The next act of Congress
A nd now for our next act.
The failure of the American Health Care Act to make it across home plate had the minute-by-minute drama of a closely contested game, right down to the breaking news that House Speaker Paul Ryan was “rushing” to the White House to inform the president that he couldn’t get the votes to pass the bill.
Imagine the sighs of relief in the Senate bleachers, where the third of the membership facing elections in 2018 have escaped at least one shamefaced vote, and in the House, where any single member could win or lose the next election based on the act’s drastic impact on Americans’ health.
The collapse of the Republicans’ health care bill shows that the party has been so consumed with being against Obamacare provisions that it hasn’t been able to agree on what it wants. Having mounted a strong defense against virtually every proposal from the Obama administration, the party has let its strategic offense skills atrophy.
This is a humiliating lesson for the Republicans but a temporary relief for Americans who would have lost health care coverage — by estimate of the Congressional Budget Office, 24 million over the next decade. Still, Obamacare needs reform, and for that Congress needs to regroup,
Some things can be predicted as coming next: Congress will move on to the next priority on the Republican agenda. Majority leaders will go back to the consensus building they thought they had achieved with the party’s January meeting in Philadelphia.
Ugly as this process has been to watch, it bodes some improvement for the balance of powers that exists not because of majority-minority party politics but because of the U.S. Constitution. The executive branch proposes and the legislative branch disposes or, as in this scenario, refuses to.
That dynamic has seriously weakened over the last few administrations, in which frustrated presidents of both parties have used executive orders to get what Congress won’t give them and have even booked major military spending — on the Iraq War, for example — outside the budget.
Leading the effort to resurrect Republican unity and congressional authority, besides the bloodied Ryan, will be Sen. Mitch McConnell, who has said he won’t be supporting the cuts in foreign aid and medical research in President Trump’s proposed spending plan. That was a rare moment in which McConnell, the Senate’s Wizard of No, said he’d use his power to block provisions constructively rather than as an obstruction.
What’s vital now is for citizens to keep their eyes on the next acts of Congress — not just tax-cutting or The Wall or the Supreme Court confirmation vote on Neil Gorsuch but the hearings the Trump administration would like us all to overlook.
Don’t be distracted. As Congress investigates the Trump campaign’s ties with Russia, questioning by panel members will ripple across the campaign staff and the administration. Anyone who remembers the Watergate investigations into President Richard Nixon and his staff will notice the sense of déjà vu.
As it was in the 1970s, it can be now. The hearings are bipartisan affairs in which panel members have the political cover to think of themselves as representatives of the American people first, and party members second, if they so choose. That’s what happened as the Watergate hearings proceeded.
If Congress can exercise its constitutional share of the balance of powers by conducting fair, open investigations into the allegations of undue influence and inappropriate contact, in the process it may regain some self awareness of what it’s like to function as a bipartisan body.
And that would make reform of the health care law, the tax code and other urgent matters a lot more likely to succeed.
The collapse of the Republicans’ health care bill shows that the party has been so consumed with being against Obamacare provisions that it hasn’t been able to agree on what it wants.