Like a monster in some B horror movie, the trigger is a terrible idea that just will not die. I guess as long as you have a massive heath insurance lobby willing to spend millions to keep your pet creature alive, it will never truly meet its end. Tom Carper is now working with Olympia Snowe to bring back the trigger, which he has comically named the “hammer.”

Indeed she and Carper have discussed his plan, but she remains pessimistic that it’ll ever be adopted.

“Tom and I have been working on it, we’ve had discussions and so on, but, you know, we haven’t got down in concrete terms, and he’d like to have my affordability language and so on,” Snowe said. “But nevertheless it’s still going to require 60 votes so I don’t know when that would happen, and frankly I would have preferred that to happen at the outset of this process, rather than going through this convoluted procedural gymnastics.”

Carper’s worthless trigger is nothing more than a fig leaf to pretend that they did not kill the public option. But killing the public option has always been the whole point of a trigger. If someone opposes the idea of a public option for some reason, then they should be equally opposed the idea of a real trigger that would put the public option in place a few years later. The only reason politicians who oppose a public option claim to support a trigger is because they know the trigger will be designed to never be pulled. Supporting a trigger is therefore the same thing as completely opposing a public option.

The fact that Carper felt the need to give the “trigger” a new, stronger sounding, rhetorical name, the “hammer,” only proves how worthless it really is. The only hammer his proposal calls to mind is the bright blue hammer that comes in the Fisher price “laugh and learn toolbench.”