How’s That?
Well, there we are. It took less than three weeks for us all to realize that neither the Republican party nor Trump are ready to govern. Their health care fiasco was the talk of the weekend, and fingers are being pointed every which way as culprits are sought and blame assigned. Naturally, Trump doesn’t take any of the blame onto himself. That’s just not his way: he hasn’t nurtured that TV persona of perpetual winning and ace deal making for nothing. Even though it is, apparently, patently absurd. Trump’s image as dealmaker in chief now lies in that dust alongside Ryan’s reputation as a wizard policy wonk and Congressional consensus builder.
Reality is a very difficult thing, especially so if, as the Republicans have done for years now, you can ignore it and succeed only in a world of pretense.
Perhaps most baffling is that the Republicans had no thought through policy in their arsenal as they went into the health care battle. A battle that they chose and that they began. They were remarkably unprepared to confront the realities of both legislation and of the details of health care policy making. Instead they trumpeted their alternative to Obamacare as being a lean and mean example of unbureaucratic planning. It weighed in at only sixty-six pages, of which about ten percent were devoted to the precise ways in which lottery winners were to be denied public assistance in their health care. Compared with the six to seven hundred pages of Obamacare the Republican plan was supposed to be a triumph of direct business like language and no nonsense decision making. Instead it was revealed to be a botched together ensemble of unrelated ideas that anyone could have cobbled together over a drink with friends at the local pub. It wasn’t a plan at all, it was a wish list that had no real central purpose, no coherence, and no constituency. It was doomed to fail from the outset as an orphan with no advocate. Amidst its rubble the Republicans are now revealed as a party under-prepared and poorly led. And, more the point deeply divided.
This point will loom large in the next few weeks as the Republicans seek to recover from this self-inflicted defeat. There is an extreme wing in the GOP party caucus that values ideological purity above action. It abhors compromise and believes that it was sent to Congress to lead the nation away from the corrosive effects of the “nanny” state back to some pristine and efficient market-driven world where each citizen genuinely gets the rewards he or she deserves. In such a world poverty is something you bring upon yourself through idleness, indolence, and the like. It is not a consequence of a systemic failure. Nor is it an outcome of upbringing, luck of birth, or lack of opportunity.
This hard line small government rump of politicians burnished its reputation in those opposition years by constantly haranguing Obama and by forcing votes along hard right lines. It never mattered whether those votes led to legislation, what mattered was only that the purity of ideological temperament was demonstrated and preened before radical voters. This is a great way to oppose. It is a shambolic way to govern. As we now know.
Worse for the Republicans, though, is that the ideological schism between that hard right group and a softer right — I won’t call it centrist — group now casts a long shadow over the governing party. As they move on from last week’s debacle and seek to undertake tax reform that sharp divide looms larger. How can Ryan, himself a member of the hard right at heart, produce a tax plan that caters to the two sides?
Already we have been given a glimpse of a possible rapprochement. One of the hard right leaders, Mike Meadows, has already signaled that he is not as opposed to “budget busting” tax reform as he might have been before. His hard line has hitherto been to enforce budget “neutrality” meaning that any new spending has to be offset by cuts elsewhere to ensure that the Federal deficit is not increased. Apparently he is now willing to back away from that requirement in the interests of party solidarity. He is thus channeling Dick Cheney from the Reagan years who famously argued that deficits don’t matter. Well, not at least when they are created by Republican tax giveaways to big business and the wealthy.
There are some elements of Ryan’s tax proposal that are already being heavily opposed by loyal Republican outside interest groups. The so-called border adjustment tax is especially reviled by a large and well-funded coalition of businesses all of whom fear a major tax increase because they are so import dependent. This group, plus any wavering deficit hawks, are likely to cause as much of a problem for Ryan as he tries to get his tax bill through Congress, as the hard right did during the health care disaster. So the odds are that whatever tax reform gets passed into law, if it gets that far, will be a hollow shell of an effort. It will most probably simply be a large tax cut for business and well off taxpayers. It will have little to no effect on the economy, despite the probable cheerleading from the White House, and will almost certainly contain nothing for Trump’s loyal voters.
But they ought to be getting used to being ignored by now.
How’s that for leadership and dealmaking?
