The Senate health bill is a scathing indictment of the Republican Party

What does it say about the values and priorities of the people who wrote this monstrosity?

Republican senators.
(Image credit: REUTERS/Aaron P. Bernstein)

Too often, we think of politics as a game, losing ourselves in the personalities and the strategies and the winning and losing. But the reason it matters in the first place is that all of our lives are affected by politics, by who holds power and what decisions they make. And in those decisions, lawmakers reveal themselves. They show us what — and who — is important to them. Republicans and Democrats aren't just opposing teams, like the Yankees and Red Sox. They represent two alternate visions of the world and two very different moral systems.

While those contrasting moralities express themselves every day in ways large and small, every once in a while a party gets the opportunity to make a grand statement about what it believes. That's what Republicans in the Senate did this week when they released their version of a health-care bill. If you want to know what today's GOP is all about, you can find the answer woven through that bill's pages.

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Paul Waldman

Paul Waldman is a senior writer with The American Prospect magazine and a blogger for The Washington Post. His writing has appeared in dozens of newspapers, magazines, and web sites, and he is the author or co-author of four books on media and politics.