The crime and punishment of Obama's healthcare law
About six years after it would have been useful, some if not all of the Democrats are coming around to the much-ignored nostrum that public opinion may count, after all.
In 2010 they took the chance that they could pass a bill into law against the will of the people and have life after that simply recommence smoothly. They received signs to the contrary after the 2010 midterms, but it was not until November 2014 that they would come to discover exactly how wrong they had been.
This was no flash-in-the-pan burst of pique that would flare out quite quickly, but a slow burn that would lay bare the earth around Democrats. In 2009 they had 60 senators, 257 House members, and 32 governors. In 2015 those numbers will be 46 (including two Senate independents), 188, and 21 governors. Most of this is the result of Obama’s decision, after Scott Brown’s election in January 2010, not to ease off but to ram his health care bill through Congress on a stretched technicality, adding insult to what was in itself already perceived as an injury. People were angry, and they became even angrier. And then they stayed angry a long time.
In 2014, polls determined, health care was no longer quite the flashpoint it had been in the 2010 midterms, but it had become so entwined with Obama and Democrats that it colored everything they did. Approval and disapproval of Obama and Democrats tracked exactly with approval and disapproval of Obamacare, which in turn tracked directly with candidates running in Senate races, in which Republicans would capture nine seats. At a panel held by the Kaiser Family Foundation held September 9 this year, a pollster said that while health care was mentioned less often, it underlay everything. “Obamacare really cannot be separated from the views … on the president,” he said. “Those two ideas … have gone hand in hand from the beginning.”
“It was huge,” Charlie Cook weighed in later. “It did play a central role in framing everything … basically, health care’s been pretty much the dominant issue one way or another for five years.”
Obama’s idea that he could govern without popular consent didn’t just lose him Congress — it poisoned the well for all future developments, and made certain that this “achievement” might well be his last. With public opinion behind them, Republicans saw no need or desire to compromise. “All of that two year period, I would argue, put us in the position we’re in,” as Chuck Todd told an audience, with no politics, no legislation, and only a grinding and grim civic war.
There’s another reason why the way the act passed has kept it in trouble, and why challenges to it won’t die. Democrats' decision to pass the Senate bill back through the House meant there would be no chance to clean up the many loose the ends they had left in it. “The bill is a mess,” Todd added. “There’s a reason it’s in front of the Supreme Court. It’s amazing how many people … were telling me, ‘We just assumed that we could fix that in conference committee, and we could do this here.'”
Another small problem that eluded Obama, in his misguided effort to capture his legacy, was this: By passing that law in a way no president had done before, he probably guaranteed that no future president, seeing this frightful example, will attempt it again.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of "Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families."
No comments:
Post a Comment