After the health-care failure, it’s time for Republican voters and donors to rethink their political support.
On the night of Nov. 8, 2016, after it was clear that Donald Trump had upset Hillary Clinton, there was broad agreement that one word described the American electorate’s purpose: change. Voters wanted change from the status quo.
Last week, not 100 days into the Trump presidency, the members of the House Freedom Caucus decided that the 2016 election was not about change. It was instead about legislative gridlock, with the bitterly ironic difference that these 25 or so self-described conservatives have locked up their own party.
Democrats need 24 pickups to regain control of the House. There are 23 Republicans running from districts Mrs. Clinton won. After the 2018 midterms, history may record that the Republican Party lost House control to the Democrats around 2 p.m. on Thursday, March 23, 2017.
That was when Republican members from closely contested congressional districts—such as Virginia’s Barbara Comstock and New York’s John Faso—announced they would vote against the health-care reform bill.
The Freedom Caucus, whose leaders are from “safe” districts, opened a Pandora’s box that pushed these Republicans into impossible vulnerability on the health-care bill. Now Democrats will exploit this vulnerability on every issue before the House.Meet the House Un-Freedom Caucus.
The health-care bill’s provisions for individual patient choice are gone. The Republican Legislature in Kansas voted Tuesday to expand Medicaid. Others will follow.The chances of a truly liberating tax-reform bill are now diminished. As to their “principles,” this caucus has probably helped entrench pure presidential power. Mr. Trump, undercut by his own party, will likely resort to more Obama-like rule by executive order.
This lost opportunity is not about Donald Trump’s House-of-Borgias White House operation or Paul Ryan’s leadership. It is the product of a conservative movement that over the past eight years talked itself, literally, into believing that political activism equals political accomplishment. It does not.
The tea-party movement sits at the center of these events. The tea parties began in 2009 as a spontaneous revolution against Washington’s spending pathology and President Obama’s intent to push it higher. Hundreds of citizen-driven tea-party groups sprouted across the country, even in New York City.
A year later, the Obama IRS began the destruction of that movement, and the small groups collapsed under federal investigations.
After that, the remnants of the original citizen antispending movement were taken over by larger operators who absorbed the tea-party brand and turned conservative political activism into a sophisticated business model.Rage at Washington—the original and genuine tea-party idea—became a commercial political meme. They created and endlessly repeated stirring phrases such as “the donor class” and “the establishment.” These were anger triggers—clickbait for donors.Let us grant that for some, the early impulse was to displace the progressive ascendancy with a more limited government. Between 2009 and 2016, something went off the rails that turned politics into mainly an addictive thrill ride. Achieving legislative goals became a secondary objective.
Pity the poor citizen who thought all this conservative organizing and rage was about something more than anger. As to the Trump supporters, their hero was just taken down by the most right-wing members of the House. At crunch time, the Freedom Caucus stiffed the Trump base that had given them politics’ rarest gift—control of government.
Barack Obama has to be grinning the biggest Obama grin ever. This is the world of political nihilism he created. In February 2010 he convened a bipartisan health-care summit at Blair House, and when it was over he walked away from every market-based proposal the Republicans made. That was the day Paul Ryan and Tom Price, now the Trump HHS Secretary, started writing their own health-reform bills.
The Obama method also brought to Congress people like Freedom Caucus leader Mark Meadows of North Carolina, who had no idea how to do politics inside the complexities of the U.S. system of dispersed political constituencies.
Some Freedom Caucus members now say Mr. Trump should have reached out to them earlier. That is irrelevant. They would have done this to a President Pence. Theirs is a world of face time.
What comes next?
The White House and congressional Republicans have their game faces on for tax reform, but make no mistake: The Democrats have been handed an unearned second wind, and the Republicans are playing defense on nearly everything, from taxes to Russia.
The conservative fundraising machines will go back where they were in 2010, pulling donations out of befuddled, angry voters. But this is a moment for those voters and donors to rethink their support. Maybe those safe Freedom Caucus House seats shouldn’t be so safe. And maybe there’s a difference between conservative organizations that produce constant motion and those that want real victories.
Source:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-house-un-freedom-caucus-1490828436
