“I know this is a comedy show but I have some sad news tonight,” Stephen Colbert said at the top of his Late Show monologue on Tuesday. “As of 10:48 p.m. Eastern last night, the GOP health care bill was pronounced dead of terminal sucking.”
“It was always a long shot because the Republicans control only all three branches of government. Can’t be expected to do everything,” the host joked. “It is hard to overstate the level of failure here. The GOP crushed their car at 90 miles an hour into a cliff with a grin on their face. It’s like if Batman v. Superman took a Pontiac Aztek to Blockbuster to rent The Lone Ranger and watched it on LaserDisc. That’s how badly they failed.”
After playing a montage of Republican members of Congress hammering their “repeal and replace” message over the past several years, Colbert said, “It was your one job! It’s your tagline, it’s your motto, it’s Paul Ryan’s tramp stamp.”
But Colbert was not about to let the “chucklehead-in-chief” off the hook either. “Hey, remember two months ago when Trump and the GOP threw an old white guy party celebrating when the House passed their version of the bill?” he asked of the Rose Garden victory lap that looks even more ridiculous now than it did then. “‘Guys, we’re going to have so many chickens. Let’s start counting!’” he imagined the president saying. “Now, that celebration seems almost as embarrassing as Lyndon Johnson’s ‘Victory in Vietnam’ luau.”
“This is a good time to remind you that when they knew Barack Obama would veto it, the GOP voted more than 60 times to repeal Obamacare,” Colbert added. “But now that they can actually do it, they don’t have the balls. All those times they voted, they must have been yanking their own lever. But, now, when they have a Republican president, they can’t get their vote up.”
“So Trumpcare is officially deader than the people who would’ve been dead if Trumpcare had passed,” Colbert declared. “All their plans come to naught, all their promises are lies. And not just lies to the whole American public — specifically they lied to their voters and people who trusted them.”