Reports from Capitol Hill today indicate ,B>rising exasperation among old-school conservatives about the shifting, raise-the-ante, refuse-to-say-"yes" demands from most members of the House Freedom Caucus, with regard to the upcoming vote on the House Republican healthcare bill. The exasperation is well-justified.
The House Freedom Caucus is clearly driven by outside groups such as Heritage Action, which has become such an all-or-nothing, my-way-or-the-highway outfit that it makes Patrick Henry look like a compromising squish. It seems as if every concession made to the Freedom Caucus is met with a new demand.
I just returned from a barbecue place in conservative Mobile, Ala., where a longtime Republican activist stopped me and asked: "Are we going to get a health bill? Are these guys in Congress ever going to prove they can govern? Will they ever know when to get to 'yes'? Are we ever going to stop making the perfect the enemy of the good?" This was a conservative stalwart in deep-red Alabama, not a centrist Long Island inheritor – and even he was disgusted by the House Freedom Caucus' behavior.
The House leadership's original bill contained a lot of good features but doubtless left much to be desired. Its policy mix was poorly cobbled together; the political groundwork for it was nearly non-existent; and the public relations surrounding its release was slow, muted and confused. But since then, the Trump White House and the leadership team have made yeomen's efforts to improve the bill. They have listened, reconsidered, adjusted and reworked a number of provisions — especially by encouraging block grants and work requirements for Medicaid.
But the House Freedom Caucus leaders and their outside pressure groups have refused to get on board even to keep alive what surely will be the only vehicle to replace Obamacare that will come up this year. They have no respect for the reality that the budget "reconciliation" rules do indeed put real parameters on what can be included in such legislation with just 51 votes. They show no memory of how the only reason the whole of Obamacare passed in 2010 was because the Senate did meet a 60-vote threshold on Christmas Eve of 2009 and then used that vote as pretext for claiming reconciliation rules either already had been met or else no longer applied — and thus that Democrats then had an advantage Republicans do not enjoy right now.
They show no understanding that whatever they vote on in the House will absolutely be altered in the Senate and that they in the House will, therefore, get another chance to vote yea or nay on final passage. In effect, the first floor vote in the House amounts, de facto if not de jure, to a procedural vote. Without this vote, they absolutely will not be able to meet their campaign pledges to replace Obamacare. And they will make the Republican Congress and the new White House look hopelessly inept, destroy any political momentum from the election, explode comity within the House and Senate Republican caucuses, and badly hobble the entire conservative agenda in a flurry of mutual recriminations.
Yes, the whole process should be slowed down once it reaches the Senate. Senators should include House conservatives in behind-the-scenes negotiations as the Senate tries to rework the bill. The final bill should be crafted to fit as much within reconciliation rules as possible, should be accurately scored by the Congressional Budget Office before a vote, should be available for members of Congress and the public to read for a full week before the final vote, and should have parts that actually fit together rather than working at cross-purposes.
Yet all of this is best done in the Senate. Only the Senate really can determine how much to squeeze within its own peculiar reconciliation rules. Only the Senate can determine how conservative a bill can be without losing just three of 52 Republican members.
Yet the House Freedom Caucus won't budge. It won't accept the Madisonian design of the constitutional system which makes ideological purity in legislation a near-impossibility. It just issues ultimatums, promising the political guillotine to anybody who won't toe their ideological hard line.
The group should rename itself. It's not acting like a Freedom Caucus, but like a Jacobin Chorus. If it doesn't wise up, it may be reminded that revolutions tend to eat their own.
