The real people’s work
THE IMPASSE: a partial federal government shutdown over a needless wall enters its third week. THE WAY OUT: Forget the wall, fund government, and find some real big, beautiful things to do.
The partial shutdown of the federal government, now into its third week will inevitably come to an end, President Donald Trump’s latest blustering threat to stretch it out for months or even years notwithstanding.
And when it does end, the president and Congress will have to get down to the work of governing in Washington’s newly bipartisan reality. They should be thinking right now about where they can find common ground.
Common ground isn’t in the fake compromise floated by some of Mr. Trump’s surrogates to perhaps spend a little less than the $5.7 billion he demands for his fantastical border wall. No matter how low the down payment for a wall Mr. Trump said that Mexico would fund, it’s a ridiculous idea.
The new Democratic House majority is right to say Mr. Trump will not get his vanity wall, which even many Republicans realize would be an absurd waste of money. The president’s party couldn’t muster the votes for the wall when it was in complete control of Congress the last two years. And most Americans think it’s nonsense.
Democrats have offered some reasonable paths out of this: Fund the full government, or at least the eight agencies other than Homeland Security now caught up in the president’s political grandstanding, and continue negotiations on a real border security and immigration reform package all sides can live with.
And then? If they want to do more than just keep the other side from looking good, they have to get to work.
One good place to begin doing the people’s work would be the issue that Democrats made a centerpiece of many of their campaigns to win back 40 House seats: health care.
Republicans surely know by now that they hold a losing hand on an issue that affects every American. They failed to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, and they can’t deliver on their promises to deliver cheaper coverage while protecting people with pre-existing conditions, allowing children to stay on their parents’ policies till age 26 and providing all the other popular features of Obamacare with none of the unpopular things like a mandate for people to have health insurance. So shore up and improve Obamacare, then have an honest debate on “Medicare for all” without the ideological histrionics.
Another potential source of common ground: America’s aging and outdated infrastructure — its roads and bridges, its water and sewer systems, its communications and digital networks. Mr. Trump wants to build something, so how about a big, beautiful plan to rebuild America?
These are the sorts of things Congress and the president can do when the shutdown is resolved, which is likely to be much sooner than Mr. Trump suggests. Even if he has no care for the damage he’s doing to government, to the millions of Americans who need to interact with it, and to hundreds of thousands of federal workers, this former reality TV star must know one can drag out a contrived drama only so long without losing the audience. This audience pays taxes and votes. When it gets fed up, it doesn’t change the channel. It changes leaders.