It’s very common for me to see a question – sometimes rhetorical and sometimes otherwise – that can be answered rather easily with a simple search. Most of the time I don’t mind doing that search, but I wonder why people don’t do it themselves more often. After all, one of the good aspects of the internet is that it gives us the ability to look things up quickly without hauling ourselves to the library and spending a ton of time locating the proper source. It’s all here at our fingertips – literally.
Sometimes the searching isn’t so simple, of course. But it often is. For example, I sometime read something like, “No GOP politician has ever spoken out against [fill in the blank] or supported [fill in the blank].” And yet all I have to do is take 30 seconds of searching to find quotes from GOP politicians doing just that.
So, what gives? Do we often think if we haven’t heard something it means it didn’t happen? There’s a cacophony of noise out there and only some of it filters through.
While I’m at it, I’ll mention something else, which is that a huge percentage of online commenters on the right hate, despise, and detest the GOP and especially its representatives in Congress. The sense of betrayal is epic, fueled by hundreds of truly disappointing, frustrating, and infuriating incidents. That colors perceptions of just about everything that happens in Congress, from the idea that Democrats always get what they want (no, they don’t, although they often do), to the idea that Republicans in Congress are utterly corrupt liars who only care about money and are in league with the Democrats but just aren’t honest about it (the “Uniparty”).
I don’t quite agree, but not because I don’t feel some of the same feelings. And it’s not because I’m so trusting of the GOP, either. I think it’s because I’m more cynical, not less, about the possibilities of government and of Congress. I’m actually pretty cynical about all politicians. But I think that means that at a certain level I accept that the people who enter politics have certain characteristics and motivations that many of the rest of us don’t share, or we’d be entering politics too. Those characteristics don’t tend to be noble, although a few of them are. Politics is always a pretty dirty business and I think there’s something inherent in it that means it’s not going to become clean, and that purists and idealists do well in politics only in the movies. In addition, I do think that some people in Congress are quite smart, hard-working, and dedicated, but it’s not the rule and I don’t think it’s ever going to be the rule.
Plus, the GOP hasn’t had anything but narrow majorities for a long time, and because members of the GOP tend to be less likely to toe the party line than Democrats are, you always will get some defectors here and there. When majorities are large – and the Democrats often used to have very large majorities during the 20th century, although not recently – a few defections don’t matter. When majorities are small (as the rare GOP majorities have tended to be since before FDR), defections do matter – as the Democrats found out during the last Congress, when Manchin and Sinema made the rest of the Democrats gnash their teeth with frustration at their refusal to get with the program.
So just a few people can frustrate narrow Republican majorities. John McCain did that with the “skinny” Obamacare repeal in 2017, casting the deciding vote against it. His defection seems to have been a surprise:
McConnell, who seemed to exhaust every trick in the procedural playbook to get to this point, seemed surprised and undercut by the result.
The defeat ends — for now — the health care debate in Congress. The chamber adjourned following the defeat, and there are no further Senate votes this week…
Republican senators said there was no consensus and no plan for what comes next on health care. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, warned of potentially severe political consequences for Republicans for failing to deliver on what has been the GOP’s unifying campaign pledge for the previous three elections.
“I sadly feel a great many Americans will feel betrayed,” Cruz told reporters, “that they were lied to, and that sentiment will not be unjustified.”
The “skinny repeal” was a pared-down version of Republican proposals to undo Obamacare with no plan for what to replace it with. It would have eliminated the individual and employer mandate and key taxes, defunded Planned Parenthood for a year and eliminated key protections of health benefits that were required under Obamacare.
The bill was deeply unpopular, but GOP leaders worked to assure members it would never become law. Instead, they wanted the Senate to pass it in order to advance the legislation to a third round of negotiations with the House to try to craft a final bill both chambers could pass.
Many of you who hate the GOP for this and so many other failures will probably say it was all a plot, that McConnell knew what McCain would do and colluded with it, and that the GOP never actually wanted to repeal Obamacare. What do I think? I think the Republican Party was divided about what was an acceptable alternative to Obamacare – they’d studied and proposed tons of them – and that McCain blindsided McConnell, with great relish. I think the confused-sounding agenda described in the last paragraph – “they wanted the Senate to pass it in order to advance the legislation to a third round of negotiations with the House to try to craft a final bill both chambers could pass”- is a reflection of the way Congress works when a party doesn’t have overwhelming and united majorities in both houses. I think compromise is hard, and members of Congress used to be better at it and voters more tolerant of it. Those days aregone.
And yes, I would like to see a much better leader in there than McConnell. But whom would that person be, and would that person actually want the office? Being Speaker is a complex, difficult, and mostly thankless task, especially with such tiny majorities. And although the job seems powerful and it is, the actual power can be thwarted by just a few members of Congress and then the Speaker gets blamed for it.
But ah, you say, the Democrats stay united. My answer is that they don’t always – again, see Manchin and Sinema – and also that Democrats are different than Republicans in temperament and in the willingness to go with the group.
In other words, Republican cats are more difficult to herd than Democrat cats.
Hate on the GOP in general or certain Republicans in particular all you want. But I think we should be realistic about what’s possible in Congress and especially with a tiny majority in one house of Congress. Also, if someone in the GOP (or anyone, actually) is reported in the media and/or blogs and/or social media as having said something that gets your goat, please look up the entire quote and its context. You may get some surprises.
