Republicans have to stop playing doomsday politics

Since Donald Trump took office, Republicans have tried to govern as if Democrats didn’t exist. They tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act and succeeded in ramming through huge tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy without seeking a single Democratic vote — in fact, without even holding hearings where Democrats could comment on the proposals.

Now, however, GOP leaders are in trouble. They need to pass a “continuing resolution” in order to maintain funding for the government and avoid a shutdown. But despite control of both houses of Congress, they don’t have the votes.

Why not? In the House, the main problem was ultra-right-wing members, who don’t want to support even routine spending.

Still, Republicans didn’t need Democrats to get a bill through.

However, passing the bill in the Senate will require 60 votes. With only 51 Republicans, Democratic votes are needed.

Once upon a time a party that needed some help from across the aisle would have sought a deal that made some concessions to the other party’s agenda. And until a few days ago it seemed as if normal political rules still applied.

A bipartisan group of senators reached a deal that would have met a key Democratic priority: protecting the Dreamers — young people who were brought to the United States illegally as children, who want to remain in the only country they have ever known. And in return for that agreement — which actually involved a number of concessions to Republicans — Democrats would have been willing to help keep the government running.

Protecting the Dreamers is enormously popular, even among Republicans. But Donald Trump torpedoed the deal, apparently because he doesn’t want immigrants from “s***hole countries.”

This sent Republican leaders back to the drawing board, and what they came up with was another doomsday threat, this time aimed at children.

You see, back in 1997 a bipartisan deal created the Children’s Health Insurance Program, or CHIP, an expansion of Medicaid to cover children who might not otherwise have been eligible. CHIP has been a huge success story, at modest cost. The Congressional Budget Office says extending CHIP another 10 years would actually save the government money, because some families forced off the program would end up receiving subsidies for more expensive sources of coverage.

But Republicans allowed CHIP funding to expire four months ago. And now they’ve attached an extension of the program to passage of a continuing resolution, believing that this will force Democrats to give them what they want.

GOP politicians claim to support CHIP; while there isn’t a lot of polling on the issue, what there is suggests overwhelming popular support, including among Republican voters, for continuing the program.

Yet GOP leaders seem to believe that they can bully Democrats by threatening to hurt millions of children. They also believe that if this tactic fails they can frame it as an exhibition of callousness by Democrats.

Democrats should just say no. These tactics cannot be allowed to succeed. For once doomsday-machine politics becomes the norm, anything is fair game. Give us what we want, or we’ll cut off Medicare. Give us what we want, or we’ll destroy Social Security.

This has to stop. And now is the time to draw the line.