If Republicans can’t get their act together, they will pay at the polls.
.. Republicans reputedly control majorities in both houses of Congress. A GOP chief executive itches to deploy his signature pen. Regardless, senators from President Trump’s own party concoct excuses to avoid forwarding bills to his desk
.. The free-market, conservative movement is blessed with hardworking, dedicated, and idealistic (in the best sense) donors, scholars, opinion journalists, broadcasters, and activists. Alas, we are doomed by flaccid, nearly non-existent congressional leadership, “so-called Republicans” (in President Trump’s words) who crave big government, and libertarian utopians who — on too many issues — will reject significant policy improvements while demanding nothing less than a live-action version of Atlas Shrugged.
.. The free-market, conservative movement is blessed with hardworking, dedicated, and idealistic (in the best sense) donors, scholars, opinion journalists, broadcasters, and activists. Alas, we are doomed by flaccid, nearly non-existent congressional leadership, “so-called Republicans” (in President Trump’s words) who crave big government, and libertarian utopians who — on too many issues — will reject significant policy improvements while demanding nothing less than a live-action version of Atlas Shrugged.
.. he should have yanked their committee assignments. This perfectly illustrates McConnell’s problem: He is neither loved nor feared. He is barely respected. Mainly, he is disregarded
.. The end of reconciliation means that any new repeal-and-replacement bill will need 60 votes, rather than 51. The need to recruit at least eight Democrats to push a new healthcare bill over the filibuster threshold will move it, ipso facto, to the left of GCHJ. Perhaps Rand Paul and Ted Cruz can explain how this would advance capitalism and freedom.
.. “Collins’ state would have received a 43 percent increase in federal healthcare funding” from GCHJ, health-policy expert Betsy McCaughey of the London Center for Policy Research tells me. “She was cowed by the rhetoric and demagoguery.”
.. McCain left intact a calamitous law that lacked bipartisan support and jacked up the average Arizonan’s premiums last year by 116 percent.
.. Come 2018, the Republican Party will need these patriots to knock on doors, man phone banks, attend get-out-the-vote rallies, and of course, cast ballots. Watching Republicans stagger from one self-inflicted defeat to another will unleash a pandemic of learned helplessness on the Right. If repeatedly campaigning hard for Republican candidates achieves so little, why knock ourselves out a year from now?
.. GOP powerbrokers worry that inability to deliver while in full control of government will enrage the grassroots and depress turnout of a broader electorate that could wonder what’s the point of reelecting a Republican House and Senate.”
Trump’s Foreign Policy: The Conservatives’ Report Card
Yes, Machiavelli did say it was better to be feared than loved. But the great Florentine also said, “a prince ought to inspire fear in such a way that, if he does not win love, he avoids hatred.”
Much of this is self-inflicted. Trump didn’t need to start his presidency by
- infuriating the president of Mexico on the eve of a planned visit to Washington, or by
- comparing the American intelligence community to Nazi Germany,
- or by throwing a tantrum with the prime minister of Australia.
- He didn’t need to demand that Seoul pay for missile defenses that would protect American troops in the event of war with North Korea,
- or toy with our NATO allies as he mulled whether to reaffirm our mutual-defense obligations.
Trump could have avoided all of this. He didn’t, either because his personality is defective or because he thinks humiliation is an appropriate tool of presidential power. Character is destiny, conservatives used to think. We are living this destiny.
.. In Hamburg this month, Trump again showed how eager he was to oblige his man-crush in the Kremlin, this time at the expense of Israel.
But the deeper flaw of Trump’s foreign policy isn’t psychological. It’s philosophical
.. “The world is not a ‘global community’ but an arena where nations, nongovernmental actors and businesses engage and compete for advantage,” McMaster and Gary Cohn
.. Mark this as the shift from internationalism to transactionalism; from a values-based foreign policy rooted in Alexis de Tocqueville’s notion of “self-interest, rightly understood” to an approach that might be called neo-Maguirism, after “Jerry Maguire.” To wit: “Show me the money!”
It’s not that the administration has done everything wrong, at least by conservative lights: It’s always possible to do the right thing for the wrong reason.
.. But if serious conservatives believe in anything, it’s that we really are, as Lincoln said, “the last best hope of earth,” and that our foreign policy should be equal to that hope.