As of early December, it looks like the Democratic controlled House will impeach the President, and that the Senate will vote to acquit him. Our country is so polarized, that no GOP Senator would risk being "primaried" because s/he voted to convict him of "high crimes and misdemeanors." We're seeing a political hypocrisy that we haven't seen since the Clinton impeachment. And it's so sad....
Donald Trump is a narcisist. He will revel in the House presenting the impeachment to the Senate for a trial. At that time, political hell will break loose. The GOP will put their wagons in a circle and defend a president that most elected officials dislike, but our powerless to control. (Shades of 1930's Central Europe....) But there are ways that sane men and women from both parties could prevail if they gave the process some out of the box thought.
Many in the mainstream press report that most of the GOP Senators would vote to convict if their ballots were cast in secret. There is nothing in the constitution that prohibits the Senate from making rules to allow this to happen. Since politicians are in the business of lying to their constituents at times, saying that they were one of the handful of GOP Senators who voted to acquit should be easy for them. Will Mitch McConnell take this way out of trouble?
An option that involves the House would be to impeach the president, but not send the articles over to the Senate until they are complete. The house can approve a subset of articles based on current investigatory evidence, and hold off delivering the indictments until a full investigation is complete - sometime in late 2020. This would prevent the president from getting the Senate acquittal he wants and allow the House to continue presenting public evidence through election season. An added benefit for the Democrats would be to allow their presidential candidate Senators to continue their campaigns without having to be in Washington, DC for the Senate trial.
This nation has a serious problem. Adding "Democracy" to the presidential nominating process has encouraged the bases of each party to grow more and more extreme. When I was young, there wasn't that much that separated the left and right wings of American politics. The party leaders would allow the base to voice its opinion, and prevent "extremists" like Lester Maddox and George Wallace (who later moderated his views) from getting on a nationwide ballot. It is no coincidence that politicians pander to the base before the primaries, and move to the center afterwards. Over time, this process served to cull the centrists from both parties and leave people who want a winner take all process - and we all lose out because of that.
Given the polarized bases, might a middle road be chosen? The majority of people polled want our president removed from power. But this doesn't apply to his base. It will accept no evidence that he has gone past tolerable political limits. Do we have still have leaders in government who know how to finesse the system to deny the narcissist in chief what he wants - an acquittal? The jury is still out on that verdict, but I hope they figure out something, as it doesn't bode well for people who have faith in the 2020 elections.
This week's entry will be relatively short.
As I write this, the AHCA act has yet to be brought to a vote before the full House. And it doesn't have that great a chance of passing. Then, if it does, it still doesn't have a ghost of a chance in the Senate. What does this say about the GOP as a political party?
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For the past several years, the GOP has been stirring up its base, saying that the Affordable Care Act (A.K.A. "Obamacare") is bad for the American people and would be repealed on the first day that the GOP had control of government. So far, it has been a little over 2 months since the GOP got its wish, and they were unprepared to do what they promised.
The key features of Obamacare (I use the word as a compliment to the man) are:
- A mandated definition of what basic health care coverage is, so that people buying this care on exchanges could make "apples to apples" comparisons.
- A mandated participation in the health care market (with subsidies, if needed) to insure that both the poor are covered, and that the insurance pool is large enough to absorb the expenses of the old and infirm who were unable to get affordable insurance.
- A mandate that insurers accept people with pre-existing conditions and cover those conditions in their policies.
- An establishment of government sponsored (state or federal governments) health care exchanges, so that people could easily buy insurance from a marketplace.
There are more features, such as the expansion of medicaid that could be mentioned here. But they only serve to make the discussion a little more complex than needed.
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The problem with health care is that many things dovetail with each other. Take away mandatory participation in a health care market, and the insurance pools do not cover enough young and healthy people to absorb the expenses of the old and infirm. Isolate the old and infirm into assigned risk pools, and they will not be able to afford health care without subsidies. Take away coverage of pre-existing conditions, and the people who need coverage will not be able to get it. Take away the public exchanges and mandated definitions of "coverage", and the public will not be able to make informed choices. In short, one has to address many requirements in order to maximize coverage across as many people as possible in a nation's population.
The GOP attacks the first two elements in the above list in all their proposals to repeal the ACA. They do not care that less people will be covered by insurance. They do not care that insurance will become unaffordable to the old and infirm. They only care about restoring a dysfunctional prior status quo. The GOP has had several years to design a better health care plan than the ACA, and yet had not done so. Instead they kept making noises about the free market being better than the ACA's "solution" - even when the other major industrialized nations have shown that "socialized medicine" has resulted in more available health care at a lower price to society. In fact, one staunch GOP loyalist made the claim that if Stephen Hawking had to use Britain's National Health Service (NHS), that Hawking would be dead today. Well, Hawking uses the NHS and is still alive as I write this.
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The GOP is now in charge of the Executive branch of government, as well as both legislative branches of government. And the three stooges in the above photo have yet do produce a health care reform that would be better than what we now have. It should be the duty of any opposition party, that when it comes to power, that it has well thought out policies and actions ready to go. This was not the case when the GOP gained power this year.
I don't need to say much about Trump, except that he is a malignant narcissistic sociopath who has no loyalty to anyone but himself, who has no taste, and who has no empathy with other people. In short, he is a social cancer that can cause damage when left unchecked. Paul Ryan is an idealog who can be very dangerous as he gets more power, as he does not believe that the fortunate in society have any duty to those less well off. And Mitch McConnell may not be an ideolog, as he has no ethics to guide him except a loyalty to his party.
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The public is enraged - and that includes many in the "Red States" who are seeing how the party they voted into power is about to betray them. The GOP had no Obamacare replacement, so they slapped something together and called it reform. The public knows better, as they can see how they will lose their ACA benefits when what they derisevely called "Obamacare" is repealed. They see that giving away park lands in places like Montana will hurt their local economy. They see that polluting the water with mining waste will take away their clean drinking water. In short, they are willing to the Democrats if the Democrats have leaders who will address the needs of the people in "Fly Over Territory".
Luckily, we're seeing the Democrats get energized, as they are getting ready for the 2018 elections. But do they have enough of the right people in place for the future? I doubt it. Their leadership is getting long in the tooth, and they don't have enough young leaders who can energize the public. The one person who can lead them, Bernie Sanders, is an older man who has captured the imagination of youth. He is the same man, when in a forum of Trump supporters received the ultimate compliment from a person in mining country. This compliment took the form of being told that Sanders, from the Northeast, is doing more for people in Coal Country than Mitch McConnell next door.
My question is: Will the Democrats be ready in time to topple "Larry" and "Curly" in 2018, and take care of "Moe" in 2020?
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PS: After I wrote this, the GOP Bill went down in flames. As expected, Trump had to find someone else to blame the failure on, and he blamed the Democrats for not working with him. Hmmmm. The GOP refused to help when Obamacare was passed 7 years ago. So why should the Democrats respond any differently. Trump claims that Obamacare will implode, and it may yet in some states. But if it fails in 2018, it will be an election year, and I doubt that Trump will be able to stop the upcoming disaster that an honest attempt to repair what was in place could have prevented.
Mark Twain once said that "There are three kinds of lies: Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics." And in the case of Obamacare, Trumpcare and the Healthcare debate, all three kinds of lies are in play.
When the Affordable Care Act was enacted, it had no support from the GOP, even though the design came out of a GOP think tank. The GOP was so focused on making Obama a one term president, that it became an extremely polarized opposition to anything supported by Obama. And this included the beginnings of a national health care system based on free market principles, yet tempered by the realities of unequal wealth distribution and unequal health across subgroups of our nation's population.
I was surprised to find that a president and party would have spent so much political capital oh health care. And in retrospect, I am reminded of LBJ who noted that by standing up for civil rights, he was giving the "Old South" to the GOP. It seems like healthcare reform may symbolize something similar for Democrats, as the GOP has used Obamacare as a tool to rally the base.
Over the past few years, the Democratic party has been losing seats in both the House and the Senate. In 2016, the Democrats finally lost the presidency, which gave the GOP a chance to remake healthcare in ways that may reflect either an ideological purity or a pragmatic recognition of reality. Unfortunately, the first important draft at a reform bill will only serve to double the number of uninsured people, and give excessive tax cuts to the rich.
Designing reforms to a health insurance system is not something that can be done in days. It took the Democrats months to flesh out a plan, and then they had to pull out all stops (including bringing in a sickly Ted Kennedy to help break a filibuster) to get the bill passed. Even then, the bill was far from perfect - and was signed into law with known problems. The Obama administration figured that Healthcare reform was now in play, but repeal would be political suicide once the average citizen started to receive the benefits of this new entitlement.
President Trump promised that he would sign a repeal of Obamacare the day he took office. It's been roughly two months since he took office, and no repeal or replacement bill has been signed into law at the time I'm writing this entry. The GOP never thought that they would be in a position to fulfill its promises to repeal Obamacare, and now they are caught between keeping this promise and doing the right thing.
The GOP is saying lies of varying magnitudes in regard to the ACA. What they are not saying is that their lack of cooperation in congress and in their statehouses helped to cause major problems in the "Red States". Obamacare is in trouble in many of the Red States, as quite a few did not accept federal monies for Medicaid expansion. As a result, many people who could have gotten medical care were caught in a gap - between Medicaid eligibility and being able to afford healthcare. So they got screwed by their own leaders, just because of a political game that was being played.
In the "Blue States", we see a system that is relatively successful. Yes, there are problems. But people are accessing healthcare who could never have afforded it in the past. So, what's going to happen to them now that the GOP is in charge? Trump and the rest of the GOP do not want to look at the statistics regarding Obamacare. The Congressional Budget Office did predict a $370+ million savings due to the GOP's most recent health care reform bill. But it said that the number of uninsured would more than double. This means that the GOP will need to tell big lies to mollify its base - a base which is finally coming to terms with the Affordable Care Act, not realizing that it is one and the same as the dreaded "Obamacare".
There are Senators warning GOP house members that the current bill will be DOA if it reaches the Senate. Both the President and the Speaker of the House are saying that this bill is the only one that might pass muster in the House. Yet something more may be going on here. Could a bad bill be written up, making it possible for purists to say they voted for an acceptable bill that will never come to law - and please their constituents? Could a future bill be designed to "repeal" the ACA, but merely be a set of tweaks to make the existing law more palatable?
What is most telling is that TRUMP, a man who puts his name on everything, boils red when he hears the phrase "Trumpcare". He doesn't want his name associated with a GOP suicide pact. And yet, that's what seems to be happening right now - GOP Congressmen and Senators are avoiding their constituents in order not to address their fears of losing affordable health care. Does this mean that because of ideological concerns that the GOP may commit political suicide? Who knows?
The other night, Bernie Sanders held a town hall in "Trump Territory". And it is amazing how he addressed the concerns of West Virginia voters better than that of their own leaders. In fact, one person there said that he was amazed that Sanders was looking out for retired coal miners more than Mitch McConnell, a Senator from a nearby coal mining state. What does this say about our 2 party system? To me, it says that if a party ignores the concerns of people who are minorities in the party, it will lose the votes to the other party - even if the only things given are lip service and lies, as the GOP has done for years.
Even in a state that bleeds red, the ACA has shown to be useful. It made sure that coal miners suffering from Black Lung disease got the benefit of the doubt when claiming benefits - something that would be lost in an ACA repeal. People in Trump Country see this, and do not want the ACA repealed - they want it fixed. Even so, our VP went to Kentucky and talked about all of Obamacare's failures - even when the little guy is starting to see the benefits of the law. I can only imagine what would happen to the GOP if more people started seeing the lies for what they are - mistaken tribal and ideological opposition to a "lesser of evils" law.
In the major Western nations, there is no country which has free market health care - not even us. In a free market, people would die if they were taken to the hospital without money or insurance coverage. Out of humanity, we require hospitals to treat all people regardless of ability to pay, and then those hospitals shift their unreimbursed costs to those least able to pay "rack rate" for medical care. And yet, the GOP keeps arguing that a free market can work with health care when there are no examples in the world of a free market working for health care. What lies will they tell to bamboozle their base to convince them that a return to healthcare's past is what is needed in a "reform" effort?
Luckily, there are a few GOP Congressmen and Senators willing to buck party ideology and demand that a replacement bill actually be better than the system we have now. It's not important that they dress up their verbiage in fantasy talk or pragmatic statements. Instead, it's important that they are realizing that if the GOP breaks Obamacare without having a better Trumpcare ready to roll, then the GOP could lose both houses in the next election, and possibly start losing the statehouses as well.
I predict that we will hear a lot of misinformation spouted over the next few weeks while ACA repeal is being discussed. Luckily, the Democrats still have the ability to filibuster many bills that come through the Senate, and have an effective veto that can be used for most half-assed attempts to repeal the ACA. Hopefully, the Democrats will use what little power they have left in both a wise and effective manner. And I hope that in the middle of this political game being played, that people lose the ability to purchase healthcare that they once enjoyed under the ACA.
Years ago, one tobacco company advertised its wares with the phrase "Sold American!" Well, I am reminded of that phrase today, when major GOP leaders such as Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan are calling Trump's statements totally irresponsible and offensive, and yet will still vote for him in the general election.
President Obama joked about Trump being a candidate that the Democrats could love (because he is so bad). And then he talked about the dysfunction in the GOP and about the need for a healthy "right-center" political party to give meaningful, loyal opposition to ideas from his "left-center" party. Again, our president surprises me - he's saying something serious and meaningful, and not lowering himself to the level of his opponents.
Sadly, tribal loyalty is trumping (pardon the word) benign self interest. There were other more reasonable choices throughout recent years, but the GOP has allowed itself to shift to the extreme right. The loyal GOP followers have only themselves to blame for Trump - they voted in liars who never delivered on their promises to the base, and now are voting for Trump because he will upset the elite. If these people had only said - the GOP's policies do not reflect my needs, and then voted in their self interest, none of the clowns who steered the GOP to the hard right would have ever gotten power. And, as a result, moderates would have worked with Democrats and dealt with serious problems. This has not been the case....
Until the GOP base says - let's elect a truth telling moderate, the party will head towards its own destruction. We've see what happened the last time a major American political party fell apart - and I'm afraid history will repeat itself.
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