As Kevin Williamson wrote in May of 2016: Americans and Republicans, remember: You asked for this. Given the choice between a dozen solid conservatives and one Clinton-supporting con artist and game-show host, you chose the con artist. You chose him freely. Nobody made you do it.
.. The RNC is reportedly refusing to support Republican candidates who criticized Donald Trump in the wake of the Access Hollywood video. “[The president] is unhappy with anyone who neglected him in his hour of need,” an anonymous RNC insider explained.
.. This is sickening madness. If this is true, then the logical inference is that the GOP as a party believes that there was nothing wrong with the president’s conduct, even though he was a Democrat at the time. Or, perhaps, that there is nothing so wrong with what he said — and what he claimed he did — that it can justify breaking faith in the Leader.
.. That is moral rot on an institutional scale and the people aiding and abetting it should be ashamed of themselves.
The Collapse of Obamacare: Big Problem in Republican States
The lack of competition in the exchanges is overwhelmingly a problem for people living in states controlled by Republican governors.
.. 20.7 percent of the people living in states with Republican governors have only one insurer in the exchange.
.. And 1.8 percent of people living in states other than North Carolina controlled by Democratic governors only have one insurer in their exchange, as shown below.
.. the biggest problem is in Republican states where there has been little effort to make the ACA work.
Republicans Can’t Pass Bills
There are many different flavors of freedom. For example, there is freedom as capacity and freedom as detachment.
Freedom as capacity means supporting people so they have the ability to take advantage of life’s opportunities. You encourage your friend to stick with piano practice so he will have the freedom to really play. You support your child during high school so she will have the liberty to pick her favorite college.
Freedom as detachment is giving people space to do their own thing. It’s based on the belief that people flourish best when they are unimpeded as much as possible. Freedom as detachment is marked by absence — the absence of coercion, interference and obstacles.
.. Back when the Republican Party functioned as a governing party it embraced both styles of freedom, but gave legislative priority to freedom of capacity.
.. Over the past few decades Republicans cast off the freedom-as-capacity tendency. They became, exclusively, the party of freedom as detachment.
.. Despite all the screaming and campaigns, all the government shutdown fiascos, the G.O.P. hasn’t been able to eliminate a single important program or reform a single important entitlement or agency.
.. The freedom-as-detachment philosophy is a negative philosophy. It is about cutting back, not building.
.. A party operating under this philosophy is not going to spawn creative thinkers who come up with positive new ideas for how to help people. It’s not going to nurture policy entrepreneurs. It’s not going to respect ideas, period.
.. If you’re a regular American, the main threats to your freedom are
- illness,
- family breakdown,
- social decay,
- technological disruption and
- globalization.
.. The Republicans could have come up with a health bill that helps people cope with illness and nurtures their capacities, a bill that offers catastrophic care to the millions of American left out of Obamacare, or health savings accounts to encourage preventive care.
.. And if you think G.O.P. dysfunction is bad now, wait until we get to
- the debt ceiling wrangle,
- the budget fight and
- the tax reform crackup.
.. we’re living at a time when the prospects for the middle class are in sharp decline. And Republicans offer nothing but negativity, detachment, absence and an ax.
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.