As Trump agenda falters, the two parties erode
WASHINGTON — As the new president continues to traffic in whole-cloth lies and genuine fake news, where are the voices in the Republican Party he hijacked that once represented the sober conscience of American conservatism?
With the exception of naysayers like former GOP presidential nominee John McCain of Arizona and his Senate sidekick Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, the Grand Old Party has allowed Donald Trump and his chest-thumping America First fanatics to become a super-nationalistic wrecking ball. Methodically, the old reliable party establishment of moderate elders in the mode of the late Everett Dirksen in the Senate and Bob Michel in the House have silently stood aside. They have allowed the essentially non-ideological Trump to pepper his White House staff and cabinet with anti-government toadies.
Under the domination of Steve Bannon, the ultra-right oracle who boasts of orchestrating “the deconstruction of the administrative state,” the United States’ decades-long dedication to international solidarity against authoritarianism is in danger of being disemboweled. Meanwhile, several Trump Cabinet members have potential conflicts of interest with their most important missions. Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price came into office with questionable holdings in the health care field, and Michigan billionaire Betsy DeVos, an advocate of school vouchers and foe of public schools, is in charge at the Department of Education.
Many of the 15 Republicans who last year vied with Trump for the party’s presidential nomination, and were defeated and humiliated by him in the process, have since quietly and obediently rolled over. The Republican congressional leaders, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker Paul Ryan, have essentially done the same. The surviving former Republican presidents, the two George Bushes, have allowed themselves only a few symbolic asides of meek Trump disapproval. Ironically, the one Bush so conspicuously trashed by Trump in last year’s Republican presidential primaries, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, has been a bit more outspoken about the need for the GOP establishment to reassert political responsibility.
A few of those 2016 presidential primary losers, such as former Texas Gov. Rick Perry and retired superstar neurosurgeon Ben Carson, have swallowed the Trump Kool-Aid and joined his cabinet. Even “Lyin’ Ted” Cruz has begun goose-stepping along in the Trump ranks. Of all the primary candidates, only Ohio Gov. John Kasich has emerged relatively untarnished to give voice to the nominally moderate Republican establishment banner of Ronald Reagan. He thereby potentially remains a party alternative to Trump in 2020, if the new president manages to survive his chaotic Oval Office beginnings to seek a second term.
As Kasich’s argued on the “Meet the Press” television show, “If you don’t get both parties together, nothing is sustainable.” If the Republicans pass their Obamacare repeal bill “just by themselves,” Kasich warned, the Senate Democrats will reject it and “we’ll be back at this again.”
In casting himself as a honest broker in the current debate over repealing and replacing Obamacare, Kasich is managing to take a position apart from Speaker Ryan, who insists the House Republican bill is the best deal his party can get, and that it reflects the conservative principles a majority of his caucus seeks. Kasich has warned that both parties “are disintegrating before our very eyes,” and disagreements over any new health-care legislation will be politically damaging to both Republicans and Democrats. Yet the way the debate has been going, the most Trump may achieve is what doubters have called “Obamacare Lite,” minor fixes on the margins while the essential Obamacare architecture remains.
If the most popular features of the old plan are preserved — keeping coverage for patients with pre-existing conditions and for dependents under age 26 — and 24 million others are stripped of their protection, as the Congressional Budget Office has now forecast, the Republicans will be the big losers in the end.
Such an outcome predictably would result in Trump heaping blame on the Democrats and his designated “enemies of the people” in the news media. But it would leave him with a major broken promise requiring his explanation. And Kasich’s observation that the two major parties “disintegrating before our very eyes” will be hard for either side to deny.