Conservatives may get their cuts to welfare state
Throughout the modern history of Congress, lawmakers have inexorably expanded progressive social policies, and while conservatives have successfully forestalled expansions to the social safety net, they’ve had very little success in reversing them.
Right now, however, Republicans have a chance to buck that trend, as they debate legislation aimed at repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act. The Senate bill released Thursday, coupled with the House bill passed earlier this year, would be exactly the kind of cuts to the welfare state that conservatives have consistently failed to achieve.
The repeal measure, which follows weeks of secrecy in its drafting, would bring down taxes, eliminate hundreds of billions of dollars in outlays on the social safety net and curtail the federal government’s involvement in a crucial sector of the economy.
The American right has had few chances to enact such farreaching legislation. For decades, Democrats controlled the House, and Republican presidents have often pursued moderate or progressive domestic agendas.
Public programs established by Democrats have proved popular among beneficiaries, and it has been difficult for Republicans to dismantle them.
Conservative principles have often won out in foreign policy, in the courts and at the level of the states, but the trend in federal lawmaking has long been to the left.
The Republican health- care bill would be an exception. The law would go beyond repealing parts of Obamacare to drastically restructure Medicaid, a 52- yearold program.
“The more common pattern in the U. S. is that progressive social policies have been prevented, rather than rolled back,” said Julia Lynch, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania.
“Until now, the growth of the welfare state has occasionally been slowed, but never reversed in any major way,” said H.W. Brands, a historian at the University of Texas at Austin, in an email.