We begin today's roundup with The New York Times and its editorial on the failure of the Trumpcare bill:
Republican legislative leaders are in a bind. While they appear to have failed for now in their goal of destroying the Affordable Care Act, their eagerness to shower tax breaks on the wealthy at the expense of health coverage for millions of Americans has crimped their ability to pass other fiscal legislation.
This is not a lament. It’s just as well that they haven’t done anything big, given their goals. But it is a stunning demonstration of incompetence that, with control of the House, the Senate and the White House for six months, Republicans have not only failed to enact any major bills but have also created a legislative logjam that is bound to get worse. [...]
After years spent as obstructionists, obstruction seems to be all they know. Now they’re obstructing themselves, a good thing since it may limit their ability to do harm.
Matt Lewis at The Daily Beast highlights Trump’s six months of "winning”:
If we were to judge Trump on a legislative agenda, he would (at best) receive an “incomplete.” Early on, there was much talk about a robust agenda, including health care reform, tax reform, and an infrastructure bill. But the first six months saw no major legislation signed into law.
It took until May for the House to pass a bill to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, and after the events of Monday night, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell says the Senate will vote only to repeal—not yet replace—Obamacare.
Having gotten bogged down in trying to overhaul one-sixth of the U.S. economy (a pursuit I compare to a land invasion in Asia), it goes without saying that tax reform and infrastructure are delayed—and imperiled.
Paul Waldman at The Week, meanwhile, tackles Republican nostalgia for a pre-Obamacare world:
To begin with, the perfect wisdom of the free market had somehow left 50 million Americans with no coverage at all — and the GOP health plan would get us back near that number. Then let's consider pre-existing conditions. Maybe your family has some of them; mine does. Nothing life-threatening — an old injury here, a bothersome condition there — but in the past it was enough to get us denied coverage on the individual market. If it didn't happen to you, it probably happened to someone you know. The ACA outlawed those denials, and while most Republicans claim they want to keep those protections in place, the bill the Senate is considering would eviscerate them. A provision written by Ted Cruz that was recently added to the bill would allow insurers to offer bare-bones plans that provide little if any real coverage, as long as they also offered a plan that was compliant with the ACA's mandate that insurance cover "essential health benefits" like hospitalization, emergency care, preventive care, and prescription medications. Health-care experts warn that it would create a two-tier system in which young and healthy people buy the cheap coverage and those who are sicker and older buy the more comprehensive coverage, quickly leading to a "death spiral" of skyrocketing premiums in the latter.
Norm Ornstein at The Atlantic dives into why the legislative process on Trumpcare has been so poisonous:
Eight years ago, when the Affordable Care Act was in its gestation period, then Republican Whip Eric Cantor said the GOP alternative to it was “weeks away.” It turned out to be 400 weeks. After ACA was enacted, we saw not a Republican alternative but 60-plus votes to repeal with a promise to replace. A week ago, when asked why Senate Republicans had to scramble to slap this plan together, Senator Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania said it was because none of them had expected Donald Trump to win. Think about that: Toomey was admitting that Republicans saw no need to come up with their own health plan in a Clinton presidency; they could just continue to work to sabotage Obamacare and take more votes to repeal without any replacement to be judged by the same standards as other bills. [...]
Of course there is a workable alternative: join with Democrats and fix the problems in Obamacare, stabilizing insurance markets, expanding Medicaid in the states that have failed to do so, finding ways to make the individual mandate work better to expand the risk pool more. But after a decade of success inflaming tribal warfare, that is not a path McConnell and Ryan are willing to take.
David Faris at The Week highlights how unproductive this Republican Congress has been:
...it turns out that the GOP-controlled Congress can't seem to pass any meaningful laws at all. Either they have forgotten how, or the divisions in their own increasingly radicalized caucus are proving too difficult to surmount. Whatever the explanation, thus far these GOP legislators are on track to be the least productive group since at least the Civil War. [...]
Over the past few years, journalists have given significant attention to the data maintained by political scientists at the University of California Los Angeles, which tracks the ideological makeup of individual members of Congress over time. The most important finding they've uncovered is that over the past 30 years, congressional Republicans have become substantially more ideologically extreme, while congressional Democrats have moved marginally to the left but are not much different as a group than they were in 1980, a process known as "asymmetric polarization." For most of the post-war period, there were Democrats who were more conservative than the most liberal Republican, and vice versa. The last time this happened in the Senate was in the 108th Congress, when soon-to-be-ex-Democrat Zell Miller sat to the right of several liberal Republicans, including Susan Collins, Olympia Snowe, and future party-switching Republicans Lincoln Chafee and Arlen Specter.
The slow decline of this ideological overlap has led inexorably to gridlock and dysfunction when one party controls the presidency and the other leads at least one chamber of Congress. There is is simply less to talk about. It's not like disagreeing about whether to get a Border Collie or a Boston Terrier; it's like if you want a dog and only a dog and nothing but a dog and your partner despises animals of all kinds.
Sam Stein and Andrew Desiderio analyze Mitch McConnell’s next steps:
McConnell now faces one of the most difficult obstacles of his decades-long career. His close aides fret that failure to pass some legislation could depress the Republican base and leave the party incredibly vulnerable in 2018. But no amount of procedural maneuvering or policy reshuffling has allowed him to crack the health care reform code. His options are limited and none are particularly confidence-inducing.
On Monday, McConnell announced that he would allow a vote on a proposal to repeal Obamacare immediately with a two-year window to come up with a replacement. It was a strategic gambit, designed to keep the raucous base at bay. Republican lawmakers voted in 2015 in favor of this approach. But they were assured then that President Obama would veto their effort, and in the current climate there is no guarantee—and, indeed, much doubt—that 50 members will say yes to this proposal.
Should that fail, McConnell could simply start over on Republican-authored reform. There are ideas out there. Most recently, Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA) pitched a plan to send money to individual states and allow them to address their health care needs. But on Capitol Hill, their proposal has scant resonance.
And on a final note, here’s Eugene Robinson’s analysis:
It’s exhausting, I know, but don’t let outrage fatigue numb you to the moral bankruptcy and gross incompetence of the Trump administration. This ugly departure from American norms and values must be opposed with sustained passion — and with the knowledge that things will probably get worse before they get better. [...]
As long as there are pro-Trump majorities in the House and Senate, there will be no real congressional oversight and no brake on an out-of-control president’s excesses. Incumbency and gerrymandered districts mean that winning anti-Trump majorities in 2018 will be difficult. But not impossible.
The Democratic Party needs a plan, a message and a sense of urgency. Trump hopes to bully critics into submission, but the country is bigger than this one president. And much better.