The tweet that ends the logjam
By:
LeRoy Goldman
Columnist
BlueRidgeNow.com
Times-News Online
July 16, 2017
On June 30, President Donald Trump tweeted, “If Republican senators are unable to pass what they are working on now, they should immediately REPEAL, and then REPLACE at a later date!”
Most saw the president’s tweet as either terribly harmful to the GOP legislative effort, or irrelevant. Many also saw it as simply another example of the president putting his mouth in front of his brain. Regardless of whether or not you think the president has a brain, there’s a chance he might just have stumbled into a way to end Washington’s logjam.
One would think politicians would have learned by now that health care legislation is a lethal third rail. Touch it and perish.
Repeal is easy. Replace isn’t, and thus the Republican replacement effort over the past few months has been a joke and a self-inflicted disaster.
Recall the blunders made in the House by Speaker Paul Ryan. First, he doubled down on the Democrats’ fatal mistake in 2009. He decided to bring profound change to one-sixth of the American economy on a totally partisan basis. That never works. Then, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, he crafted legislation that would transfer billions of dollars of tax cuts to wealthy Americans, while at the same time eventually resulting in a predicted 23 million fewer Americans having insurance coverage.
In the process, Ryan created a lose-lose dynamic within the GOP in that the Freedom Caucus opposed the bill because it wasn’t radical enough and the moderates opposed it because it went too far.
In the end, it squeaked through the House by a couple of votes. President Trump immediately held a pyrrhic victory celebration with House Republicans in the Rose Garden for a bill that everyone knew was dead on arrival in the Senate, and one that the president himself would soon describe as “mean.”
In the Senate, the story has been the same. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell doubled down on Ryan’s fatal error of judgment by refusing to bring the Democrats into the process of crafting the Senate bill. With “Ryan Lite,” he has run into the same paralyzing dynamic. Conservative senators like Rand Paul, Ted Cruz and Mike Lee refuse to support a bill that does not gut Obamacare and Medicaid, while moderate Republicans senators like Susan Collins, Rob Portman and Shelley Moore Capito refuse to support a bill that eviscerates Medicaid.
McConnell’s bill would also transfer huge amounts of wealth to the nation’s richest, eventually reduce the number of insured by a predicted 22 million, and, unbelievably, do much of its damage in states that elected Trump. Only about 20 percent of the American people approve of Ryan and McConnell’s legislative legerdemain. What else do you need to know?
McConnell’s perfectly predictable dilemma is that he can’t corral the 50 votes he needs from among the Senate’s 52 Republicans as long as hard-liners like Paul and/or moderates like Collins refuse to play ball. McConnell has created his own Catch-22. For a man whose reputation is built upon his skill of playing “inside baseball” in the Senate, McConnell comes across as a masochist and a fool.
Soon we will know how this plays out. There are two basic options. If McConnell can scrape together 50 suicidal Republicans and pass his monstrosity of a bill, the House will approve it, and Trump will sign it into law. That will trigger swift and certain voter retribution, which will drive the GOP from power in 2018 and 2020.
But if McConnell’s bill flames out, Trump has an historic opening. He should then urge the GOP to pass a repeal bill, which they would do. But at the same time, he should reach out to the only person who can help him craft a bipartisan replacement bill that serves the nation — President Barack Obama. That move would change everything!
If he makes a genuine offer to Obama, Obama can’t and won’t refuse. Such an offer can easily be based on the health care promises Trump made repeatedly during the 2016 campaign. Trump and Obama could then create a set of legislative specifications that would retain the best of Obamacare, while at the same time making most of the necessary reforms the GOP has long advocated.
Such a move would isolate the radicals of both the right and the left in both chambers of Congress and would enable a bipartisan majority of more than 60 Republicans and Democrats to pass sustainable legislation.
When this approach works for health care, even the village idiot will be able to figure out that it can work for things such as tax reform, the infrastructure rebuild, the budget and trade. And who will get the credit for ending Washington’s logjam? The president of the United States!
It’s called Making America Great Again — TOGETHER.
Times-News columnist LeRoy Goldman is a Flat Rock resident. Reach him at :
