Category Archive 'House Freedom Caucus'

27 Mar 2017

Trump’s First Obamacare Repeal Attempt Failed, So What?

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One of my Yale classmates forwarded this columnn, featuring Nicholas Kristof gloating over the Trump Administration’s failure on Friday to pass a new health care bill in the House, to the class email list:

The Trump administration is increasingly showing itself to be breathtakingly incompetent, and that’s the real lesson of the collapse of the G.O.P. health care bill. The administration proved unable to organize its way out of a paper bag: After seven years of Republicans’ publicly loathing Obamacare, their repeal-replace bill failed after 18 days.

Politics sometimes rewards braggarts, and Trump is a world-class boaster. He promised a health care plan that would be “unbelievable,” “beautiful,” “terrific,” “less expensive and much better,” “insurance for everybody.” But he’s abysmal at delivering — because the basic truth is that he’s an effective politician who’s utterly incompetent at governing. …

Whatever one thinks of Trump’s merits, this competence gap raises profound questions about our national direction. If the administration can’t repeal Obamacare — or manage friendly relations with allies like Mexico or Australia — how will it possibly accomplish something complicated like tax reform?

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I replied:

Personally, I thought Trump’s healthcare bill failure was endearing. It confirmed that this administration is being run by amateurs rather than (shudder) practiced professional pols. The question we can now all ask is: can Trump learn?

I was happy that solid ideological conservatives stood their ground and defeated attempt No. 1. I am optimistic enough to believe that the GOP cannot fail (Get-on-board-or-else rhetoric notwithstanding) to return to the inevitable duty of repealing Obamacare. The next try will be better, and hopefully will omit the “covering everyone” and the “free lunch at other people’s expense” coverage for existing conditions. If your house is burning down, sorry! you do not get to phone in and buy fire insurance.

Someone once observed that the legislative process is like the manufacturing of sausages. It can have desirable results, but you will be happier if you don’t watch.

Nicholas Kristof is perfectly correct in one respect, of course. The democrat party is made up of people like Hillary Clinton and Yale’s own John Kerry, consummate shits and professional political operators who would make Machiavelli seem like a naif and Rodrigo Borgia like a wimp. Republican pols tend to be aging Eagle Scouts and Rotarians playing out of their own league. Watching the Congressional GOP take on the democrats is often very much like watching the Washington Generals play the Harlem Globetrotters. Republicans are handicapped by Constitutional Fideism, and a respect for Process, and being afflicted with ordinary decency.

However, the World’s turned upside down. Eight years of economic suffering while Caliban strutted on the national stage enraged the democrat party’s traditional Working Class base. There was a Populist Revolution and the Revolution wasn’t knocking on my door with pitchforks and torches. The angry mob was after Progressivism and the National Establishment. The ideology of the national ruling class and the party that represents it has shown itself to be intellectually exhausted and degenerated into a host of pathologies. The more established any of our institutions, the more debased its morals and the more insane its poses and pronouncements. Nothing in America is more Establishment than Yale, and contemporary Yale has become a national laughing stock and disgrace. The American People are naturally unwilling any longer to be led by a class of nincompoops and demoniacs who hanker after their own eradication and replacement by a new, more melanistically-favored and questionably-gendered population, and whose first priority is apologizing on all of our behalfs.


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