Thursday, April 12, 2018

Paul Ryan Shares Responsibility for Republicans’ Obamacare Failure

On the last day of 2016, I sent the editing team at The Federalist a draft article that predicted events in the coming Congress. If those events came to pass, then it could publish, along with a notation indicating that I had written it months (or years) previously.

The piece described a scenario in which cross-pressures over repealing-and-replacing Obamacare led Paul Ryan to resign his speakership. Even then, before the 115th Congress officially convened, I envisioned conflicts between the “repeal” wing of the Republican Party and the “replace” wing, making success on health care unlikely and Ryan the likeliest “fall guy” in any such scenario. Even though Wednesday’s retirement announcement by the speaker officially rendered this outcome moot, I can’t help but reflecting on the prediction.

A Party Proves It Has No Idea How to Lead

A few months after I drafted that prediction, the worst-kept secret among Republican circles became the fact that House leaders didn’t start drafting health-care legislation until late January 2017, around the time of President Trump’s inauguration. On one level, the delay made some sense. After all, no one expected Donald Trump to win the presidency—not even Donald Trump.

But on the other hand, members and staff should have immediately sprung to work the morning after the election, to begin assembling options and drafting legislation. Congressional leaders had 72 days between November 9, 2016 and January 20, 2017 to develop both a coherent strategy and a bill. They certainly didn’t do the latter, and they probably didn’t do enough of the former. Those failures ultimately lie at Ryan’s feet.

Some may argue that congressional leaders’ initial support for a repeal-first approach—also called “repeal-and-delay,” for it would have postponed the repeal’s effective date to allow for enacting a replacement—justified the lack of action on a “repeal-and-replace” measure. After all, “repeal-and-replace” didn’t become the preferred option until the month of Trump’s inauguration. But Republicans were always going to need some type of “replace” legislation eventually, and delaying work on drafting that bill qualifies as legislative malpractice.

Hiding Your Heads In the Sand Isn’t a Plan, Guys

Once they did release their bill publicly, House Republicans didn’t hold hearings on the legislation before marking it up, leaving many members to defend their votes for legislation whose full implications they didn’t necessarily comprehend.

The fast timetable meant House leaders passed the bill in committee, and on the House floor, without final Congressional Budget Office scores. One staffer called this tactic a game of Russian roulette—a hope that final CBO scores would not blow up in members’ faces after they voted for the bill. These procedural shortcuts led to understandable concerns among the public about the rush to pass a bill, not to mention justifiable arguments of hypocrisy over how Republican critics of Obamacare’s lack of transparency used an even more secretive process.

Second, once they did draft a bill, time pressures contributed to Ryan’s initial take-it-or-leave-it strategy with his own conference. In part, House leaders’ talk of “binary choices”—“Either support the Republican plan as-is, or support Obamacare”—stemmed from their desire to pre-empt a rightward drift that might hinder the bill’s chances in the Senate. But it also came from their absurd prediction—which I called absurd at the time—that Congress could introduce, and pass, legislation remaking much of the nation’s health sector within six weeks.

The Party’s Mess Isn’t Ryan’s Fault, But Leadership Lack Is

To be clear, the Republican Party faced internal fissures on health care that Ryan could not have resolved by himself. Immediately after the election, I considered stalemate the likeliest option, and so it proved.

But had House leaders crafted a bill sooner, they could have 1) guaranteed a more open process, alleviating some member concerns and preventing bad headlines about the lack of transparency, or 2) discovered the intractable nature of the debate at an earlier stage in 2017, and pivoted away from health care sooner (perhaps to come back to it at some later date). Either option would have proved far preferable than the events of last spring and summer.

To sum up: House leaders’ failure to plan, and draft Obamacare legislation well in advance, led to members taking tough votes—votes that could cost members their seats in November—without either all the information they needed to make an informed choice or a process they could publicly defend. And it squandered the entirety of what little honeymoon President Trump had with voters last year.

In his first letter to the Corinthians, Saint Paul asked, “For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle?” At the time when Republican Washington needed a path toward action on health care, another Paul proved to be a far from certain trumpet, with disastrous consequences for his party. It will stand as part of his legacy.

This post was originally published at The Federalist.