Sometimes, you have to wonder who really crafts the narrative down at Camp Runamuck. Apparently, the grift du jour is pretending that the administration*, and the Republican Party behind it, actually has a replacement plan ready to go if and when the Supreme Court scuttles the Affordable Care Act, which the Department of Justice last week announced it would no longer defend. There is no plan. There is no plan to create a plan. There is no plan to create a plan to create a plan. The administration*'s healthcare plan is a chimera. It's a Yeti. It's a sasquatch. Whatever "plan" eventually is trotted out will be 90 percent air.

The way I know this is because of the person the administration* has chosen to lead the fight for the "plan" which will never exist. It is the equivalent of hiring Bernie Madoff as Fed chair. From the Orlando Sentinel:

President Trump named Scott and fellow GOP U.S. Sens. John Barrasso of Wyoming and Bill Cassidy of Louisiana as his point people on Capitol Hill at a question-and-answer session at the White House. "They are going to come up with something really spectacular," Trump told reporters Thursday. Scott’s new role is a long way from his political origins in 2009 and 2010, when as one of the earliest critics of Obamacare, he launched ads arguing that pre-existing condition protections would cause premiums to skyrocket.

Yeah, so Senator Batboy is a hypocrite and is as completely insincere an advocate for genuine healthcare reform as can be found this side of Dr. Mengele. But those of us who have followed his rise closely know that his complete lack of credibility on the issue is based on more than his capacity to lie about what he's doing.

Scott also was the CEO of the hospital company Columbia/HCA in the 1990s, who resigned four months after a federal inquiry into the company was made public. The company was later fined $1.7 billion in 2000 and 2007 for what was then the largest case of Medicare fraud in history.

Sure, the president* is so committed to making the GOP the "healthcare party" that he handed his effort over to a guy who presided over a company that looted Medicare with both fists and a vacuum cleaner. Scott's company stole everything except the staplers and the break-room breadbox.

In a way, though, it doesn't matter that we once again face the epistemological conundrum of how many foxes have to be let into the henhouse before it is considered a foxhouse. The Republican plan for healthcare in this country will remain nothing, zip, bupkis. Scott will not produce anything because there's no constituency for an actual plan either in the White House or in the Republican Party. However, Nothing But The Best People will never not be funny.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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