig leaf to avoid being attacked in the 2018 primaries by challengers even further to the right than they are themselves.

          It may work. It may not.

          All in all, their vote has more to do with selfish self-interest than it does with the well-being of average Americans.

          This should not be forgotten in the months ahead.