Useless, Good-For-Nothing Senate Votes to Defund Planned Parenthood and Repeal Obamacare 

The Senate, a group of itinerant time-wasters who assuredly relish the smell of their own farts, has voted along party lines to defund Planned Parenthood and repeal Obamacare. President Obama will veto the measure, and Senate Republicans lack the supermajority they need to overturn the veto. Thus making this—like most of what your Congress does—a vast, petty jerk-off gesture aimed at no one.

Senate Republicans have voted roughly eleventy-million times to repeal Obamacare, but today’s measure is the first in which they also attempted to tack on an amendment defunding Planned Parenthood, an entirely separate consideration. (The Senate voted 54-46 to block an attempted counter-amendment brought by Democratic Senator Patty Walsh, which would have prevented cuts to PP’s funding.) They knew they didn’t have the supermajority votes to overrule the President’s certain veto, though, meaning that this was a deliberate set-up designed to stoke conservative outrage in the lead-up to the 2016 election.

The White House issued a statement Wednesday saying, basically, “Go straight to hell” on the Obamacare portion of the vote:

“Repealing key elements of the Affordable Care Act would result in millions of individuals remaining uninsured or losing the insurance they have today. An estimated 17.6 million Americans gained coverage…The (bill) would roll back coverage gains and cost millions of hard-working middle-class families the security of affordable health coverage they deserve.”

Earlier today, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell looked downright giddy as he pretended this was a real vote that had more than a snowball’s chance in a furnace of getting anywhere:

The particularly amazing thing about this vote is its utter tone-deafness: the week after a deranged madman shot up a Planned Parenthood wouldn’t strike most people as an ideal time to jam this useless show vote through, but then, most people don’t have the impressive lack of taste, timing, and human feeling endowed to most members of the Senate.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, with the looming disembodied head of Texas Senator John Cornyn looming in the background. Photo via AP Images