Earlier this week, I turned to the editorial page of the Houston Chronicle and saw this garbage from Marc Thiessen on the op-ed pages.
As a conservative, I'm thrilled by the arrival of unified Republican government. But the politician I'm most grateful to in Washington today is not President Donald Trump, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, R-Wis., or Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.
It's Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y.
That's because the Senate minority leader is doing more than anyone in our nation's capital to ensure the passage of the most conservative health-care and tax reform possible — while working overtime to make sure that Democrats who voted for Trump in 2016 stay in the GOP fold in 2018 and beyond.
The grand irony in all of this is that as I was reading it, Republicans’ attempts to enact “the most conservative health-care and tax reform possible” was falling apart before our very eyes, and Chuck Schumer, as the leader of the Democratic Caucus, had a lot to do with that. While Democrats’ tactics of opposition are similar to Mitch McConnell’s in 2009, the fundamentals at work were and are entirely different.
McConnell made an entirely political decision to oppose Democrats’ health-care reform (and, well, everything else) because letting Democrats pass the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act — now commonly known as the ACA or Obamacare — would give Republicans a convenient political cudgel to use against Democrats in the coming years. Of course, had McConnell been focused on governance and not politics, McConnell would have understood that Democrats had the votes to pass health care reform and that said bill would ultimately prove popular, so watering the bill down and making it more palatable to Republicans would have made some sense from the perspective of governance.
But as we’ve known all along, Republicans aren’t terribly interested in governing, and that was the (decidedly correct) calculation that Schumer and the Democrats have made this year. Why bother negotiating with Republicans when if you just hold tight, the Republicans will destroy the bill themselves? Schumer understood that Republicans had (a) a President who wasn’t terribly interested in the nuts and bolts of health care and simply wanted to say he repealed the ACA to tout the accomplishment, and (b) a Congress that was torn between the loons in the Freedom Caucus and an establishment that doesn’t particularly like the President, and also a handful of members in swing seats (including, arguably, the Speaker of the House) who weren’t about to die passing a bill that nobody wanted for a President who doesn’t care.
But even that misses a much more basic reality of the Republican Party for at least the past eight years, and probably much longer than that. The Republican Party of 2017 is interested in winning elections and thoroughly uninterested in governing. More fundamentally, the Republican Party is an opposition party and not a governing party.
I don’t mean this in the sense that they do not control the levers of government at present (they do), but the Republican Party has devolved into an institution whose only goal is to oppose everything liberals do, and said opposition is far more about winning in the ballot booth than it is about any real coherent set of policy goals. Repeal the Affordable Care Act? Send all the illegals back to Mexico? Destroy ISIS? Overturn Roe v. Wade? Privatize Social Security? Sure, why the hell not? Democrats like those things, therefore Republicans oppose them.
But what happens to an opposition party when there’s nothing left to oppose? That has always been the day of reckoning that Republicans have feared, and when faced with the choice to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Republicans are choosing the path of least resistance: to punt, and hope for a day when perhaps a Democrat will come along who’s dumb enough to shoulder part of the blame for getting rid of it. The American Health Care Act is failing, and so, too, will tax “reform,” the border wall, the Muslim ban, and every other fever dream that Republicans have campaigned on. Because at the end of the day, these things have to fail. If the border wall is built, Republicans know that either it doesn’t work and voters will blame them for its failure — or, it does work, and Republicans lose an issue on which they can demagogue voters.
Which brings us back to Trump. The GOP establishment’s embrace of Trump seemed weird at the time, but it makes sense now. On paper, a President Rubio or a President Cruz could have accomplished many of the things Trump is attempting to accomplish — but at the end of the day, Republicans don’t actually want to take away any of the things they’ve long railed against liberals about. Instead, the Republican establishment thinks it can have its cake and eat it too: the ACA remains as an issue that Republicans can use to rile up their base, and now, they can blame repeal’s failure on an interloper who was secretly a liberal anyway. And seemingly the only person who doesn’t realize this is Donald Trump.
And in 2024 — or 2020, if Trump is somehow not on the ballot — the Republican establishment will go back and tell the base that if you’ll just nominate a real conservative, they can roll back everything liberals have ever done.
Lather, rinse, repeat.