Seemingly suicidal House Republicans go off the cliff

Ross Douthat

Over the past seven years, the Republican Party has engaged in increasingly elaborate political suicide attempts. The party has nominated cranks and erstwhile witches and Todd Akin in winnable Senate races. It has engaged in Somme-esque trench warfare within its own congressional caucus, shut down the government without a strategy for winning anything out of it, and campaigned on a sub-Ayn Randian narrative about the heroic businessman and the mooching 47 percent. And then, after all its prior efforts at seppuku failed, the party nominated Donald Trump for the presidency.

You know how that turned out.

So it would be a foolish prognosticator indeed who assumed that Thursday’s House vote for the American Health Care Act, a misbegotten Obamacare quasi-replacement with the favorable ratings of diphtheria, will necessarily be the undoing of the congressional GOP.

Perhaps House Republicans will be saved by masterly policymaking in the Senate (don’t laugh). Republican senators are basically promising to start from scratch, which could lead to anything from the Bill Cassidy-Susan Collins proposal to allow red states to use Obamacare money for non-Obamacare experiments while blue states keep things as they are, to an AHCA rewritten to make it reasonably defensible as policy and non-suicidal in its politics.

Such a rewriting is theoretically possible: A better-funded alternative to Obamacare could lead to modest coverage reductions and still be less politically disastrous than some Democrats expect.

Alternatively, maybe the Senate will simply wrangle and argue and finally do nothing. In which case House Republicans will be able to say, hey, we tried to fix Obamacare, its problems are the Democrats’ fault, and have you checked out the unemployment rate?

So there are ways in which they might yet escape the consequences of voting for such a lousy and unpopular piece of legislation. But it would not be an escape that they deserve.

They were given a gift by Trump’s campaign, a grace they did not merit: the gift of freedom from the trap of dogma, from the pre-existing condition of zombie Reaganism, from an agenda out of touch with the concerns of their actual constituents.

As written, the AHCA basically takes Trump’s gift to the party and hurls it off the highest possible cliff. It is not just the scale of the likely insurance losses, or how much the rich benefit relative to everybody else. It’s also the gulf between that reality and what Trump and others explicitly promised.

If the AHCA stands as the chief policy distillation of Trumpism, then the central Democratic argument in 2018 and 2020 should be entirely clear: Trump is just another pro-plutocracy Republican, and everything his party promised you on health care was a sham.

This sounds like a winning argument to me. However: When a party repeatedly attempts suicide and somehow staggers bleeding into political victories instead, it is reasonable to doubt the rival party’s ability to capitalize even on the worst of blunders.

So two questions loom for the Republicans who voted for this terrible bill. Can the Senate save them from themselves? And if the Senate doesn’t — can the Democrats?