You can get elected as an outsider, but once in office, you have to actually govern.
The conservative movement is caught in a Catch-22 of its own making. In the war against “the establishment,” we have made being an outsider the most important qualification for a politician. The problem? Once elected, outsiders by definition become insiders. This isn’t just a semantic point. The Constitution requires politicians to work through the system if they’re going to get anything done.
.. Look at all the senators who rode the tea-party wave into power: Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Ron Johnson, Pat Toomey, Mike Lee. To one extent or another, they are now seen as swamp things, not swamp drainers, by the pitchfork populists.
.. Merely talking like a halfway responsible politician — “we don’t have the votes,” “we have to pay for it” — is proof of selling out. Trump bashes NBC News as ‘Fake News’ on Twitter
.. He wore the animosity of his colleagues, including the GOP leadership, like a badge of honor. He was the leader of the insurrectionists. He had only one problem: He talked like a creature of the establishment — largely because the Princeton- and Harvard-trained former Supreme Court clerk and career politician was one. He knew the lyrics to every populist fight song, but he couldn’t carry the tune.
..But not only did Donald Trump jump into the fray at the height of populist fervor, the field was also divided 17 ways. No one spoke less like a politician. No one who understood how governing works would have promised the things Trump promised —
- health coverage for all, for less money,
- eliminate the debt,
- bring all those jobs back, etc. —
because they’d either know or care that such things are literally impossible.
.. The establishment remains the villain and Trump the hero for his willingness to say or tweet things that make all the right people angry. For his most ardent supporters, the fault for his legislative failures lies entirely with the swamp, the establishment, or the “Deep State.”
.. he most important factor was Moore’s demonization of the establishment, particularly Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell. The voters valued sticking their thumbs in the establishment’s eye more than giving Trump a win.
.. there is remarkably little intellectual or ideological substance to the current populist fever. Strange was more conservative than Moore but less bombastic. Moore opposed Obamacare repeal and, until recently, couldn’t say what DACA was. In other words, MAGA populism is less of an agenda and more of a mood.
The Looming Republican Disgrace Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/449720/republican-health-care-bill-looming-disgrace?utm_source=Sailthru&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NR%20Week%20in%20Review%202017-07-23&utm_term=VDHM
A majority is a terrible thing to waste.
On the cusp of a historic failure, the party has begun the finger-pointing, and it’s hard to argue with any of it.
- The establishment is right that Trump is incapable of true legislative leadership.
- The Trumpists are right that the establishment is ineffectual.
- Conservatives are right that moderates don’t really want to repeal Obamacare, whatever they’ve said in the past.
- And pragmatists are right that a few conservatives are beholden to a self-defeating purity.
.. At least Collins, an ideological outlier in the Republican Conference, has been consistent. She voted against the repeal-only bill in 2015, and the GOP leadership never thought she was gettable.
.. For Rand Paul, clearly, a perhaps once-in-a-generation opportunity to significantly reform two entitlement programs isn’t as important as scoring cheap points against his colleagues in the cause of getting as many cable hits as possible.
.. it’s particularly important that the Utah senator keep the big picture in view; torpedoing the entire effort over a relatively technical question about the insurance risk pools — Lee’s current posture — would be a disastrous mistake.
Just. Cut. Taxes.
But the world is what it is, and a party that offers nothing, whose ideological sclerosis and internal contradictions allow it to offer nothing, might as well just go pass a tax cut and call it a day.
.. the Republican leadership in Congress persuaded itself that it could pull off a complicated fiscal maneuver, using health care reform to change the budget baseline in anticipation of a tax reform more comprehensive and enduring than George W. Bush’s tax cuts 15 years ago.
.. Republicans could just go ahead and cut taxes the way Bush did — without major offsets but with a 10-year expiration date, so that all you would need is 50 votes plus Mike Pence to do it.
.. there are still lots of clever and plausible ways to overhaul and improve the tax code without sacrificing revenue.
.. You could cap various perverse deductions that mostly benefit wealthy blue-state taxpayers, like the home-mortgage and state and local tax deductions, and use the savings to lower rates across the board. You could cut the corporate tax rate and raise the capital-gains tax rate to compensate, as Senator Mike Lee has proposed. You could even (gasp, heresy, gasp) raise the top income tax rate, as Steve Bannon reportedly wants to do, and use the savings to cut payroll taxes or fund a new child tax credit.
.. Republicans don’t seem equipped to pull off anything complicated, they don’t look united enough to take political risks, and they aren’t ideologically ready to pass anything heretical. So barring a sudden transformation in the party and its leadership, a temporary, deficit-financed tax cut is the only thing that has a decent chance of happening
.. One reason among many that Obamacare repeal has run aground is that the deficit picture doesn’t look as dire as it did when the health care law was passed — and Obamacare itself is not driving the kind of spending surge that many of its critics (myself included) feared.
.. Instead, the ugly years of fiscal cliffs and shutdowns and sequesters produced a certain amount of deficit reduction even without a grand bargain, Medicare spending has been coming in lower than expected, and interest rates have stayed historically low.
.. without doing much entitlement reform, we’re in much better shape than either the Simpson-Bowles commission or the deficit hawks of the 1990s projected.
.. I can live with a Trump administration that appoints conservative judges and fails at everything else, since judicial appointments are about the only thing I trust this G.O.P. to do.
Health Care Overhaul Collapses as Two Republican Senators Defect
The announcement by the senators, Mike Lee of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas, left their leaders at least two votes short of the number needed to begin debate on their bill to dismantle the health law. Two other Republican senators, Rand Paul of Kentucky and Susan Collins of Maine, had already said they would not support a procedural step to begin debate.
.. In announcing his opposition to the bill, Mr. Moran said it “fails to repeal the Affordable Care Act or address health care’s rising costs.”
.. In his own statement, Mr. Lee said of the bill, “In addition to not repealing all of the Obamacare taxes, it doesn’t go far enough in lowering premiums for middle-class families; nor does it create enough free space from the most costly Obamacare regulations.”
.. But with conservative and moderate Republicans so far apart in the Senate, the gulf proved impossible to bridge. Conservatives wanted the Affordable Care Act eradicated, but moderates worried intensely about the effects that would have on their most vulnerable citizens.
.. “This second failure of Trumpcare is proof positive that the core of this bill is unworkable,” Mr. Schumer said. “Rather than repeating the same failed, partisan process yet again, Republicans should start from scratch and work with Democrats on a bill that lowers premiums, provides long-term stability to the markets and improves our health care system.”
.. the health insurance lobby, which had been largely silent during the fight, came off the sidelines to blast as “unworkable” a key provision allowing the sale of low-cost, stripped-down health plans, saying it would send premiums soaring and undermine protections for people with pre-existing medical conditions.
.. Mr. Lee, one of the most conservative members of the Senate, was part of a group of four conservative senators who came out against the initial version of Mr. McConnell’s bill after it was unveiled last month. He then championed the proposal to allow insurers to offer cheap, bare-bones plans, which was pushed by another of those opponents, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas.