Tag: Paul Ryan

TRUMP’S ‘GOOD WEEK’ IS JUST MORE OF THE SAME

To hear Donald Trump tell it, he had his best week yet in Washington. The president bitch slapped his own party’s Congressional leaders. Then he hugged Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, and even let House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi dictate a Twitter message for him. Not only that, he helped secure rare bipartisan support for a bill that will get Texas some hurricane relief and keep the government open for three more months. Could this, the Donald’s 137th reinvention, be the one that really sticks? Could it be that he has finally become presidential?

Naaaa, of course not. This was just one more iteration of Trump being Trump. When it comes to his core values, he has always been consistent. And what he really values, at his core, is himself, and how he looks to the world at any moment in time. “It’s all over the news,” the president bubbled in a call to Schumer. “The coverage is incredible; everyone is praising me. Even MSNBC is saying nice things about me.” (Here and here.)

And that’s what it takes for Donald Trump to have a very good week. There was a time he had to really work to create the public illusion of grandeur. Like when he impersonated his own press agent in order to spread lurid reports about his love life to gossip columnists. It’s so much easier now. All he has to do is make nice with a couple of Democrats he spent the last six months vilifying.

Back in the real world, North Korea is polishing its nukes, 800,000 young Americans face deportation, and there is no assurance our government will be funded past December 8. Trump’s feel-good days of early September offer no nourishment for a body politic that has been ailing since January 20. For that, we need skilled leadership, someone with credibility, vision, a sense of direction and an ability to subjugate ego needs for the sake of getting the job done. Alas, Trump is a dismal failure in all four areas. He is constitutionally incapable of getting outside of himself in order to lead others. The president’s euphoric week was packed with evidence supporting the previous sentence.

It started with the dreamers, the now young adults whose parents brought them into the country illegally as children. Through a 2012 executive order, the Obama administration protected them from deportation. Trump excoriated Obama for that action during the campaign, promising, if elected, to send them all back to the countries of their birth. Then he softened a bit, telling the dreamers not to worry because he loves them. However, as the songwriter noted, love hurts. On Tuesday the administration pulled the plug on the dreamers, announcing that they would be subject to deportation in March if Congress did not resolve the issue through legislation. That was it. The president took no position on what Congress should do – protect them or evict them. He just wanted the monkey off his back. Amazingly, the New York Times quoted White House aides saying their boss did not appear to fully understand the meaning of his announcement an hour before it was delivered.

The public response was overwhelming negative. So Trump, naturally, turned to Twitter for a mood adjustment. His message: if Congress doesn’t act, he will “revisit” the issue. For someone who fancies himself as a master negotiator, this was an incredibly insipid move. It instantly deflated the leverage he created by linking the dreamers’ deportation to a failure of Congress to act. But it made him feel better for a while.

Then came the infamous Oval Office meeting with Congressional leaders. The Republicans, Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan, wanted to raise the debt limit and keep government funded for 18 months, getting them past the mid-term elections. Schumer and Pelosi wanted only a three-month extension because it would give them leverage in a year-end funding battle. Ryan called the Democrat’s three-month proposal “ridiculous and disgusting.” Trump’s partner in the meeting, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin had just delivered a defense of the Republican’s 18-month plan when Trump shocked the room by siding with the Democrats, whose three-month deal was soon summarily passed by both houses, much to the chagrin of frustrated Republicans.

It was the news of that meeting that gave Trump his good week. He could view himself as a bipartisan deal-maker. Basking in the mania of that image, Trump upped the ante, by joining with “Chuck and Nancy” in supporting a law protecting the dreamers. A day later, he went even further and said he agreed with Schumer that Congress should end the requirement of regularly approving the government’s debt limit, a sacred conservative ritual if there ever was one.

The pundits have had a field day with it all. Some compared it to Bill Clinton’s triangulation. Some wondered if Trump was finally finding his footing. Others, noting that the president was once a Democrat, speculated he might be returning to his roots. The analysis is about as meaningful as trying to figure out why a leaf suddenly falls from a tree. That’s what a leaf does. And this is what the Donald does: grab whatever attention he can to make him look and feel good in the moment. As Poe says, “merely this and nothing more.”

The problem is that moments are outlived by their consequences. Strategies are designed to build a multiplicity of moments that will get you to where you want to go, assuming you know where that is. Trump doesn’t get any of that. He’s too wrapped up in watching himself on cable news to realize that when you blindside associates – on either side, when you yank the rug out from under your treasury secretary, when you love dreamers one day and move to deport them the next, you lack the credibility, integrity and probity needed to lead. You’re just a leaf sailing through the breeze. ‘Tis the wind and nothing more.

OBAMACARE REPEAL PROMISE SHOWS ITS AGE, AND IT’S NOT PRETTY

For one brief shining moment, the left and the right have come together in a chorus of Kumbaya. All it took was a singularly pernicious piece of legislation that simultaneously offended all of their principles. You’ve got to hand it to Republican congressional leaders: they came up with a health care bill that almost anyone can hate. Who could have imagined such a collection of odd couples – Planned Parenthood and the Koch brothers, MoveOn.org and the Tea Party, Sens. Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz – all locking arms in battle?

Yet, even with depleted and exhausted troops, these determined generals – Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan – keep trying to climb that seemingly unscalable mountain in order to pound a stake through the heart of Obamacare. It’s a seven-year-old elusive dream that has not aged well. This bizarre mission is draped in a misplaced notion of integrity, of promises to keep. “We’re keeping our word,” Ryan told ABC news. “That’s very important.” Our promise, McConnell has repeatedly insisted, is to “repeal Obamacare root and branch.” The repeal mantra worked for Republicans back in the day. But political slogans need to change with the times. Even George Wallace knew that his 1963 “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever” line wouldn’t play in the 1980s. Too much had changed. The health care swing was less dramatic but just as real.

The frenzy to pass this legislation is all about a promise that is no longer operative. It served conservative political interests a few years back, when the new health insurance system was confusing, unsettling and, thanks to Republican demagoguery, unpopular. However, people have gotten used to it, including the estimated 17-20 million who now have insurance for the first time. Suddenly, polls show that a majority of Americans like Obamacare. Meanwhile, NPR/Marist polling on the Republican health bill this week gave it a 17% approval rating. In that same survey, 63% of the respondents favored either leaving Obamacare unchanged or strengthening it.

From a pure standpoint of self-interest, the GOP’s health care strategy makes no sense. Politicians have two constituencies: voters and campaign contributors. So far, every health care permutation Republicans have come up with alienates both groups. If anything resembling their current bills pass, between 22 and 23 million Americans will lose insurance. Lower income families and the elderly will see premiums rise by 280%. Taking benefits away from people – or overcharging for them – is not an effective way to win votes. Republican governors get that, which is why many of them oppose their party’s mindless drive to repeal and replace. It’s a promise that has lost its predicate.

And now come the financial heavies, the real power behind the anti-Obamacare movement, all angrily insisting that the Republican bills aren’t a repeal at all. The repeal promise, of course, was not born out of a desire to create a better health care system. It was all about appeasing the Koch brothers and other titans of the corporate right. Americans for Prosperity, the Koch network’s political arm, and a number of similar groups, poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the campaign coffers of candidates committed to a total dismantling of Obamacare. They are all thoroughly disgusted with the House and Senate bills that upend insurance for millions and slash Medicaid spending. It’s not enough for them, not nearly enough. AFP leader Tim Phillips called the Republican legislation “a slight nip and tuck”, according to the Associated Press. He said it was “Obamacare-lite” and that AFP is poised to go after Republicans who support it. In other words, the only way McConnell and Ryan can satisfy their financial benefactors is to cut much deeper, leaving millions more without insurance, and passing their subsidies on to the rich in the form of tax cuts.

The Washington Post reported today that McConnell was gingerly rearranging pieces of his Senate bill in an attempt to address objections launched from every possible direction. Reportedly, this would involve scaling back tax cuts for the rich in favor of helping lower income people get insurance. That might appease some moderates but will further frustrate the right. To compensate, says The Post, he may strike some Obamacare coverage mandates from the bill. Meanwhile, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office reported that the bill’s reduction in Medicaid coverage would be significantly higher than originally calculated. Bottom line: the bill is not headed toward a Palm Sunday reception.

McConnell and Ryan are not in this promise trap by themselves. President Trump spent his campaign promising to slay Obamacare on day one. Of course, the president could cram everything he knows about health care and the legislative process into a single tweet, and have 140 characters left over. He says he wants a Senate bill that is not as “mean” as the House version. Yet, Trump threw a Rose Garden celebration for passage of that “mean” House bill, calling it “very, very, incredibly well-crafted . . .a great plan.” Unlike the president, McConnell and Ryan know what they are doing. They just made a huge stumble.

There is a certain nobility attached to fulfilling a promise, but nobility can quickly turn into dung when the underlying conditions behind the promise change. This is one more example of Republicans ignoring science at their peril. Remember the uncertainty principle from physics class? You can determine a particle’s position or its momentum, but you can’t accurately measure both at the same time. That’s because positions and momentum change. The Republican leadership built their repeal strategy on 2010 measurements. Once people who never had health insurance got it, the public’s position on the particle called Obamacare started to change. It’s been moving ever since, but the Senate majority leader and House speaker are just now taking stock of its momentum.