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So Wait, Ryan Doesn’t Have Any Responsibility Here?
So, I was reading Jonah Goldberg yesterday and he had this:
On Saturday morning, Trump placed the blame squarely on the House Freedom Caucus, the 30-odd members of Congress who reportedly kept changing their demands until it was clear they were never going to support the American Health Care Act. Nor is there a single quote from a member of Congress echoing this sentiment, even from the Freedom Caucus. The people in the room understand that Ryan, who clearly made some mistakes, nonetheless acted in good faith to move the president’s agenda. The Pirro crowd, however, can’t endorse the effort to blame the Freedom Caucus, because it’s the heir of True Conservatism. If Trump found himself in opposition to the group, it must be because he was tricked — by Ryan’s irresistible “swagger.”
The second point: Contrary to what Pirro says, she and the other members of Trump’s amen chorus did expect him to work miracles, or at least they said as much. Indeed, during the campaign, Trump said “it will be so easy” to get rid of Obamacare. Trump and his boosters insisted there was nothing he couldn’t do with his Jedi-like negotiating skills and gift for “winning.” So the only explanation that can rescue them from the agony of cognitive dissonance is to insist that Trump was betrayed. That’s why Hannity’s claim that Trump did “everything in his power” to get the bill passed is an accidental admission against interest. It concedes the falsity of the idea that Trump is a modern-day, omni-competent Cincinnatus who will lay down his golf bag to save the republic.
So my only two choices are to blame Trump or to blame Ryan, and if I am blaming Ryan I am avoiding the agony of cognitive dissonance? I feel rather set up here. Apparently, according to Mr. Goldberg, if I don’t put all the blame at the feet of Trump for the failure of this legislation, I am in thrall somehow to Trump.
I have to say that this is a fine example, a fine example, of what it is like to be spoken down too by my betters for supporting Trump. A caricature is built of a unreasonable person, a few people with extreme positions are picked to be spokespeople, and anyone supporting Trump, or feeling that the GOP in the House shares some blame is only avoiding the negative feelings that his savior is betraying him.
Well.
The GOP has had seven years to come up with a plan. Both houses passed a resolution from Tom Price in 2015 Obama vetoed. I cannot help but notice they did not even try to pass that. Trump did not write this legislation, it came from the House. To lay its failure at Trump’s feet, seems odd, indeed. I am not looking to scapegoat Ryan. I blame the entire GOP in Congress who has had seven years to come up with a solid repeal and replace plan. I blame the entire GOP in Congress for being unwilling to ignore Democrat appointed parlimentarians and make their own rules on reconcilliation. I blame the entire GOP in Congress for passing over a dozen resolutions to repeal Obamacare they knew would not be signed into law, but blanching the moment that progress might be made.
The GOP does not appear to want to rock the boat. They promised us, for (dare I say it) seven years, they would repeal it. “Vote for us to stop Obama! We will undo Obamacare!” Those promises were lies. John Podhoretz castigated anyone who believed them, saying “They all lie.” That was on a Ricochet podcast, where he was dismissing the anger and sense of betrayal loyal voters had at the GOP for “not doing anything.” Oh, one can argue they did “a lot” or “what they could” to block Obama. That was not what Mr. Podhoretz was saying, however. So the GOP got elected on the lie they wanted to repeal and replace Obamacare, as evidenced by the first chance they get, they have nothing ready to go, not even passing one of their old resolutions. And Mr. Goldberg says it is Trump’s fault. Let’s sequence that out:
- GOP has seven years to get something ready.
- They create something horrible that will not get the support of the Freedom Caucus no matter what.
- Trump supports the bill they create, and goes to work spending capital to get it passed.
- The House cannot pass it, delivering Trump a defeat.
- It is Trump’s fault for the failure.
- Blaming Ryan is just a way to avoid the truth about Trump.
- This proves Trump is not conservative
- If he ends up working with Democrats because the GOP refuses to work with him, that is the fault of the people who are in thrall to Trump, not the GOP who refuses to work with the President in their own party.
- We will have less conservative victories.
Here is my formulation, which is a bit different:
- GOP has seven years to get something ready.
- They create something horrible that will not get the support of the Freedom Caucus no matter what.
- Trump supports the bill they create, and goes to work spending capital to get it passed.
- The House cannot pass it, delivering Trump a defeat.
- The GOP in Congress is a fault because they did not create a bill they themselves could pass.
- Ryan is Speaker of the House, and therefore he gets the blame for pushing something the GOP won’t pass.
- This proves the GOP is not interested in advancing the conservative interests of the base.
- If Trump ends up working with Democrats, it will be the fault of the GOP in Congress for not working with the President of their own party.
- We will have less conservative victories.
For the record, I would have liked for Trump to have said “You bozos have had seven years to come up with something, and you send me this crap? Go back to the drawing board and send me something you might even be able to pass!” Maybe next time he will, after this loss.
Published in General
The GOP is about as useful as tits on a bull.
Trump is an idiot, Ryan was gutless and the GOP majority is corrupt. Beyond that, we’re chugging along.
I believe that we will see round 2 soon. Pressure is mounting from the many solid folks that we have elected into both the House and Senate. I think Trump has learned from this debacle (I hope) and Ryan has gained clearer perspective on who has the tighter grip on his <redacted> and the GOP establishment is now aware that they don’t have the numbers (or media dominance) to just tell conservatives to sit down and shut up anymore.
My prediction is that this is about to turn into an important victory for conservatism.
http://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2017/03/28/speaker-paul-ryan-house-gop-leadership-trying-the-health-care-rescue-again/
It is liberals who seek recriminations and want to place blame. It is not a characteristic of a conservative mind. Happy Warriors Unite!
From my reading, it sounds like he’s blaming the freedom caucus more than anyone, and then he’s complaining about people who try to spin this as a win for Trump, or at least absolve him of all blame because nothing can even be partially the fault of true conservatives (i.e. the Freedom Caucus) or God-emperor Trump. So they (not you) blame only Ryan because he’s the only one that can possibly do anything wrong.
To me it’s pretty obvious everyone screwed up. Congress should have figured something out years ago, Ryan shouldn’t have over-wonked the bill and been so laser focused on the only thing he was really trying to fix with this legislation (Medicaid) and he shouldn’t have overthought the Reconciliation attempt.
Really, all this did for Trump was destroy the idea that he was this negotiating god who just always gets his way and always gets things done. Jonah’s complaint is about people who can never even believe this is true. It’s not that it’s really Trump fault except in a political sense. If you want to be an effective president, you can’t let things like this happen, whether you did anything wrong or not.
No illumination comes from a broken light bulb.
Meh. To echo several others in this post: everyone shares the blame for this one.
Ryan definitely dropped the ball big time: he knows as much as any lawmaker in DC about the specifics of healthcare reform, and he knows who to call to write a decent bill. But he’s not a natural leader in any way, and apparently being in the limelight is quickly eroding his policy expertise. He really shouldn’t be the speaker of the House.
But let’s delve a little deeper: whose fault is it that Ryan became speaker in the first place? He certainly wasn’t trying desperately to get the job when it opened up. Remember that the Freedom Caucus helped overthrow Boehner but then couldn’t get enough support behind any of their own preferred candidates. How weak is that? Answer: very.
Ryan’s poor leadership skills may be a proximal cause of the healthcare failure. But the root cause is a problem which is so obvious that nobody dares talk about it: the fact that the Republicans in the House – and Republicans in general – simply disagree too much about policy to get anything large done.
I think it destroyed for Trump a sense he can negotiate with Congress in good faith. Does not seem like a win at all.
RyanF, I hope you are right about conservatism.
I’m about fed up with the Hastert mentality, which demands that you don’t bring a bill to the floor unless you know it’s going to pass. To me, that mentality is like a football coach who demands that every play must score a touchdown, or else punt. It makes the coach look like a genius when they score, but more often, it means that the players don’t run plays unless everything is perfect. Which means, rarely. Instead of getting four plays to make ten yards, they’re “settling” for one play to make eighty yards – and so they don’t try.
Right now, the Democrats and the media are gleefully scorning the Republicans because … why? Because a bill didn’t pass? When did that become the end of the world? They’re making a catastrophe out of (what should be) a bump in the road. Pick yourself off the ground, get back in the huddle, and run another play.
To stick with the football analogy, the teams that consistently win (Brady’s Patriots, Peyton’s teams) succeed because they kept the ball moving. They don’t try to score every play. They exploit what the defense gives them. Like Brett Favre used to say: how do you win? Move the chains.
Stop trying for a touchdown every play. Move the chains.
Trump definitely deserves a great deal of blame as well, though.
He was fairly open during the campaign about his MO: he doesn’t bother trying to learn the details of complex issues, but he’s a master at choosing the right people to do the difficult work.
If that’s the case, then the fault for trusting Paul Ryan lies squarely with Trump himself. You can’t claim that your greatest strength is picking the right people, and then turn around after a failure and say it’s not your fault because you were tricked by the wrong people. If that were actually the case, then Trump has no strengths.
I am there with you on that! My beef is they have run on this for seven years, and this is the best they can do? Losers.
Here’s the thing:
1. Trump wildly oversold by repeatedly saying how easy this would be. Anyone who knows anything about the process realized this was untrue, but he said it anyway.
2. He sold himself as the hyper-competent master negotiator who could and would make deals. Now that we have seen Trump’s level of skill, he was wildly exagerating his prowess.
3. Trump is not only the head of the government, but the head of the party. If this piece of garbage bill had passed, he would’ve been bragging about how amazing he was.
4. As President, especially as one whose party controls Congress, he sets the agenda and wields enormous power.
I don’t care who gets the blame. It doesn’t matter to me either way. I don’t care for Ryan or the Republican Party. But when Trump fails like this, he shouldn’t be let off the hook.
KC, you make a great point. But I think there’s a logical (albeit somewhat complicated) explanation as to why Republicans never want to vote on anything until it’s been completely hammered out behind closed doors.
The reason is because most Republicans live in an electoral world in which they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Between the rise of the organized conservative base, digital media, and gerrymandering, most Republican Representatives represent districts with a sizeable base which has a zero-fault mentality: any time their representative so much as utters a sentiment which counters their wishes, it’s off to find a primary challenger. Of course, many of these same Representatives also rely on the votes of numerous moderates in general elections to stay in office.
Given those incentives, it makes perfect sense that those Representatives will be unwilling to take any unnecessary risks. Only voting on bills which have already been compromised to death behind closed doors allows them to a) keep their cards held tightly, and b) claim afterwards that they had no choice, as the caucus/leadership presented them with an all-or-nothing choice.
MikeH, Mendel and Fred have it right – the blame lies at everyone’s feet. Jonah’s point in the linked piece is that there is a certaine element that will just never blame Trump for anything and that this is ridiculous.
This is the most telling part for me. Since Obamacare passed the GOP congress has run on repealing it. Ted Cruz was a villain who did not understand politics when he shut the government down in 2013 over Obamacare. Smart people kept telling us the GOP was doing everything in there power. Look how many times they have voted to repeal.
Every repeal vote was a lie. Now that they could actually pass a repeal they have no plan, not even the ones they supported a year ago.
Bryan,
Jonah is smart, flip, and entertaining. However, he isn’t always as deep as he’d like you to believe he is. I think this is a shallow analysis. My take is that the Republican House strategy of the Obama years which unfortunately Ryan continued in the last 2 years of the Obama Administration is what is at fault. The strategy was always waffle in the middle, try to make deals behind the scenes with the Dems while you talk tough and then slam the conservatives to the mat at the very last moment.
This Bill was very very compromised yet both the Dems and the Republican moderates voted against it. Of course, the conservatives would vote against such a Bill. What this tells you is that the basic strategy is now completely useless if always less than virtuous.
Here is the winning formula. Go to the Conservatives first. Find the most stretch in their position that you can get and then go with that as the working idea. Next, go to the moderates and the Dems targeting those who have some integrity and aren’t just following orders. Let them know that Obamacare is collapsing and isn’t an option. Let then know that an over compromised Bill will also collapse. Finally, go to the American People with the truth. This is what we must do. If we don’t do it this is what we will get. If we go with our plan this is what we will happen.
Ryan wasn’t even close he only thinks he was. Ryan either gets a serious dressing down and changes to the new approach or you need a new speaker pronto. “Aw shucks we tried really hard” is not good enough.
Regards,
Jim
I think the processes was more of a problem. They did not allow for any audibles. My understanding of the legislative process (granted I know State Legislation better than Federal) is that you introduce a bill, there is debate, amendments, votes on the amendments then finally a vote on the final bill.
Ryan set this up as “take it or leave it” then tried to amend the legislation, not on the floor but before it was introduced.
My problem with Ryan is that he did a bad job of managing the legislative process. Trump did not manage expectations well nor did he help craft the bill, that is a problem.
The GOP as a whole should get most of the blame. There are a lot of smart people in the GOP caucus, they spent their time lying to us and taking token votes rather than doing the real work of creating a bill that could pass.
It’s easy to get people to vote for a bill that has no chance of becoming law.
It was also Trump who insisted on both coverage for everyone and lower costs. From what I can discern this is not possible. You must be honest and lay it out that you either have one or the other. Anything else is just a gimmick. If something worthwhile is to be passed, someone must be willing to say what we all know to be true….Trumpcare is going to cause some folks to lose their coverage and that is the trade we are willing to make. I think it will be important to be honest about it, get ahead of it and to provide a factual voice against the media’s lies about “millions dying in the streets!”
Here’s the thing: Ted Cruz is supposedly a folk hero on the right for making a brave stand to defund Obamacare.
And yet Cruz lost the Republican primary to a guy who, only weeks before, had repeatedly praised single-payer healthcare systems.
As long as we’re playing the blame game, I think it’s fair to ask: did Republican primary voters really care that much about repealing Obamacare? Sure, it was somewhere on the laundry list, but it obviously wasn’t a high priority.
As Obama liked to say, “elections have consequences”. When it counted, the actual party leadership (i.e. voters) chose someone very weak on healthcare. So I think they also deserve at least as much blame as Ryan, Trump, or anyone else in DC.
How do we manage to send so many slow learners to represent us? Are they so self-absorbed that their perception gets set to zero? Even when one feels they might have actually learned, as you have expressed here, an uneasiness remains because they are so unexplainable. And then, when we get to the Senate, we’ve got John McCain.
Bryan, if your problem is that the GOP ran on this for seven years, then you don’t have much of a problem at all. See RyanFalcone’s comment above. The GOP had a repeal and replace legislation, and then Trump came in and, being quite ignorant of the issues and probably not thinking he would ever get elected, promised that we would keep all the “good” parts of Obamacare while removing all the “bad” parts. The plan the GOP formulated was totally disrupted by Trump’s campaign promises (which basically amounted to a student government candidate promising free candy from the vending machines).
This is true, but also keep in mind that many in congress supported that plan when it had a snowballs chance in hell of becoming law. Now when faced with the prospect that they have to answer to constituents who like their government freebies the prospects are vastly different.
As Mendel pointed out above – the fault ultimately lies at the feet of the American people. We want all the good with none of the pain and we will punish any politician who won’t work magic to accomplish it. It’s no surprised that congressmen from diverse districts suddenly go wobbly – the incentives aren’t there. Couple that with a Freedom Caucus composed of members from extraordinarily safe districts who can shoot down anything and claim they are standing on principle against Obamacare/big government and this is the inevitable outcome.
To be clear – I agree with the Freedom Caucus on their principles, I just think their tactics will always lead to this outcome.
Echoing others, I didn’t get that from the article. Rather, I thought the focus was Goldberg’s frustration that some Trump fans — particularly big media personalities like Pirro and Hannity — absolve the president of any responsibility for this mess.
To be clear, I think Ryan deserves the bulk of blame for this fiasco, though there’s plenty left for other parties, very much including the president. (If Goldberg agrees with this, it would have helped for him to have said so explicitly.)
Oh, I agree. I just think that our political process was intended to resolve this dilemma by forcing politicians to explain the problem first – which in turn forces them to understand the problems themselves.
For example, it would have been useful to hold a committee hearing on one specific topic: pre-existing conditions. Like most political problems, the topic of pre-existing conditions is a dilemma, one that (as Thomas Sowell says) you can only deal with by tradeoffs, not with some clever magic formula. In other words, you can’t fix the problem, you can only figure out how to live with it. Insuring pre-existing conditions is popular with the public, but it comes at a real-time cost, and let’s face it, the Democrats fuzzied up the cost and made it seem like it was all paid for. An honest conservative approach would have been to say, “look, folks, this isn’t magic – we can only cover preexisting conditions if we pay for it elsewhere. Where?”
In other words, go through the process. Don’t skip over the hard parts, or present it all as a black box magic solution – which they did this time.
Obviously, though, I agree with your point. Working the process is a risk – but I think they need to do it anyway.
Ryan deserves a large amount of the blame, but I think its shared equally with President Trump who promised the world without understanding the issue and the Freedom Caucus who expect perfection and brook no compromise.
Not that I consider politicians innocent or anything – I don’t. But @mendel made a good point up above. Republican representatives’ constituents do send them conflicting messages, because the constituents aren’t all conservatives like us, and representatives like to get re-elected. And yes, conflicting messages promote slow learning.
We don’t send computers mixed messages – 1 always means “on” and 0 always means “off”. Imagine what would happen if we did. How would a computer know what to do? If it just guessed, how many times would it guess “stupidly”? Fanciful example, I know. Maybe less fanciful – parents are supposed to be consistent with kids, so that the kids learn. How is a kid who’s sometimes cossetted and indulged for his tantrums, and other times spanked, supposed to learn whether to throw tantrums or not?
I’m not taking the blame off politicians here – after all, politicians sell themselves as being particularly wise at judging their constituents’ desires, and anytime they fail to live up to that, they are acting more oblivious than promised. But perception set to zero is not necessary as an explanation in a world where the perception genuinely receives mixed signals.
Jonah’s point is the same as it has been for months. This was an opportunity to score NT points by a “certain element” against Trump. So predictable.
Congress creates and passes bills, not the president. The only factor that has changed due to the recent election of glory is that Congress now has a president who will actually sign bills presented to him by congressional Republicans.
If those dunderheads can’t write a bill that isn’t O’care 2.0, it’s hardly the president’s fault. But that isn’t good enough for the Goldberg crowd; Trump must have used Jedi mind tricks on Ryan and forced him unwittingly to create a stupid-on-stilts healthcare bill. I’m not buying this carefully constructed arc of deceit and blame. Try another tack.
This is a naive view of how governing works. It’s not Pelosicare it’s Obamacare. For a reason.
The GOP has been selling this for seven years. That goes back into Trump is a Democrat territory I think. (That is a joke and not meant to be fact checked).
One episode = 100% accurate assessment of skill. Being a Falcons Fan, I don’t want to agree with that way of judging.
I agree. And the same people blaming him for its failure would be blaming him for how un-conservative it was. They still would not put any blame onto Congress.
In this case, it appears Trump let Congress set the agenda. I imagine he will be reminded of #4 and not make that mistake a second time.
Much of the conservatariat is fast to let the GOP off the hook for their failures. Ryan is a fault here. The article cited appears to absolve him from the blame, and focus the spotlight on Trump supporters instead.