Absurdly, GOP saves Obamacare

Absurdly, GOP saves Obamacare

By:

LeRoy Goldman

Columnist

Times-News

BlueRidgeNow.com

March 29, 2017

Forget the Republican rallying cry of “Repeal and Replace Obamacare.” The Republicans at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, in an act of absurd stupidity, have rescued it!

Late last Friday afternoon, after President Donald Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan had no choice but to pull down their star-crossed bill that was headed for certain defeat on the House floor, Ryan admitted that “Obamacare is the law of the land.”

There’s abundant blame to go around. But at its heart are the three blind mice: Ryan, House Freedom Caucus Chairman Mark Meadows and Trump. Have you ever seen such a sight in your life? Let’s see how they run.

In 2010, widespread public opposition to Obamacare enabled Republicans to win the House. In 2014, they captured the Senate. And last November, the election of Trump gave them the trifecta, which they have now squandered. It’s what happens when you combine incompetence, ideological zealotry and hubris.

Speaker Paul Ryan

Ryan became House speaker on Oct. 29, 2015. In an op-ed column published that day in another newspaper, I warned of the coming catastrophe: “He could have turned the tables on the House Freedom Caucus ... . Instead Ryan has trapped himself. ... Ryan blundered badly, sold himself short, and has set the stage for his own demise as speaker.”

Last week, Ryan’s Freedom Caucus chickens came home to roost.

But Ryan’s blunder goes way beyond not being able to bring the Freedom Caucus to heel. His bill was stillborn. Among its many flaws, the fatal ones were those that would take health insurance away from 24 million Americans and give the wealthy an enormous tax break. No competent policy wonk or congressional leader could ever expect such a proposal to pass in the House.

Although Ryan was correct in his postmortem on the failed bill by bleating that “governing is hard,” he missed the point. Governing isn’t possible when stupidity of this magnitude is at the center of one’s legislation.

Rep Mark Meadows

There are about three dozen members of the Freedom Caucus, all uncompromisingly rigid conservative Republicans. They exercise outsized power over all House Republicans by sticking together and thus denying the GOP the ability to move legislation when, as is too frequently the case, the caucus’ allies are all the Democrats.

This was the case with the health care bill and will likely be the case with much of the rest of Trump’s forthcoming legislative agenda. Think of members of the Freedom Caucus for what they really are and don’t realize: a front organization for Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats.

The caucus humbled and destroyed former Speaker John Boehner. Now they have emasculated Ryan. But to what end? Their uncompromising rigidity has rescued Obamacare.

The more House Freedom Caucus Chairman Meadows forced the bill to the right, the more mainstream Republicans jumped ship. If Meadows’ intention was to kill the bill, humiliate the speaker and save Obamacare, his strategy was as brilliant as it was destructive. That’s madness.

President Trump

The president promised to repeal and replace Obamacare. He failed. The tortured history of health care reform makes it starkly clear that it’s the third rail of domestic politics. Even a neophyte like Trump should have known this.

He should have led with something else, anything else. And he should have told Ryan not to talk to him about health care until he had a bill that enough Democrats would support so they would succeed on a bipartisan basis and not have to worry about the Freedom Caucus crazies. Such an accord would have been possible because Obamacare is imploding, and that’s sufficient motivation for Democrats to support a bipartisan effort to repair it.

Trump didn’t and thus revealed himself as the apprentice, not the deal-maker. Even worse, last week’s events underscore that Trump is the puppet of those who disembark from Clarabell (Reince) Priebus’ clown car that pulls up to the White House each day and from which the president’s pathetic White House staff tumbles out.

There may be a tiny silver lining in this fiasco. Perhaps Trump will realize the only way to fix health care is to call Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell and open a genuinely bipartisan dialogue. That is, after all, how Washington is supposed to work!

Since these three blind mice don’t have tails, were I the butcher’s wife with a carving knife, I’d find something else of theirs to cut off

LeRoy Goldman is a Flat Rock resident. Reach him at:

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