This is kind of a weird situation when you consider that Republicans control both houses of Congress and the presidency. You'd think that they could do better legislatively. When they finally passed a major overhaul of the tax code in late 2017, that ended up being their only major legislative achievement for the year, and happened only after embarrassing debacles involving their repeated attempts to repeal the Obama-era Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). The process by which the tax code overhaul was finally passed was exceedingly ugly: no hearings, no debate, absolutely zero consultation with Democrats, virtually no input from the Congressional Budget Office (whose eventual analysis, provided long after the point when any real Congressional debate could have occurred, proclaimed the bill would increase the deficit by some $1.5 trillion) and no public input. It underwent multiple hasty drafts and had sweeteners tossed in ad lib to bring individual Republican Senators on board, all at warp speed compared to the normal pace at which massive legislation is typically drafted.
There's a reason Congress usually takes its time with massive legislation: such legislation tends to have a lot of unexpected fallout if it isn't carefully drafted. You'd think Congressional Republicans would be concerned about unintended consequences, as those consequences are nearly always bad and can be costly at the next election.
But Congressional Republicans mostly inhabit safe seats. That means that they don't have to care about adverse consequences for the country, only about adverse consequences for their constituents — and not even for their constituents, as long as their donors aren't riled.
Yet you'd think that Congressional Republicans would want to craft legislation carefully anyway. After all, legislation is how a party furthers its agenda.
Except in the case of Congressional Republicans, it isn't. Because Congressional Republicans have no real agenda.
What do Republicans nationwide want? Smaller government (except for the military and police). That has been the party's mantra for nearly four decades now. Other issues sometimes come to the fore, like curtailing abortion or cracking down on crime, but the issue with the broadest appeal is always smaller government.
Yet what does that actually mean?
I defy any Republican elected official or voter to say in any detail what he or she means by shrinking the federal government. (For simplicity's sake we'll ignore states.) Occasionally they make noises about killing whole segments of the executive branch, like the Department of Education or the Department of Energy or the Department of Health and Human Services or the E.P.A., but when it comes time to look at what that would entail ... well, they get cold feet. Like Rick Perry at the Energy Department, they suddenly find that, gee, the department actually does useful things.
That's the problem with what Republicans call their "agenda". It's not an agenda at all. It's not a statement of things they want to accomplish. It's a statement of inchoate, inarticulate frustration that the government is complex and far bigger than they think it should be.
That's an emotion, not an agenda. What unites Republicans is anger and frustration, not policy.
It's no wonder that, with the reins of government in their hands, they find themselves incapable of charting a positive path forward. They knew that they wanted to reduce taxes but when it came time to decide how, they flailed. They could not articulate a vision that even all their elected representatives could support, and it took backroom deals out of the public eye to get to a bare majority. Same thing happened with their repeated attempts to kill Obama's Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) — it turned out that the only thing uniting them was the broad desire to claim that they had repealed it. When it came down to the dirty work of actually deciding how, they had no freaking idea — at least, none that could command a majority of their members. Remember that even though Paul Ryan managed to get repeal passed in the House multiple times, he totally punted on the foreseeable need to craft legislation that would pass the Senate. He could argue, and he did argue, that he managed his end, but a House leader who ignores the math in the Senate is, at the end of the day, no help to getting legislation passed.
Note, too, that the Obamacare repeal effort failed after seven years of whining and literally dozens of votes on bills to kill it. It's telling that all of that whining didn't lead to a winning path, legislatively speaking, once Obama no longer stood in the way and Republicans had their bicameral majority. They weren't ready to commit to any of their dozens of repeal bills.
Surprised? You shouldn't be. Those bills were empty gestures, not genuine legislation.
The inescapable conclusion is that Congressional Republicans, and the national party generally, not only don't know how to govern, but aren't interested in doing so.
That's staggering.
It's also dangerous. When all you have is contempt for government, you aren't interested in making it work well. Or, as we see with the impending shutdown, making it work at all.
Because while Paul Ryan set the tone for the predictable Republican spin by putting the blame squarely on Senate Democrats, Congress is only voting on a continuing resolution to keep the government running because Congressional Republicans are uninterested in, and/or incapable of, drafting a budget that would cover a whole fiscal year. A majority of them cannot be corralled into carrying out what any normal person would say is their absolute minimum job requirement.
We got to where we are because one of our two major political parties no longer knows how to make government work — because it long ago stopped caring about making it work.
No comments:
Post a Comment