And one lesson of that decade, of every election when Barack Obama wasn’t on the ballot, is that a party that’s terrible at governing can still win elections if the other party is even worse at politics.
Which the Democrats, amazingly, have been. Or to be less judgmental, let’s say that there’s been a strange cycle at work, where Republican incompetence helps liberalism consolidate its hold on highly educated America … but that consolidation, in turn, breeds liberal insularity and overconfidence (in big data and election science, in demographic inevitability, in the wisdom of declaring certain policy debates closed) and helps Republican support persist as a kind of protest vote, an attempt to limit liberalism’s hegemony by keeping legislative power in the other party’s hands.
.. But even the Iraq War and the financial crisis didn’t prevent U.S. politics from reverting to a Republican advantage.
.. So that leaves the Democrats as the only people with the power to put an end to the current spectacle of Republican incompetence and folly.
All they need to do is persuade Americans that they have more to fear from conservative hackwork than from a liberalism in command of politics as well as culture.
The Republican Health-Care Fiasco
Senator John McCain cast the deciding vote to jettison Republicans’ latest Obamacare reform effort, handing a victory to Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine, moderates whose opposition to any substantive health-care reform has become nearly intractable. But the legislation for which Republican leaders asked their conference to vote was so unpalatable, and the process so objectionable, that it is almost difficult to fault him. The Congressional Budget Office suggested that the “skinny” health legislation on which the Senate voted would raise premiums by as much as 20 percent. It assumed that since the legislation ended the fines for going without insurance, many healthy people would drop coverage, and premiums would have to pay for a sicker population. The estimate may be too high, since the CBO has repeatedly overestimated the impact of the fines. But it almost certainly had the basic story right.
Senator McCain may have been taken aback as well by the CBO’s projection that the bill would result in 16 million fewer people having insurance coverage — something Democrats nearly unanimously portrayed as “taking away” insurance from all of those people. In fact, this projection is based almost entirely on the end of the fines. The CBO estimates that once they can make a decision free of the threat of fines, 15 million people will forgo coverage.
.. We are willing to bet that McCain didn’t know any of this. A lot of health-policy experts are unaware of it too. The legislation was unveiled, after all, only a few hours before the vote. There were no hearings on it. The CBO had only provided the relevant numbers the same day, with the inferences we have made above left unstated.
Republican leaders such as Mitch McConnell were asking senators to vote for a poorly understood bill that would likely raise premiums in the expectation that something better would emerge from a conference committee between the House and the Senate. But there was a chance that the House would end up just passing the skinny bill. And if the conference committee was capable of coming up with something better that could get 51 votes in the Senate, why couldn’t the Senate come up with that “something better” itself?
.. Here Senator McCain deserves criticism for naïveté. He believes that there should be bipartisan reforms to Obamacare (which is a far cry from what he had previously campaigned on).
But the Democrats have made it clear that the only “reforms” that interest them are increased taxpayer commitments to shoring up the program, including increased subsidies to the insurers. In practice, this option would amount to higher spending and, at best, a fig leaf of reform; it would become law through the votes of nearly all Democrats and a handful of Republicans.
.. Option three, the “let it burn” approach, is simply untenable.
.. Option three is likely, then, to be option two in slow motion.
.. Consideration of the alternatives should bring Republicans back to option one. Try, try again, but this time with more deliberation.
GOP senators threaten to kill their own Obamacare bill
Senate Republicans are threatening to tank their own Obamacare repeal bill if they don’t receive a guarantee from Speaker Paul Ryan that it will merely be a starting point for negotiations and not become law.
So Ryan (R-Wis.) seemed to provide the assurance they were looking for, but it’s not clear it will be enough.
.. “The skinny bill as policy is a disaster,” Graham said, explaining it would cause a crisis in the insurance markets. “I need assurances from the House speaker … if I don’t [get them], I’m a no.”.. McConnell made one last frantic plea to his Senate Republican members to advance the party’s scaled-back Obamacare repeal, assuring them at a private lunch that the vote is merely aimed at getting to conference with the House rather than preparing it to land on President Donald Trump’s desk.
G.O.P. Support for Trump Is Starting to Crack
Below the leadership level, Republicans are defying Trump more often, and McConnell and Ryan aren’t always standing in their way. You can see this defiance in the bipartisan Senate investigation of the Russia scandal. You can see it in the deal on Russian sanctions. And you can see it in the Senate’s failure, so far at least, to pass a health care bill.
.. During Watergate, as the political scientist Jonathan Bernstein has noted, most Republicans stood by Richard Nixon until almost the bitter end.
.. “The current congressional G.O.P. seems less supportive and more constraining of the Potus than basically any in history,” Glassman wrote to me, “save the unique circumstances of Andrew Johnson (who wasn’t really a Republican) and John Tyler (who bucked his party aggressively), neither of whom were elected.”
.. Many of today’s Republicans avoid going on television as Trump surrogates. They mock him off the record, and increasingly on therecord, too. In recent weeks, eight senators have publicly stood in the way of a health care bill. Republican senators are also helping to conduct an investigation of Trump’s campaign and have backed the appointment of Robert Mueller as special counsel.
One reason is that they don’t fear Trump. About 90 percent of Republican House members won a larger vote share in their district last year than Trump did
.. In the months ahead, unfortunately, that level of resistance is unlikely to be sufficient. Trump has made clear that he isn’t finished trying to take health insurance away from millions of people or trying to hide the truth about his Russia ties. “The constitutional crisis won’t be if Trump fires Mueller,” as the A.C.L.U.’s Kate Oh put it. “The constitutional crisis is if Congress takes no real action in response.”