By Kevin D. Williamson
Sunday, December 03, 2017
Presidents really only get to do one big thing, or maybe
two. Abraham Lincoln saved the Union. Franklin Roosevelt got his New Deal and
joined the war against Adolf Hitler. Lyndon Johnson expanded the welfare state
and signed into law a landmark civil-rights bill. George W. Bush wanted to be a
school-reformer and economy-modernizer, but instead he was obliged to spend his
presidency playing Whac-a-Mole with al-Qaeda and its allies.
Barack Obama’s one big thing was moving the United States
toward a more European model of health care, one in which the federal
government would take a stronger and much more direct role. It isn’t that he
didn’t know what he wanted: While his heart’s own true desire is a government
health-care monopoly (“I happen to be a proponent of a single-payer
universal-health-care program,” etc.) he also believed that transitioning to
such a program all at once would be disruptive, and so he backed what turned
out to be an incompetent attempt at adapting a Swiss-style system of mandates,
subsidies, and price controls to American conditions. As a political matter,
he’d have signed a four-inch-thick stack of paper containing nothing but
endless repetitions of the phrase “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy!”
so long as Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi got it to his desk with the words
“Health-Care Reform” on the title page.
His eight years in office will be remembered as a failure
and a great lost opportunity, not least of which because his one big thing, the
Affordable Care Act, was such a dog’s breakfast of a bill that it immediately
began to unravel. Parts of it conflicted with other laws and with the
Constitution. Its underlying economic architecture is a mess, which resulted in
substantially higher health-insurance costs for many Americans and fewer
choices for many more. Its mandate that individuals buy insurance — necessary
to the function of insurance markets under the preexisting-conditions rule
imposed by the ACA — was toothless.
That mandate is slated to be repealed as part of the Republican
tax-cut bill. A little irony in that: The mandate was an unconstitutional
misapplication of congressional powers under the commerce clause, but Chief
Justice John Roberts and his Supreme Court colleagues went to extraordinary
lengths to find that the mandate could be instead understood as a
constitutional application of Congress’s taxing power, thus saving Obamacare’s
constitutional bacon. If we are to take serious the risible fiction that the
Affordable Care Act was really at its heart a tax bill, then repealing the
mandate in another tax bill is appropriate.
But Republicans ought not spend too much time savoring
that irony. In their tax bill, they have repeated virtually all of the major
procedural sins of the Affordable Care Act: the lack of regular order, the
reliance on ridiculous budgeting shenanigans, the “we have to pass the bill in
order to find out what’s in it” approach to lining up votes behind legislation
nobody had read, which was still being amended well into the evening — “under
cover of darkness,” as they like to say in Washington — sometimes with notes
scribbled in the margins. And, of course, the tax bill was passed on a
party-line vote, or near to it: Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee voted against
the bill.
A lot of fun stuff was jammed in there at the end.
Senator Ted Cruz of Texas put in a provision that would allow parents to use
tax-advantaged college-savings accounts to pay for K–12 tuition at private
schools and for some expenses related to home-schooling. That’s a good idea.
But I wonder how long any of this will last.
President Donald Trump desperately needed a win in his
first year in office after having failed to deliver on such big-ticket campaign
promises as repealing the Affordable Care Act and replacing it with a more
consumer-oriented alternative, building a border wall and coercing the Mexicans
into paying for it, and reordering our trade relations with the world. The
Senate vote came on the day Michael Flynn, his former national-security
adviser, pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about his contacts with Russian
authorities, a question that is likely to continue haunting the administration.
The president’s son-in-law and adviser, Jared Kushner, is said to be the next
target of the investigation.
Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer, one of the
sillier figures in American politics, said that the vote on the tax bill would
constitute a “dramatic turning point in a downward spiral for the Republicans.”
Well. Who knows what 2018 holds for the GOP, but the results of the last
several elections — which have seen Democratic ranks decimated in Congress and
in the states and the inevitable Hillary Rodham Clinton presidency derailed by
a daft game-show host commanding his legions from his seat upon a gold-plated
toilet — do not suggest that it is the Republican party that is moribund. If
anything, Schumer should be sobered that his party has had its head handed to
it by a bunch of yokels capable of nominating and electing Donald Trump.
Pendulums swing. But when and how fast, no one knows.
The downward spiral here isn’t tracing the decline of the
Republican party but the descent of Congress, which, from the Affordable Care
Act to the new tax-cut bill, has shown itself incapable of proceeding according
to regular order, of conducting its business in a fashion befitting the
legislature of the most powerful nation in the history of human affairs, and of
forging bipartisan compromises — which are desirable not because bipartisanship
and compromise are virtuous but because achieving broad political buy-in is the
only way to produce stable and long-lasting policy settlements. The Affordable
Care Act began coming undone the second it was signed; this tax plan, created
in much the same way, may very well suffer the same fate. Whatever the
corporate tax rate is when Trump signs the tax bill, it is unlikely that it
will stay there for very long if Democrats come back into the majority in
Congress. And who believes that Republican congressional majorities are
destined to be eternal?
The Republicans are very lucky that the only practical
alternative to them at the moment is the Democrats. The Democrats are lucky in
precisely the same way.
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