Official United States Senate photograph of Sen. John Thune (R-South Dakota). Photograph by John Klemmer. Thune, the third-ranking Republican, doesn’t buy the notion that South Dakotans would be adversely affected by the Senate health care bill.

Sen. Mitch McConnell hopes to tweak the Senate health care bill so that he can submit it Friday to the Congressional Budget Office, the same Congressional Budget Office that torpedoed the bill in its current form when it announced that the bill would result in 22 million more people being uninsured by 2026.

That sent the Repubs into overdrive to get the bill revised in time for their Yankee Doodle break, because if anyone deserves a Fourth of July break, it’s hard-working Congress.

President Donald J. Trump got into the act by saying that the revised bill would contain a surprise, as if he were Daddy bringing home ice cream cake for his unruly brood.

We don’t need surprises, which tend to destabilize the stock market. We need health care.

Just 17 percent of Americans approve of the Republican health care plan, according to a new Marist poll. But the Republicans in Congress are acting as if they have a mandate from the people. (Of course they have. It’s called a $250,000 tax break for the 1 percent.)

When “PBS NewsHour” anchor Judy Woodruff asked Sen. John Thune of South Dakota – the third-ranking Republican – to respond to reports that 64,000 South Dakotans would be adversely affected by the Senate bill’s cuts, he said that his state had always run its Medicaid program in a cost-efficient way. Yes, that would be under the current Affordable Care Act, not under the miserly Republican reboot.

Honestly, these people seem to be suffering from stupidity, a disease for which there is no cure.