Donald Trump interrupted his Friday campaign speech on behalf of Alabama senator Luther Strange to engage in a digression about the decline of football in general and the protests of Colin Kaepernick in particular, following up with a barrage of tweets on the subject over the following days that also rescinded a White House invitation to the NBA champion Golden State Warriors. As with many such developments, the initial news media response (to briefly paraphrase: "?!?!?!?") soon evolved into a discussion of whether or not Trump's attacks amounted to smart politics. Some observers judged the president's actions a mistake, while others argued that Trump's behavior reflected an effective strategy of harnessing racial tension and opposition to social change within the American public. "This kind of thing," wrote Rich Lowry of National Review, "is why he's president."
Because much of our punditry views politics primarily through an electoral frame, "smart politics" is generally defined as an action that helps one party win popular support at the expense of the other. It's quite possible that a majority of the voting population sides with Trump on the Kaepernick issue, especially if Trump's preferred interpretation of the protests—that players who demonstrate during the pregame national anthem performance are "disrespecting" the flag, the troops, and the nation—wins broad acceptance.
But politics is about more than winning elections, and the Republican Party's current problems have little to do with the party's relative strength compared to the Democrats. Today brought three significant developments in the world of Republican politics, all carrying relatively minimal implications for electoral competition between the parties—but with much more serious (negative) consequences for the GOP's deteriorating capacity to govern.
The first development was the Senate Republican conference's public acknowledgement that the Graham-Cassidy health care reform bill lacks sufficient support to win a vote on the floor. From a purely electoral calculation, congressional Republicans are probably better off abandoning their "repeal and replace" efforts than enacting a law that would result in millions of Americans losing health insurance coverage beginning in the 2018 election year. But the inability to pass legislation through Congress addressing the party's top domestic priority is not only a source of embarrassment for Republican leaders and exasperation for Republican activists, but also represents a significant sunk cost of time and energy over the past nine months that could have been devoted instead to taxes, infrastructure, or other more promising matters.
The second big news item of the day was Senator Bob Corker's announcement that he would not seek a third term in 2018. Corker's retirement does little to change the electoral math—Tennessee is decidedly inhospitable territory for Democratic candidates even without a popular incumbent on the ballot—but removes a capable, pragmatic, leadership-friendly senator from a Republican conference in need of legislative heft.
Third, former state supreme court justice Roy Moore easily defeated Strange, the appointed incumbent, in the Alabama Republican Senate primary. Thanks to Alabama's deep red partisan alignment, Moore is unlikely to jeopardize the Republican Party's hold on the seat in the December general election. But his future arrival in the Senate will create its own set of difficulties for the GOP. Moore ran as an open opponent of Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, and his propensity for attention-getting stunts and remarks is likely to put his fellow Republican senators in an awkward position on a regular basis. Moore's demonstrated level of policy command also suggests that he will not turn out to be a legislative workhorse in Washington.
Moore's triumph over Strange will also further damage the already-faltering relationship between Trump and McConnell. Trump will be predictably furious at Strange's defeat after he endorsed, and campaigned for, the senator in part at McConnell's urging, and will seek to shift blame for this embarrassment onto a Senate leader whom he already holds responsible for failing to repeal the Affordable Care Act. An intensifying civil war within the Republican Party between its two most powerful leaders, or between "insider" and "outsider" factions of conservatives, bodes ill for the chances of productive, functional governance over the next 16 months.
Perhaps a public appeal increasingly centered on themes of cultural and nationalist nostalgia simultaneously helps a party win elections and renders it inherently ill-equipped for the process of governing. At the least, the results tonight confirm that the potency of popular rebellion from the right remains alive and well within the Republican Party in the post-2016 era. As I remarked to Jeff Stein of Vox, "You might have thought that a Trump presidency and having Republicans control Congress would relieve that pressure valve—that with Hillary and Obama off the scene, some of that anti-establishment, anti-Republican leadership sentiment would dissipate. What we're seeing in Alabama is that that's not the case." The next question is to what extent Trump, the leader of the Republican Party, throws his own lot in with the rebels.
Showing posts with label Graham-Cassidy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Graham-Cassidy. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 26, 2017
Friday, September 22, 2017
Graham-Cassidy Shows That Politics Is About Ideas As Well As Interests
Critics on the left often roll their eyes when conservatives proclaim a principled commitment to the timeless virtues of limited government and cultural traditionalism. To detractors, conservative rhetoric about values is merely a rationalization of, or mere window-dressing for, the right's actual motivation: the defense of existing social inequalities in the domains of economics, race, gender, sexual orientation, and so forth. Conservatives like to portray themselves as committed to a philosophical cause, according to this view, but they really just care about enacting policies that provide their supporters with financial or social advantage at the expense of everybody else.
As Matt Grossmann and I were writing our book arguing that the Republican Party is fundamentally an ideological movement while the Democrats are distinctively a social group coalition, some of our colleagues accused us of taking conservative ideology too seriously as representing something more than a publicly palatable justification of Republican-aligned groups' own collective self-interest. One attendee at the Midwest Political Science Association's annual conference responded to my presentation of some of our early work by complaining that we didn't understand that Republicans simply do whatever their corporate sponsors tell them to do. (She continued to rant about how ridiculous she thought the paper was in the hallway after the panel was over, personally delivering the kind of "spirited feedback" that we academics more commonly experience through the anonymous peer review process.)
It's surely true that citizens' relative degree of receptiveness to the tenets of small-government conservatism is strongly influenced by the extent to which they perceive a personal benefit from the enactment of conservative policies. But a conception of ideology as simply interests-in-disguise can't account for important elements of Republican Party politics, as demonstrated by the party's ongoing attempts to enact health care reform—the latest of which, the Graham-Cassidy bill, appears to narrowly lack sufficient support in the Senate now that John McCain has announced his intention to vote against it.
The Graham-Cassidy plan is opposed by the American Medical Association, by hospitals, and by patient advocacy groups. Despite the common assumption on the left that Republicans reliably carry water for the insurance industry on health care policy (a charge repeated by Jimmy Kimmel during one of his critical late-night monologues this week), major insurers are also strongly opposed. Though the bill was sold as a boon for state-level policymaking "flexibility," several Republican governors and the national association of state Medicaid officers do not support it. In fact, it's very difficult to identify any definable interest group or segment of the electorate whose material interests would benefit from the passage of Graham-Cassidy—even the wealthy, who gained a substantial tax cut under previous iterations of Republican reform, do not receive one here—and it's equally hard to argue that the American public at large is clamoring for its passage.
So why have Republicans made health care reform the centerpiece of their legislative agenda this year, returning to the issue multiple times despite failure after failure? The answer is that most of the key actors within the party are philosophically unreconciled to the use of government power to grant health insurance benefits to large swaths of the population. For some Republican politicians, reducing the public sector's role in the provision of health care has been a personal cause "since [they] were drinking from a keg"; for others, intense pressure from Republican activists and financial donors has spurred them to pursue repeated attempts at reform despite the considerable frustration and political risk involved.
The ideological basis of Republican behavior on health care also accounts for why the party has taken a slapdash approach to the crafting of legislation, pulling together bills affecting a major sector of the American economy in a matter of days without substantial public debate or favorable expert analysis. Most Republican officeholders are not invested in policy details or particularly curious about how their favored reforms would operate in practice. If any initiative that moves public policy to the right is desirable by definition, the specifics are much less important than the general directional thrust.
It's also noteworthy that while Republican health care reform initiatives are most commonly treated as efforts to "repeal and replace" the Affordable Care Act, each major bill—including Graham-Cassidy—has included cuts to Medicaid funding that go well beyond simply rolling back the expansion contained in the ACA. For all the public focus on Trump's supposed personal obsession with exacting revenge on Obama, the true aim of Republican policymakers has consistently been the achievement of a much broader and more permanent reduction of the federal government's health care footprint.
Whether one has been cheering or booing the results, this year so far has marked a clear departure from models of legislative action that emphasize transactional politics among interest-group stakeholders mediated by the application of policy expertise. Of course, such approaches have historically been open to criticism that they are insufficiently informed by broader ideological visions or values. The view that government-provided health insurance amounts to a normatively unacceptable implementation of a leftist or socialist belief system has only become more prevalent among Republicans in recent years, the pragmatic rhetorical patina of Trumpian "populism" notwithstanding. If politics were merely a battle of interests and not a war of ideas, the anti-government health care cause wouldn't keep springing back to life every time it appeared to be DOA.
As Matt Grossmann and I were writing our book arguing that the Republican Party is fundamentally an ideological movement while the Democrats are distinctively a social group coalition, some of our colleagues accused us of taking conservative ideology too seriously as representing something more than a publicly palatable justification of Republican-aligned groups' own collective self-interest. One attendee at the Midwest Political Science Association's annual conference responded to my presentation of some of our early work by complaining that we didn't understand that Republicans simply do whatever their corporate sponsors tell them to do. (She continued to rant about how ridiculous she thought the paper was in the hallway after the panel was over, personally delivering the kind of "spirited feedback" that we academics more commonly experience through the anonymous peer review process.)
It's surely true that citizens' relative degree of receptiveness to the tenets of small-government conservatism is strongly influenced by the extent to which they perceive a personal benefit from the enactment of conservative policies. But a conception of ideology as simply interests-in-disguise can't account for important elements of Republican Party politics, as demonstrated by the party's ongoing attempts to enact health care reform—the latest of which, the Graham-Cassidy bill, appears to narrowly lack sufficient support in the Senate now that John McCain has announced his intention to vote against it.
The Graham-Cassidy plan is opposed by the American Medical Association, by hospitals, and by patient advocacy groups. Despite the common assumption on the left that Republicans reliably carry water for the insurance industry on health care policy (a charge repeated by Jimmy Kimmel during one of his critical late-night monologues this week), major insurers are also strongly opposed. Though the bill was sold as a boon for state-level policymaking "flexibility," several Republican governors and the national association of state Medicaid officers do not support it. In fact, it's very difficult to identify any definable interest group or segment of the electorate whose material interests would benefit from the passage of Graham-Cassidy—even the wealthy, who gained a substantial tax cut under previous iterations of Republican reform, do not receive one here—and it's equally hard to argue that the American public at large is clamoring for its passage.
So why have Republicans made health care reform the centerpiece of their legislative agenda this year, returning to the issue multiple times despite failure after failure? The answer is that most of the key actors within the party are philosophically unreconciled to the use of government power to grant health insurance benefits to large swaths of the population. For some Republican politicians, reducing the public sector's role in the provision of health care has been a personal cause "since [they] were drinking from a keg"; for others, intense pressure from Republican activists and financial donors has spurred them to pursue repeated attempts at reform despite the considerable frustration and political risk involved.
The ideological basis of Republican behavior on health care also accounts for why the party has taken a slapdash approach to the crafting of legislation, pulling together bills affecting a major sector of the American economy in a matter of days without substantial public debate or favorable expert analysis. Most Republican officeholders are not invested in policy details or particularly curious about how their favored reforms would operate in practice. If any initiative that moves public policy to the right is desirable by definition, the specifics are much less important than the general directional thrust.
It's also noteworthy that while Republican health care reform initiatives are most commonly treated as efforts to "repeal and replace" the Affordable Care Act, each major bill—including Graham-Cassidy—has included cuts to Medicaid funding that go well beyond simply rolling back the expansion contained in the ACA. For all the public focus on Trump's supposed personal obsession with exacting revenge on Obama, the true aim of Republican policymakers has consistently been the achievement of a much broader and more permanent reduction of the federal government's health care footprint.
Whether one has been cheering or booing the results, this year so far has marked a clear departure from models of legislative action that emphasize transactional politics among interest-group stakeholders mediated by the application of policy expertise. Of course, such approaches have historically been open to criticism that they are insufficiently informed by broader ideological visions or values. The view that government-provided health insurance amounts to a normatively unacceptable implementation of a leftist or socialist belief system has only become more prevalent among Republicans in recent years, the pragmatic rhetorical patina of Trumpian "populism" notwithstanding. If politics were merely a battle of interests and not a war of ideas, the anti-government health care cause wouldn't keep springing back to life every time it appeared to be DOA.
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