One of President Trump’s rare strengths has been his ability to project competence.
He promised a health care plan that would be “unbelievable,” “beautiful,” “terrific,” “less expensive and much better,” “insurance for everybody.”
.. the basic truth is that he’s an effective politician who’s utterly incompetent at governing.
.. If the administration can’t repeal Obamacare — or manage friendly relations with allies like Mexico or Australia — how will it possibly accomplish something complicated like tax reform?
.. One of the underlying problems is Trump’s penchant for personnel choices that are bafflingly bad or ethically challenged or both. Mike Flynn was perhaps the best-known example.
.. As Ana Navarro, a G.O.P. strategist, tweeted: “Donald Trump attracts some of the shadiest, darkest, weirdest people around him.”
.. I fear that his health care “plan” now is to suffocate Obamacare by failing to enforce the insurance mandate, and then claim that its spasms are inevitable.
He’s not delivering Americans from cynicism about government. He’s validating that dark assessment, with a huge assist from Paul Ryan and a cast of House Republicans who had consistently portrayed themselves as sober-minded, mature alternatives to those indulgent, prodigal Dems, if only they had a president from their party who would let them work their magic.
.. It was pushed on lawmakers not as essential policy but as essential politics: The president needed a win, and the party had to make good on an incessantly repeated pledge.
.. “Because we said we would” became the motivating force for the legislation.
.. In one Quinnipiac poll, only 17 percent of them said that they favored the emerging Republican alternative to Obamacare, while 56 percent opposed it.
.. That Trump isn’t good at details and follow-through comes as no surprise. Ryan’s miscalculations are the greater revelation.
.. “Convenient how Trump flips from an all-powerful master negotiator to well-intentioned simpleton duped by Snidely Ryan at the drop of a hat,” tweeted the conservative columnist Ben Shapiro.
Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) said the proposed House Republican health care legislation to repeal and replace Obamacare “is not what any of us promised we would do.”
Gohmert said, “It isn’t going to work. We’re told prices will probably go up 75 percent or so, but maybe in the third year, they may come down 10%. We’re told we should be thrilled we’ll give so much more power to the federal government to Health and Human Services under your bill. And they don’t have an answer for what about when it’s a Democrat in charge and not a Republican? And then, we were told it is based on a false premise. They lied to the president. They misrepresented to us.”
He added, “It is not what any of us promised we would do.”
In a stunning rebuke to House Speaker Paul Ryan, House Appropriations Committee chairman Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-NJ) announced his public opposition to Obamacare 2.0 on Friday morning.
.. The House Speaker almost never loses the Appropriations Chairman on major pieces of legislation. The fact Frelinghuysen is against the bill calls into question Ryan’s ability to lead the conference–including his own committee chairs–in the future on other pieces of legislation. It shows just how unpopular this legislation really is GOP-wide, and further demonstrates Ryan’s inability to bring together the different factions of the House Republican conference.
.. Now that Ryan has lost Frelinghuysen–the chairman of a powerful committee that controls government spending–it is highly unlikely Ryan will be able to deliver the votes on this. That means Ryan is delivering a loss to President Trump, after failing to control his members.