USA TODAY International Edition
SCRAP YOUR ABSOLUTISM, FACE REALITY
Trump’s hasty deal with Democrats is a warning shot to conservative hard-liners
President Trump wrote a book on deals, and so did I. Mine is shorter and didn’t sell quite as many copies, but it was a deep dig into how political agreements are born. The process — slow, plodding, painstaking, strategic, and did I mention slow? — is nothing like what went on last week with Trump, Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer. Nothing at all.
As a citizen, I’m thrilled by the lightning round between the Republican president and his two Democratic amigos. It feels strange but wonderful to get hurricane aid, keep the government in business, and increase the U.S. borrowing limit (sparing the world a financial crisis) — all before we even began to type our traditional angst-ridden headlines about polarization, paralysis and brinkmanship.
As a liberal, I’m also pretty psyched. If Pelosi (the House Democratic leader) and Schumer (her Senate counterpart) are even half the geniuses Republicans think they are, Democrats may be well-positioned to help protect undocumented young immigrants in a program Trump just canceled, and to keep a lid on the deliverables to rich people anticipating huge tax cuts.
UNPOPULAR AGENDA
If I were a centrist Republican, I’d be intrigued by this hint of bipartisanship. Could it be that the GOP fever is finally breaking, five long years after President Obama predicted it would?
It turns out that a lot of what Obama did wasn’t so God-awful. The problem was who did it (him) and in some cases how he did it — executive actions or, heaven forbid, party-line votes.
The latest of many examples is the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. In the absence of congressional action on immigration, Obama started a permit system so people brought here illegally as children could work and study without fear of deportation. The conservative backlash was ferocious.
But now that Trump has canceled it, with a six-month grace period for Congress to act, a growing number of Republicans — including Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan — are looking for an escape hatch. Whose idea was it, anyway, to destroy the lives of nearly 800,000 young people who are engines of our economy, or could be, if we let them stay? It turns out it’s not popular to kick the “dreamers” out of America.
Turns out as well that repealing the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, is not popular either. Those protesting repeal at town meetings have included conservatives and Trump voters. Those seeking a bipartisan compromise to improve the law include more than a few Republican senators and governors. Those trying to get Congress to abandon repeal and move on include … Trump.
It wasn’t popular to pull America out of the Paris climate agreement, as Trump has done. It wouldn’t be popular to weaken fuel-efficiency standards developed by the Obama administration, as he is considering. And it won’t be popular if, as expected, the tax “reform” push by Trump and congressional Republicans turns out to be mostly about tax cuts for the rich.
REBELLION IS COMING
Buoyed by gerrymandering and cultural shifts, Republicans have had years of success winning elections at every level. They have mistaken that as popular support for free-market health care, trickle-down economics, extensive deregulation and callous social policies. Will months of failure on Obamacare repeal, capped perhaps by a groundswell of support for DACA, finally drive the message home?
The conservative House Freedom Caucus has been like the tail wagging the GOP and aspiring to wag the whole country. But its three dozen members don’t represent anything close to a majority of Americans. Even within the House, they may be outnumbered by moderate centrists.
Ronna McDaniel, chairwoman of the Republican National Committee, says it’s going to be hard for the GOP to win the 2018 elections if “we haven’t accomplished the things that we ran on.” Rep. Mark Meadows, chairman of the Freedom Caucus, predicts “rebellion against everybody” if the GOP doesn’t repeal Obamacare, cut taxes, and build a wall on the U.S.-Mexican border.
Yet rebellion seems inevitable, either from ideological primary voters or more practical generalelection voters. Both Meadows and McDaniel have it backwards. They should — and yes, I’m really going to say this — take a tip from Trump: Look at today’s political and fiscal realities, step away from their absolutism, and deal with the world as it is.