Friday, May 15, 2020

Why Republicans Get No Points for Opposing Democrats’ $3 Trillion Coronavirus Bill

On May 15, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) will bring to the floor of the House a sprawling, 1,815-page bill. Released mere days ago, the bill would spend roughly $3 trillion—down from the $4 trillion or more that lawmakers on her socialist left wanted to allocate to the next “stimulus” package.

Most House Republicans will oppose this bill, which contains a massive bailout for states and numerous other provisions on every leftist wish list for years. But should anyone give them credit for opposing the legislation? In a word, no.

Conservatives shouldn’t give Republican lawmakers any credit for opposing bills that have no chance of passage to begin with—bills they never should vote for anyway. I didn’t go out and rob a bank yesterday. Should I get a medal for that? Of course not. You don’t get credit for doing the things you’re supposed to do.

Conservatives should demand more than the soft bigotry of low expectations that Republican lawmakers’ miserable track record on spending has led them to expect. For starters, instead of “just” voting no on the Pelosi bill’s additional $3 trillion in spending, why not come up with a plan to pay for the $3 trillion Congress has already spent in the past several months?

Yes, government needs to spend money responding to coronavirus, not least because government shut down large swathes of the economy as a public health measure. But that doesn’t mean Congress can or should avoid paying down this debt—not to mention our unsustainable entitlements—starting soon.

Decades of ‘Conservative’ Grifters

Two examples show how far Republican lawmakers stray from their rhetoric. In July 2017, former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) said of his prior rhetoric regarding Obamacare, from defunding the law to “repeal-and-replace”: “I never believed it.” Of course, he waited to make this admission until he had left office and taken a lucrative job at an investment bank.

Cantor’s comments confirmed conservatives’ justifiable fears: That Republican lawmakers constantly play them for a bunch of suckers, making promises they don’t believe to win power, so they can leverage that power to cash in for themselves.

Perhaps the classic example of the “all hat and no cattle” mentality comes via former House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.). Notwithstanding Ryan’s reputation as a supposed fiscal hawk, consider his actions while in House leadership:

  • Instead of reforming entitlements, Ryan led the charge to repeal the first-ever cap on entitlement spending. He could have nixed Obamacare’s Independent Payment Advisory Board, a group of unelected officials charged with slowing the growth of Medicare spending, while keeping the spending cap. Instead, he got Congress to repeal the board and the spending cap that went with it—worsening our entitlement shortfalls.
  • For years, Ryan proposed various reforms to the tax treatment of health insurance, because economists on both the left and the right agree it encourages the growth of health-care costs. But as speaker, Ryan supported delays of a policy included in Obamacare that, while imperfect, at least moved in the right direction towards lowering health care costs. The delays allowed Congress to repeal the policy outright late last year, in a massive spending bill that shifted both spending and health-care costs the wrong way.
  • As chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, Ryan gave then-House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) the political cover he needed to pass a Medicare physician payment bill that increased the deficit and Medicare premiums for seniors. The legislation did include some entitlement reforms, but at a high cost—and didn’t even permanently solve the physician payment problem.

Ryan’s “accomplishments” on spending as a member of leadership echo his prior votes as a backbench member of Congress. Ryan voted for the No Child Left Behind Act; for the Medicare Modernization Act, which created a new, unpaid entitlement costing $7.8 trillion over the long term; and for the infamous Troubled Asset Relief Program Wall Street bailout.

Over his 20-year history in Congress, I can’t think of a single instance where Ryan took a “tough vote” in which he defied the majority of his party. Instead, he always supported Republicans’ big-spending agenda. In that sense, tagging Ryan as a RINO—a Republican in Name Only—lacks accuracy, because it implies that most Republican lawmakers have a sense of fiscal discipline that only Ryan lacks.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to draw the line from Ryan’s brand of “leadership” to Donald Trump. The latter spent most of his 2016 campaign illustrating how Republican elected officials failed to deliver on any of their promises, despite talking up their plans for years.

Stand for Principle, or Stand for Nothing

When Republicans enter the House chamber on Friday to cast their votes against Pelosi’s bill, they should take a moment to contemplate her history. In the 2010 elections, Pelosi lost the speakership in no small part because of Obamacare. One scientific study concluded that the Obamacare vote alone cost Democrats 13 seats in the House that year.

Pelosi did not relinquish the speakership gladly; few would ever do that. But she proved willing to lose the speakership to pass the law—and would do so again, if forced to make such a binary choice.

I know not on what policy grounds, if any, Republicans would willingly sacrifice their majorities in the way Pelosi and the Democrats did to pass Obamacare. (Reforming entitlements? Tax cuts? Immigration?) That in and of itself speaks to the Republican Party’s existential questions, and the ineffective nature of the party’s “leadership.”

It also provides all the reason in the world that House Republicans should not trumpet their votes against the Pelosi legislation on Friday.

This post was originally published at The Federalist.