The Art of No Deal

The AHCA, the health care monstrosity that Paul Ryan wrote and Donald Trump tried to sell to the House of Representatives, is dead. There are some delicious ironies here, but first some thanks are in order. Thank you to all of the activists who showed up at Republican town halls, and showed moderate Republicans that they risked their seats if they supported this. Thank you to everyone who wrote, called, or emailed your Representative with the same message. And thank you to the Democrats for staying united in opposition to this terrible legislation. A lot of hard work went into defeating this and saving the ACA, and it is appreciated. Next up is another round of equally hard work to defeat the nomination of Neil Gorsuch. We must draw strength from this victory, and bring it to the next fight, but we must also understand that this next battle can not be won in the same way.

It is worth looking at the dynamics of the House of Representatives that made this victory possible. Yes, the moderates let their misgivings be known, and those misgivings only grew as the bill got amended in an attempt to appease the Freedom Caucus. Irony number one here is that the only way Trump can get the House to pass a health care bill is to craft something that all of the Democrats and a handful of moderate Republicans can support. Why then did Ryan try to save this bill by tacking to the right and not the left? That is irony number two. The death of the AHCA was brought about by years of Republican gerrymandering.

The Republicans have worked long and hard to create as many safe seats as possible for Republican candidates. These are convoluted districts that look ridiculous on a map, but have all but assured a Republican majority in the House for the foreseeable future. Swing voters, who might support either a moderate Republican or a Democrat, are not welcome here. As a result, these districts don’t just reliably elect Republicans, they reliably elect Republican extremists. These districts are won not in the general election but in the Republican primary, and moderates fair poorly. In other words, they elect the Freedom Caucus. This brand of Republican is an absolutist. They believe that compromise is weakness, meaning, as we saw this week, that they are completely unable to govern. They were not interested in the replace part of repeal and replace, seeking only to eliminate Obamacare, and not replace it with anything.

We won this battle by bolstering the moderate wing of the Republican Party, giving them cover to stand up against the extremists. We won also by giving the Democrats the strength to stay united. But it was and is the dynamic created by gerrymandering that made this a viable strategy in the face of a Republican majority. It is a dynamic we will be able to use again to our advantage, but it won’t work in the Senate. There we must give the Democrats the strength to stay united in opposition to Gorsuch, but it would be best if we could also find some moderate Republicans to cross the aisle and stand with us. It will be harder to find stories to tell of how this will affect us personally, but the special education community might be a good starting point. We came to accept many extreme positions as normal when Antonin Scalia served on the Supreme Court, so we will now also be battling against legal precedents that never should have been established. I believe we can win again, but the fight will be different. The goal here is to persuade a majority of Senators that supporting Gorsuch will endanger their chances of getting reelected. That means we need to get the voters to tell pollsters they oppose this nomination. It won’t be enough to say that Gorsuch and Trump would be stealing the seat that should have gone to Merrick Garland, although that is true. Instead, we must make the case that Gorsuch would hurt people like them. I believe that we can do this, and I look forward to the fight.

Tonight’s song is a new discovery for me, but it works in its own way:

The New Normal

On Wednesday night, I set about the work of finding out about Neil Gorsuch. I had done some of this the night before, but now everyone would have posted their articles, and I would find what I was looking for, or so I thought. You see, my earliest memories of the Supreme Court are the phrase, “the Cogswell defeat”, although I really only began to pay serious attention during the Reagan presidency. But I am used to articles about Republican appointees portraying them as dangerous extremists who are well outside the mainstream. In particular, the Justice who Gorsuch is closest to in terms of ideology is Antonin Scalia, and I remember Scalia being described that way when he was nominated. But the articles I kept finding about Gorsuch duly noted his ideological leanings, but they emphasized how eminently qualified he is, and how hard he would be to defeat on his merits.

In general, I have seen the mainstream media grow a spine since the election, so I was puzzled. This was not a case of false equivalency, and it certainly was not prompted by any fear of a tweetstorm by Trump, so what was going on? How could someone who I know is so dangerous be written about in such a blasé manner? Then it hit me. In reporting about Gorsuch this way, Gorsuch is being presented as well within the mainstream because the stream has changed course. Back when Scalia was being confirmed things were different. Some statements that probably would have led to Scalia’s defeat in his confirmation hearings include: taking the position that corporations could not be restricted as to campaign contributions without restricting their freedom of speech; or arguing that one could refuse to obey federal law regarding your employees if you objected on your personal religious grounds, without regards to the religious views of said employees; or advocating that racism no longer existed, and therefore it was no longer necessary for the Justice Department to monitor election laws in states with the worst records of discrimination. Gorsuch, however, can take all of these positions in his hearings, because they are all now matters of settled law. Scalia and his allies on the Court won, and these are now mainstream ideas. When it comes to the Supreme Court, this is the new normal.

When you realize this, you also realize both how Trump became president and why this is so dangerous. Nixon began to make the scapegoating of minorities acceptable, although in veiled language, and he started the “war on drugs”. Reagan planted the idea that tax cuts for the wealthy were the best way to create middle class jobs, even though it was a mix of strong unions and safety net programs that had fueled the phenomenal economic growth in the 1960s. George W Bush created the surveillance state that we have today, and created the political climate that made Obama unwilling to try to dismantle it, and he also made torture an option for our military. All of these and more represent the foundation that Donald Trump has to build on, and all of these were outrageous ideas in their day. Now we have before us the threat that Islamophobia will become a driver of our foreign policy. We face the possibility that abortions and gay marriages could become illegal again. And we see every day the grab for more and more presidential power. Over the next four years, all of this and more could become the new normal, the standard by which our next president and Supreme Court will be judged.

At least until the 2018 elections, the best we can hope for as progressives is to prevent as much erosion as possible. We must recognize that corporatist Democrats are and should be our allies in this. We must do everything we can to insure that the Democrats, any Democrats, win both houses of Congress in 2018. Even if the Democrats had won just the Senate in 2016, we would not be talking now about the nuclear option for Gorsuch’s confirmation, and the cabinet confirmations would have gone very differently. The election of someone like Evan Bayh in Indiana would have brought us that much closer to the majority we needed to prevent Rex Tillerson from becoming Secretary of State, for example. Now we have the much more difficult job of finding a handful of Republicans to join us in preventing the new normal of 2020 from being a world we don’t want to live in. We must accept and elect allies wherever we can find them, and save the battle for the soul of the Democratic Party for a time when we have prevented Trumpism from becoming the new normal.

Today’s song: