'Trumpcare' Is The Biggest Legislative Failure In A Hundred Years
Hi all,
This is from my (humble) site, newsasitshouldbe.com With a fair bit of research, I was able to come up with the pretty striking conclusion in the title. Hope you guys enjoy.
Only in rare periods in the last century or so (1913-1916, 1933-1936, 1964-1966, and 1981) have presidents been able to move transformational legislation through Congress. The system, arguably, is designed to make dramatic shifts in the status quo extremely hard to achieve. Over the years there have been spectacular collapses of major legislation, the most consequential, perhaps, being the failure of the Senate to ratify the Treaty of Versailles in 1920. This begs the question: is the Trumpcare ‘repeal and replace’ effort of the last eight months the biggest legislative failure in a hundred years?
On the face of it, there is only really one other major contender; but before settling in for a showdown between the Clinton health care failure of the early nineties and the recent Trumpcare debacle, it would be intellectually rigorous, as well as fun, to examine modern political history, and take a walk down the boulevard of broken legislative dreams.
Unsurprisingly, the heaviest legislative defeats have revolved around health care. After intermittently successful periods of bipartisan legislation involving health and infrastructure during the Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson administrations, there came a push for health insurance reform in the early seventies. Democrats introduced the Health Security Act, a universal national health insurance program providing comprehensive benefits without any cost sharing. Around the same time, Nixon proposed the Comprehensive Health Insurance Act. In April, Democrats proposed a National Health Insurance Act, a bill to provide near-universal national health insurance with benefits identical to the expanded Nixon plan—but with mandatory participation by employers and employees through payroll taxes and with lower cost sharing. Both plans were criticized by labor, and consumer organizations, and neither gained traction. There was no reform to healthcare during Nixon’s administration; but, as a conservative, there had never been a particular ideological onus on him to deliver. It was a failure of competing plans, rather than a front and center, defining proposal from the President; and Nixon’s preoccupation (and defining successes) were always based in foreign affairs rather than domestic policy.
At the outset of the Carter administration there was wide support in the party, including from Carter, for single-payer health care. The odds of some kind of universal coverage passing were significant. Carter faced heavy pressure from unions, as well as liberals like Ted Kennedy, to introduce a national health insurance plan; but he kept delaying. Carter saw himself as fiscally conservative, and his health care focus was legislation to control hospital costs. Kennedy and the unions, willing to compromise on their calls for single-payer, submitted a new universal proposal in which private insurers would compete. But still Carter wasn’t convinced. He didn’t even want to endorse a single major bill, preferring a series of smaller ones. Kennedy and the unions refused to settle for something not offering universal coverage, and the effort died.
Also early on in Carter’s term, momentum grew for the Humphrey Hawkins Act, a proposal to guarantee a government job to anyone who wanted one so long as unemployment was above 3 percent. Carter endorsed the proposal in the campaign and it had strong backing from the civil rights and labor movements. For a brief period, the Humphrey-Hawkins act seemed certain to become law. Carter did not seize the opportunity. Instead, he severely damaged his relationship with congressional Democrats by devoting his energy to trying to eliminate water projects from the budget, legislation that didn’t stir much enthusiasm, threatened to take away much loved pork from his own allies, and ended in failure. Carter’s legislative failures were numerous; but there was no over-archingly terrible, drawn-out one; and, as dismal efforts that petered out, they at least had the virtue of being over-with relatively quickly.
In the wake of a struggle with Congress over the budget, George H. W. Bush was forced by the Democratic majority to raise taxes; as a result, many Republicans felt betrayed, given Bush had promised “no new taxes” in his campaign. Partly as a reprisal, Republican congressmen defeated a proposal by Bush which would have enacted spending cuts and tax increases to reduce the deficit. Under pressure, Bush accepted the Democrats’ demands for higher taxes and more spending, which alienated him from Republicans and eroded his popularity. Bush would later say that he wished he had never signed the bill. Although damaging, in terms of his own base, Bush was able to pivot, and the bipartisan effort didn’t seem too bad to the general public. It is also debatable whether the skirmish counts as ‘legislation’ in the sense of a defining ‘issue’ in the way Immigration, law and order, education or healthcare do.
The greatest legislative defeat during the George W. Bush administration would likely be the 2006 Immigration reform bill. The legislation proposed an increase in security along the southern border, an allowance for long-term illegal immigrants to gain legal status, and an increase in the number of guest workers over and above those already present in the U.S. through a “blue card” visa program. The bill was passed in May, 2006. The parallel House Bill would have dealt with immigration differently. Neither bill became law because the two Houses were not able to reach an agreement to go to conference. Whilst a substantial failure, the blame was widespread, as it was an across the aisle effort, and therefore a failure of compromise, and of bi-partisanship, or ‘of Washington’ rather than a distinct failure of the president, or of his administration. Furthermore, though the system was widely acknowledged to need reform, the fallback 1986 Immigration bill was one signed by a Republican president, with a bipartisan consensus, and was therefore a moderately acceptable default for the incumbent president, who, at the very least, didn’t suffer an outright personal defeat.
The same dynamic was in play during the subsequent big immigration legislative effort during the Obama administration. Entering into 2013, the conditions seemed right to achieve sweeping immigration reform. Prospects peaked when the Senate passed major overhaul legislation. But action stalled in the House of Representatives, where the bipartisan Senate bill was rejected in the GOP-led chamber. Again, it was principally the failure of a bi-partisan effort, rather than an administration driven, and defining initiative.
Also during the Obama Administration, twenty children and seven adults were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School. Momentum was behind gun-reform legislation. A law requiring background checks for all gun-show sales was favored by 92 percent of Americans and a law banning the sale and possession of high-capacity magazines was supported by 62 percent of Americans. A record-high 74 percent opposed a ban on handguns and 51 percent opposed banning assault weapons. The proposal that emerged, the Manchin-Toomey Amendment bill, was sponsored by Joe Manchin, a Democrat, and Republican Sen. Pat Toomey. It would have required background checks on most private party firearm sales. The bill was voted on and defeated by a vote of 54 – 46. It needed 60 votes to pass. Though a legislative failure, which President Obama remarked upon very emotionally, the degree of polarization meant the President, and the left, walked away with a sense of moral affrontery toward the opposition, and the process, that was matched, to a fair degree by the public. In addition, the President issued a long series of executive orders, mitigating against the sense of a comprehensive loss.
Deciding the greatest legislative failure in modern US history, then, really comes down to a two-horse race between the Trumpcare repeal and replace effort, and the collapse of the Clinton healthcare effort in the early nineties. Coming into office in the early nineties, Bill and Hillary Clinton were ambitious, wanting a far-reaching healthcare initiative. The problem was their perception of populist support. The economy was the big issue when Bill Clinton took office. After having spent the 1980s listening to Ronald Reagan say that government was the problem, America was skeptical toward sweeping programs. Furthermore, the Clinton’s healthcare plan was ever-changing throughout 1992 and into 1993. At various stages it was “managed competition” or ‘pay-for-play.’ There were also logistical problems with the legislation. According to Clinton, reflecting years later: “We had budgetary constrictions; we couldn’t raise taxes, we’d just raised taxes and cut spending to balance the budget, and therefore our only option was to have an employer mandate, and that put the small business lobby in with the health insurers, and that, plus the unified Republican opposition in the senate was enough to beat it.”
In November of 1993, the bill made its first official appearance. Over the next year, support for the bill waned. The Clintons could not persuade their own party to sign on to it. They were unwilling to compromise the integrity of their plan, and this made it hard to forge alliances within the party. Closed door meetings between the Clintons and Democratic congressional leaders were often uncompromising and tense. Neither side budged. In fact, Democratic leaders such as Senator George Mitchell and Congressman Dick Gephardt began to assemble their own bills, seeking to revamp health care as they saw fit. Opponents, both Democratic and Republican, attacked the employer mandate section requiring all employers to provide health insurance. Throughout the spring and summer of 1994, the Republicans drove home a message that the Health Security Act meant more “big government.” At the same time, lobbyists were running the now famous “Harry and Louise” ads, which featured a couple grappling with the complexities of the legislation. By late fall and just before the elections, the plan was dead. It would not even come before either house of Congress for a vote. The mid-term elections in 1994 were a disaster for the Democrats. They lost control of the House of Representatives for the first time since the 1950s. The Health Security Act played a huge part in the defeat.
Unlike the Trump administration, however, health care reform during the Clinton administration was not a singular proposition, dominating and holding up the legislative calendar. Months into his first term, Clinton signed the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, which raised taxes and set the stage for future budget surpluses. He also signed into law the North American Free Trade Agreement, the 1993 Family and Medical Leave Act, ensuring parents could take up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for a newborn or a sick relative without risking their job; the Earned Income Tax Credit was expanded; and in 1994, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act was signed: the largest crime bill in the history of the United States, providing for 100,000 new police officers, $9.7 billion in funding for prisons and $6.1 billion in funding for prevention programs. Furthermore, whilst the damage was widespread when it came to the midterms, the professional reputations of senior Democrats were not tarnished to the extent senior republicans’ have been with the repeal-replace debacle. Mitch McConnell, in particular, has had his reputation as a Machiavellian tactician who always gets results severely discredited. Also, the Republicans, instead of a filibuster-proof majority, were aiming for only a bare-majority in the Senate, using their own conference, and couldn’t muster even that drastically reduced threshold. Finally, there was no ideological / existential defining urgency in the early months of the Clinton administration as there was with the recent Obamacare repeal and replace collapse. That effort had seven years of swelling angst and resentment and an imperative from the base behind it, as well as an insurgent new president’s need to trammel and surpass his predecessor, overturning his legacy in order to establish and project dominance. In the early nineties, the healthcare reform effort had no such dynamic. Back then, healthcare reform wasn’t so much a repudiation or overturning of the previous administration’s efforts, as an ideological pursuit in and of itself. In the present scenario, Trump has looked, with each failed iteration, to have lost, and his predecessor to have prevailed. Whilst it could be argued that the Clinton health care bill was the biggest legislative failure because of its expansive scope, and the notion it therefore had the most to lose, this is trumped, so to speak, by the fact it was abstracted by never making it out of committee and really having a decent shot; whilst Trumpcare, though somewhat smaller in scale (in what it would take away) came perilously close, multiple times, to becoming a reality.
When it came to health care, Trump displayed naiveté about the process, and how legislation would work. After famously declaring that ‘No one knew how complex healthcare could be,’ and having pledged to repeal and replace Obamacare almost immediately, Trump spent almost an entire year pushing Congress, but offered vague, often contradictory clues about what he wanted to see take Obamacare’s place. Initially he promised “insurance for everybody,” then he supported a House Republican bill that guaranteed nothing of the sort. He then held a Rose Garden celebration in May after the House passed a bill to repeal Obamacare, only to describe the same bill as “mean” “cold-hearted,” and “a son of a bitch” a month later in a meeting with Republican senators. His boasts about being a ‘dealmaker,’ a defining characteristic, were undermined. Many Republicans said that Trump knew little of the detail of policy in meetings, undercutting another core image as a savvy executive. A Senator who supported an early version left a meeting at the White House with a sense that the President did not have a grasp of some basic elements of the Senate plan. Other reservations the public had about Trump, that he might be too volatile, or vindictive, were reinforced by the president’s threats to let Obama’s system explode on its own.
Some things had been achieved by the Republicans during the healthcare debate. The Senate approved a Trump appointee for the Supreme Court, and the House and Senate worked with Trump to roll back Obama-era regulations using the Congressional Review Act. But to an extraordinary degree, the struggle on healthcare came to dominate time and energy on The Hill. Almost unique was the succession of iterations, each taking up more time, and each ending in the same impasse, each receiving an embarrassing report, showing draconian consequences, from the Congressional Budget Office, and the same public spectacle of failure. Furthermore, the process became ever more desperate, with the third iteration being reduced to a mere vehicle in a complex, and in retrospect, pathetic maneuver; which resulted in a moment of now iconic drama, when Senator McCain gave a literal thumbs down, killing the effort. The pattern of calamity, followed by resurrection, and further calamity brought with it stress, recrimination, demoralization, empowerment of activist opposition who could claim victory after victory, and consolidate their networks and infrastructure; the ongoing effort squandered valuable floor time for other legislation, which was dependent to a large degree on the savings the healthcare bill’s cuts would have made… As if it couldn’t have gotten worse, the final spasm of reform effort compelled a popular late-night host, whose infant son had almost died, to launch a crusade on his show, alleging, in a PR disaster for the last legislative effort, that one of the co-sponsors of the bill had ‘lied to my face.’ In every sense, then, the repeal and replace Trumpcare effort is unquestionably the worst single legislative failure in a century. The astonishing thing, is that it is almost impossible to imagine a process worse than the one the Republicans went through.
The Trump administration’s major legislative initiative, health care reform, has stalled, potentially for good. Only belatedly has progress been made on tax reform. An infrastructure plan is nowhere to be seen. Even funding for Trump’s beloved border wall hasn’t passed yet. But at the very least, any legislation, moving forward, must be handled better than the healthcare debacle. Surely?
