Paul Ryan gave a press conference when he partially attributed his failure to get the votes to pass the draconian Trumpcare on growing pains. He deserves no sympathy due to the cruelty of the bill he attempted to pass. Robert Reich’s recent analysis was spot on and hit the appropriate points.
Ryan wrote an appalling bill. Joy-ann Reid pointed out a few days ago.
There was a cruelty to this bill that was even apparent to conservative voters, to Republican voters who were shocked at the cruelty. And the third thing and the president has kind of hinted to this too. This was a tax cut. This was an attempt to jam through a giant tax cut for the wealthy to set the stage for tax reform which is another tax cut.
“We were a 10-year opposition party, where being against things was easy to do,” said Paul Ryan. “You just had to be against it. Now, in three months’ time, we tried to go to a governing party where we actually had to get 216 people to agree with each other on how we do things. .. the growing pains of government.”
To which Reich wrote, “Rubbish.” He points out in his well-written article that the congresspeople who blocked the bill, the Freedom Caucus, did not do so out of benevolence.
The so-called “Freedom Caucus” of House Republicans, who refused to go along with the bill, wanted it even worse. Essentially, their goal (and that of their fat-cat patrons) was to repeal the Affordable Care Act without replacing it at all.
But Reich got to the core of the Republican problem.
Most of the current Republican House members have not shared responsibility for governing the nation. They have never even passed a budget into law. But their real problem isn’t the “growing pains” of being out of power. In reality, the Republicans who are now control the House – as well as the Senate – don’t like government. They’re temperamentally and ideologically oriented to opposing it, not leading it.
Their chronic incapacity to govern didn’t reveal itself as long as a Democrat was in the White House. They let President Obama try to govern, and pretended that their opposition was based on a different philosophy governing. Now that they have a Republican president, they can no longer hide. They have no philosophy of governing at all.
Reich has no hope for the current administration or Congress.
So we have a congress with no capacity to govern, and a president who’s incapable of governing. Which leaves the most powerful nation in the world rudderless. The country on whom much of the rest of the world relies for organizing and mobilizing responses to the major challenges facing humankind is leaderless.
It is of course possible that Republicans in congress will learn to take responsibility for governing. It is possible that Donald Trump will learn to lead. It is possible that pigs will learn to fly. But such things seem doubtful. Instead, America and the rest of the world must hold our collective breath, hoping that the next elections – the midterms of 2018 and then the presidential election of 2020 – set things right. And hoping that in the meantime nothing irrevocably awful occurs.
For the next two years, our only option is to limit the damage. The Progressive grassroots was responsible for the failure of Trumpcare. Many are happy to blame the Freedom Caucus. They are a group of folks that will always say no to government period. The fear was having moderates acquiesce to the draconian policies in the bill. Absent the pushback by Indivisible, Our Revolution, Planned Parenthood, MoveOn, and many other grassroots organizations they would have only gone along with Paul Ryan and his ‘Ayn Randian ilk’ to give the Republican Party a semblance of unity.