The Emperors Are Naked

The Republican Party’s seven-year long holy war against the Affordable Care Act came to a humiliating potential conclusion on Friday, March 24th, 2017.

Not too long ago, the President said, “nobody knew healthcare could be so complicated” — but we all know that healthcare politics is as controversial a domestic issue imaginable. So why is anyone surprised that the so-called American Health Care Act, slapped together in a few weeks without any real public consultation, died before ever coming to a vote in the House of Representatives?

After all, the Affordable Care Act (you may know it as Obamacare) took over a year to shape and pass, and, despite facilitating health insurance for millions of Americans, caused sufficient controversy to decimate the Democratic Party’s numbers in Congress. It probably isn’t something that can be undone in a matter of weeks.

I’m going to avoid diving into the policy implications of the last few weeks because they are actually complicated. Instead, let’s talk about what this debacle means for Republican governance going forward.

Bills sometimes fail to become laws, even after a deliberate and considered process. However, promises to eliminate the ACA have been a defining feature of Republican electoral campaigns since it became law. President Trump went so far as to suggest calling a special session of Congress on his first day of office, just to kill the ACA. Failing to meet this high-profile promise in such an exaggerated way begs the question: if the Republicans control all of the relevant branches of government, and they all ostensibly agreed that the ACA had to go, why did they fail so spectacularly?

The AHCA disaster points to a fundamental problem with the current Republican Party: they are not actually prepared to govern this country, and they barely seem to realize it. They have legislators who have been selected for their unwillingness to compromise, a legislative leader who has an outsized reputation for policy salesmanship but hasn’t actually sold a policy to anyone who matters, an administration of inexperienced and self-interested people, and a very unpopular president with no interest or ability to understand the details of public policy.

The modern Republican Party is defined by two prominent leaders and the supposed tensions between them.

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has established a substantial reputation based on being a “serious thinker” about policy; someone who is more comfortable giving a PowerPoint about block-granting Medicaid rather than fulminating about “crooked” Hillary. Being an attractive white man in a suit who speaks in a eager but soft voice can get you very far these days. This so-called policy wonk, despite having seven years and an entire universe of conservative intellectuals to come up with a health care reform to replace the ACA, managed to come up with a bill that achieved the incredible feat of being furiously attacked by the Heritage Foundation and Bernie Sanders.

As the de facto leader of the legislative branch of the United States government, with a Republican president who will likely sign whatever legislation comes to his desk, Ryan should be at the pinnacle of his career. Instead, he is imprisoned by his own reputation.

This reputation commands the surface respect of most Congressional Republicans, but so far, he seems unable to motivate or coerce them into any collective action. Republicans control 237 of the 435 seats in the House of Representatives, and the minority party has very little power (unlike in the Senate). Further, all spending bills must originate in the House, so Ryan has been theoretically handed his dream opportunity to shape government fiscal policy. For his first course, he cooked up a bucket of slop, and everyone knew it.

It is probably too early to write the epitaph on his tenure as Speaker, but he may be in the most difficult situation of his career. From the fraught process behind his ascension in the first place, it does not seem that there is anyone else who can command the same respect from all sides of the Republican spectrum. So Speaker Ryan will remain in this position that he might not be any good at, both because of his sense of duty and need to save face, and because the alternative might be all-out civil war among House Republicans. What a shame that the only man for the job is an incompetent charlatan.

This debacle has also badly exposed President Trump. While it was already clear that he did not have much appetite or aptitude for policy details, Trump’s reputation for being an expert deal-maker must now be seriously questioned. I would argue that his weak grasp on policy makes him bad at making deals as President.

Trump began the final push for the AHCA from a weak position: objectively horrible approval ratings (presidents are generally pretty popular this early in their tenures; Trump has been doing his best to be unpopular). He recently faced a precipitous drop in ratings seemingly driven by widespread disapproval of the AHCA - suggesting that even his ever-so-loyal base was balking. The role President Trump and his administration had in this process prior to the announcement of the bill has been obfuscated to some degree, but given the willingness of anonymous White House aides to air all of their dirty laundry to reporters, we have some idea. It certainly seems as though Trump and his people also fell for Paul Ryan’s reputation and allowed him to engineer the main structure of the bill (there’s golf to be played, after all). Ryan fell for Trump’s reputation and put the onus of closing the deal on him (that hair and body don’t shape themselves).

We might consider how Trump (and, alas, the broader media landscape) appear to be vulnerable to persuasion by good-looking white men in suits who will flatter him, despite being clearly in over their heads. Paul Ryan fits this to a tee, but so does his son-in-law Jared Kushner, who appears to now have responsibility for every problem that ails America, despite his only qualifications being that he managed to inherit a large real-estate business from his father and be mediocre-to-poor at it. That does sound familiar…

From a purely political perspective, Trump was unable to persuade reluctant representatives to come along — plus Steve Bannon’s faux-authoritarian act appears to have also fallen flat. He was also unable to negotiate with many Republicans on the specific concerns they had with the bill. It would not be fair to expect anyone — much less a businessman with no previous government experience — to immediately understand all the complexities of health care policy; but it is clear that Trump’s understanding was so minimal that he couldn’t even serve as a useful negotiator.

Trump will always have a lot of leverage in these situations because he has to sign off on the final product. However, he has no ability to evaluate whether demands of particular representatives on the fence could feasibly be met, even with expert advice — thus making it impossible to actually work with him. This is exacerbated by the fact that Trump doesn’t know this, but our representatives do. When you are evaluating whether to make a potentially career-ending vote, it is not reassuring to know that you might make a deal with the President and announce it — only to find it rescinded. Not because it turns out to be unworkable, but because the next morning, someone on Fox & Friends says that it’s bad.

The Republican Party sits at its highest position of power in a generation. Its opposition is largely leaderless and distracted with internecine struggles. However, it is led by two men whose charisma and skill in public relations have overshadowed their lack of competence in the difficult tasks of governing. It’s a good thing that the next thing on their agenda (tax reform) doesn’t involve complicated trade-offs between large, motivated groups of people or anything like that. Nobody knew governing the country could be so complicated.