A good friend of mine asked me a few days
ago if I thought it might have been better for the Republican Party’s long-term
prospects if Hillary Clinton had been elected president last year. I was very
much surprised to find that my immediate impulse was to pay the expected
partisan lip service to the utter irredeemable nature of a Clinton presidency;
to deny that anything good could possibly have come of it. My shock was made
all the more real by my realization that just about two years ago, I wrote in
this blog that it would require not one, but two terms of Clinton in the White House to turn the Republican
Party around. What’s craziest of all, though, is that when I examined my
feelings on that question further, I became absolutely convinced that I really
was wrong those two (long) years ago. Why? Because the Republican majorities in
Congress have, in a very short time, demonstrated that no election is going to
teach them how to actually govern. And even if they somehow got their act
together, the Democrats wouldn’t just decline to help them; they would actively
try to stop the GOP in its tracks. (And I don’t necessarily mean that last
statement as a condemnation.)
It all started with what I consider to be the
GOP’s biggest blunder so far in the Trump Era: the decision by leaders in
Congress to make fast-tracking an Obamacare repeal their first order of
business in the new session. Never mind that the replacement bill was under-baked,
unworkable, unsatisfactory, and wholly despised by everyone everywhere—the real mistake was in lining healthcare up as the
first legislative priority and then sprinting toward a vote without so much as
a water break. It truly astounds me that a party that had a front-row seat to
watch their opponents make the same mistake back in 2009 would turn around and
repeat it almost exactly upon returning to power. Let’s face it—the Democrats
paid a huge price for their decision to make healthcare reform their first
priority after President Obama came into office. They got what they wanted, but
successive drubbings in 2010, 2014, and 2016 have reduced their party’s
strength at all levels of government to historic lows. On paper, this is both a
triumph for Republicans as well as a roadmap for what not to do with their
newfound power. But, true to form, they just went ahead and did it anyway. I’m
sure I don’t need to tell you that not only did they waste a massive amount of
political capital, but they didn’t even get what they wanted in the first place. And what’s even more insane is that
their response was to float a worse bill that
is also in the process of falling apart.
The failure of Paul Ryan’s conference to
utilize its robust majority and actually get an Obamacare “repeal and replace”
package through the House is a stark illustration of how much more difficult it
is to be a governing party than it is to be an opposition one. And the
Republicans have never been much of a governing party to begin with. I’ve
railed before about their inability to learn from their electoral defeats—hell,
it took a phenomenon like Donald Trump
to simply begin the process of walking away from the mistakes of the Bush years—and
2016 will go down in history as being no different. After spending eight years
clamoring for Obamacare’s demise (the easy part), Republicans fell flat on
their faces when they actually tried to come up with a real plan to replace it
(the hard part). This isn’t wholly surprising—drafting an actual replacement
plan is actively against an opposition party’s interests. But what I can’t
forgive is the GOP’s utter unwillingness to get
serious about the healthcare debate.
I’d be willing to entertain a fleshed-out “market-based”
healthcare reform package, but I have no confidence that Congressional
Republicans are up to that task. Their refusal to take their time drafting a
bill is indicative of their inability to actually craft a workable one. They
were more concerned about escaping the corner they had boxed themselves into
for nearly a decade than actually trying to improve people’s lives. And I think
this boils down to the fact that the Party, so steeped in the philosophy of
austerity, simply can’t accept the fact that comprehensive healthcare reform
requires spending a boatload of money. Take Tom Price’s plan: it’s a solid
outline for a reform package, but (in my humble opinion) you’d have to shell
out as least five times as much money as it allots for tax credits in order for
it to be even remotely realizable. That’s just not a conversation the
Republicans are willing to have. And it’s a tragedy for me to watch a unified,
nominally conservative government stumble into these traps of their own
creation.
Meanwhile, in the Senate, Mitch McConnell
has killed the filibuster on Supreme Court
nominees. I’ll just go ahead and say that I think there is plenty of blame to
go around on this one—Republicans first cooked up the so-called “nuclear option”
because of Democratic obstruction of George W. Bush’s lower court nominees, but
it was Republican intransigence that led Harry Reid to ultimately go nuclear on
that count. Similarly, although the Democrats’ current partisan filibuster of a
Supreme Court nominee is a nearly unprecedented event, they’d be the first to remind you that Republicans refused to
even give Merrick Garland a hearing, let alone a vote. These are all valid
points, which leads me to conclude that everyone is wrong and both parties are
at fault, as usual.
I have very mixed feelings on what now
appears to be a party-line confirmation vote for Neil Gorsuch. I view Judge
Gorsuch (as do most conservatives) as an extremely capable and flawlessly pedigreed
candidate for our nation’s highest court. I actually agree with liberals who
characterize his views as outside the mainstream, but so were the views of the man
he would replace—a man who was himself a brilliant jurist and (in my view, invaluable)
conservative bulwark on the Supreme Court. Choosing a man like Judge Gorsuch to
succeed the late Justice Scalia maintains what I view as a nearly-ideal status
quo on the Court: four conservatives, four liberals, and a right-libertarian
swing vote. And so obviously part of me is quite pleased to see that Judge
Gorsuch’s path to the Supreme Court is assured.
But an equally significant part of me is
terrified for what this could mean in the future. What will happen when the
Democrats find themselves in power again? How many Supreme Court seats will be
up for grabs when that time comes? What exactly will Supreme Court nominees
look like in a world where only 51 (or even 50) Senators need to support him or
her? And the Democrats should be afraid, too—their unwillingness to make a deal
this time around has robbed them of their ability to even consider one next
time. They had better pray “next time” isn’t in the next four years.
And so, in what I’ve already said should
be a triumphant moment of unified Republican control of government, I find
myself discouraged and unengaged. I’m watching a party that can’t get its House
conference in order and has to make Faustian bargains in the Senate even when
their members are united. Add in a partisan environment that has done nothing
but grow more rancorous for the past decade, and the only thing I know for sure
is that the Republican Party has learned nothing from winning and would have
learned even less from losing. Ditto the Democrats, for whom the reality of
their own vulnerability clearly hasn’t sunk in yet. And all of this, of course,
is to say nothing of the creature in the White House. The Trump years are, I
think, predestined to be a train wreck. Sure, we got the “conservative”
majorities that we always wanted and the Supreme Court nominee of our dreams.
But, I can’t help but ask, at what cost?
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