Republican lawmakers and interest groups have backed away from Paul Ryan and Donald Trump’s proposed Obamacare replacement legislation. More accurately they have fled screaming from the room, lobbing bombs over their shoulder and salting the earth as they go. By all that is the end of it. Just like that, one of the very few verifiable promises made by Trump and repeated ad nauseam is abandoned. You don’t need to have crystal ball to know that it simply won’t do. The GOP has won elections since 2010 on the promise of destroying Obamacare and conjuring up loathing and resentment against the Democrats signature achievement. People are unlikely to forget it exists.

But it gets even worse for The Donald. This isn’t just another piece of legislation. This was his first big test. And he failed in an utterly spectacular fashion. True, President Clinton tried and failed to pass comprehensive health care reform. But he spent over a year lobbying congress, negotiating with lawmakers and advocating in public for it before he finally gave up. That’s what putting your back into it looks like. Trump, by contrast, seems to have spent about as much time golfing at his Mar-A-Lago estate in Florida as he did trying to get the law off the ground.

Some of the blame must rest with Paul Ryan. The bill was compromised from the start. Its very true that bills are often compromised by the end of the process, indeed its virtually compulsory, but they need to be attractive at the beginning. Ryan committed the cardinal sin of negotiating with himself, attempting to pre-empt the objections of the loose confederation of warring tribes that constitutes his caucus. So by the time they first saw the bill, nobody at all wanted to touch it. If he had started out with a bill someone liked and was willing to fight for, he might have had more success.

But the frankensteinian monster he created made no friends. Moderates hated it for gutting Medicare and Medicaid, knowing that would put them in hot water with their older constituents. The more conservative elements of the GOP such as the House ‘Freedom Caucus’ were aghast that it didn’t go nearly far enough and were unable to justify voting for what was in their eyes still a big government program to provide healthcare.

All of this might have been worked through if the President had been strongly behind it. But Trump seemed to be more occupied with shaving strokes off his handicap than with actually carrying out one of his signature campaign promises. A few speeches, a phone call here and there and that was it. The bill died for lack of anyone to fight for it. Steve Bannon, one of Trumps chief aides, intervened disastrously by essentially threatening several House Republicans with political retribution if they failed to fall into line. Apparently that only served to stiffen their resolve while simultaneously making any future such threats less effective. All in a days work for Steven.

So the healthcare law is dead. But this whole shambolic display raises a question: Is the Trump Presidency fit for purpose? The administration seems unable to meet what were previously basic expectations of competence and self interest. Resignation in scandal for high profile appointees, multi-round losing battles with the judiciary, embarrassingly demonstrated lies to the national media, congressional investigations into impropriety and now a humiliating defeat in congress. All this in only 68 days. This was meant to be the low-hanging fruit. Tax reform was meant to be on the agenda, and if you think healthcare is complicated wait until you see the U. S. Tax code.

Adding further doubt is the nature of the Republican party right now. To be blunt, the GOP is composed of groups who can’t stand each-other. Pro-business moderates, tea-party conservatives, religious conservatives, libertarians, constitutionalists and populists are all pulling the party in different directions, vying for control. This is the reason why John Boehner packed it all in to go back to Ohio and fret about his vegetables.  Even a talented and committed leader with a clear plan would have difficulty getting that mess to stand in line. Whereas Trump’s performance has been foolish, dissolute and aimless,

Mario Cuomo said that campaign in poetry but govern in prose. ‘Build the Wall’, ‘Repeal and Replace’, ‘Make America Great Again’. These are all fine poetic sentiments as far as campaigning goes. And so they should be. Campaigning is about glittering generalities, declarative sentences and clear contrasts. But governing is messy, granular, specific and murky.

Trump has proved himself a better poet than prosaist. To illustrate this, let me leave you with a quote that has been going around from his own magnum opus, ‘The Art of the Deal’, that is simply too appropriate to pass up:

“You can’t con people, at least not for long. You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole. But if you don’t deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on”

 

Familiarity breeds contempt, the old saying goes. And with the advent of television over the last few decades the Presidency has been thoroughly demystified, stripped of the ineffable majesty that once it possessed. People started thinking that anybody could do it. And then when Watergate rolled around it seemed to confirm the worst fears of all those who had looked with suspicion upon the occupants of high national office. Namely, the suspicion that they were all crooks.

Many people seemed to fall back on this notion to counteract their despair or justify their support for the Trump administration. How much damage could he really do? Didn’t thousands of officials and public servants really run the country, rather than the President? Did it really matter that much which of the two dull and uninspiring choices were picked? And, most of all, wouldn’t the nature of the job, the snugness of the strait-jacket of official responsibility force any occupant into roughly the same mould?

The answer, it turns out, is no. It is indeed possible to do this important job badly. This became abundantly clear to everyone watching Trump receive German Chancellor Angela Merkel at the White House recently. For starters there was the awkward proffered handshake from the Chancellor, either rebuffed or unnoticed by the President. But much more worrying was the press conference after. Lets just take a moment to examine why.

U.S. power in the world has for decades been built not just on their military might but on a series of treaties and undertakings for mutual and multi-lateral defense. These have allowed the projection of global American power in a way impossible for even the great Imperial powers of days gone by. Networks of bases across the world and support from allies enable American power to be projected anywhere in the world extremely quickly. Key among these arrangments is NATO, originally designed to provide security for Western Europe and balance Soviet hegemony of the East (what would become the Warsaw Pact). The key to this organisation is a comittment to mutual defence, that an attack on one part would be responded to by all members. This freed them from the risk of intimidation and invasion by larger powers, underwritten by the military might of the United States in whose interest it is to preserve a grouping so advantageous to their own security and power.

This is why it was so concerning during the campaign to hear Trump say that support for NATO allies was conditional upon them ‘paying their fair share’. Concerns that Trump was confusing NATO with a mafia protection racket were fully realised when he told the German chancellor that some countries (like Germany) owed ‘vast sums of money’ to NATO for their common defense.

This is simply not how it works. NATO (More specifically, the North Atlantic Council) has set a target of defense spending amounting to 2% of GDP for each member state. That is, they should provide for their own defense to the amount of 2% of their GDP. Trump seems to think that the arrangement involves them cutting cheques to NATO or Washington for that amount to subsidize others defending them, like a contractor sending an invoice for services rendered. That is to leave entirely to one side the valube of 2% as a metric. Small nations could increase their spending to that level while achieving no appreciable increase in military capacity. Even large nations could easily increase funding without buying anything the Alliance really needs. You could double the size of the German army, for instance, but without adequate logistics, sea and airlift capacity and armarment it would just mean more soldiers wandering around in Bavaria.

There are several problems with him having said this. Firstly, it is an unedifying spectacle for the President to be seen chasing money like some two-bit loanshark. It is especially problmeatic considering he is asking for money he is not, in fact, owed. Even worse is that he is doing it in the presence of one of the few truly important U.S. allies, upon whose co-operation U.S. hegemony rests. But all of these are mere irritations compared to the real issue with this kind of public snub, this televised airing of the ignorance and stupidity of the most powerful man on earth. Beause such a man is unlikely to inspire others to follow him, and therefore unable to provide leadership.

Such outbursts hasten the decline of Americna power. If Trump was trying to kill Pax Americana, the system of U.S. backed alliances and undertakings that has kept much of the world free from major wars since 1945, he could scarcely do a better job of it. He killed the TPP, and whatever you think of that agreement it was orchestrated by the U.S. Countries were draged, cajouled, bribed and begged to join. American soft power was expended in a way it has not been for years in pursuit of this new arrangment to establish global trade rules for the coming century. Even if killing it was a good thing (a proposition I think is debatable at best), how receptive will those same states and governments be to trust the word of the U.S. Government now that they have been left standing at the altar? Abandoned at the eleventh hour without a word of apology or any kind of consolation after, in many cases, expending their own political capital at home to back the deal?

It is hard to imagine they will be as receptive as they were before. In such ways are great powers undone, and hegemonys lost. So much of this stuff is about perception, and of the two on the stage during Merkel’s visit  to Washington only one looked like the leader of the Free World. And for the first time in living memory, it wasn’t the American President.

 

 

 

 

Many sayings are attributed to Sam Rayburn, the longest serving Speaker of the House in American history. One seems particularly helpful in understanding the current situation: ‘Any jackass can kick over a barn, but it takes a skilled carpenter to build one’. Repealing the Affordable Care Act (AKA Obamacare) was always going to be the easy part. Replacing it with something else is considerably more difficult.

As I have mentioned before the Republican Party under Trump is far from unified in philosophical terms, still less when it comes to the specifics of policy. It was one thing when President Obama was in office and the troops could be reliably rallied in opposition to his agenda, but now that the GOP finds itself alone in a room with a blank piece of paper the cracks are well and truly forming.

The House, under the leadership of Speaker Ryan, has released its proposed replacement to Affordable Care Act, cementing Ryan’s position as the man with the most thankless task in American politics. Reviews have not been good.

To Conservatives this bill still contains many of the objectionable parts of the original act. Direct subsidies will in many cases be replaced with tax refunds, but this is still the Federal government writing cheques to people to pay for healthcare. It is not the kind of free-market, consumer driven healthcare system they want. Worse still from their perspective is the inclusion of the tax hikes used to pay for the ACA, which will annoy both Republican donors and the Tea Party anti-tax crowd.  As if to demonstrate the truth of the old adage that ‘you reap what you sow’ the phrase ‘Obamacare-Lite’ has even been bandied about by some of the more adventurous souls on the right wing. They like the removal of the individual mandate, but that is nowhere near enough metaphorical sugar to make the medicine go down. This is not a cohort schooled in compromise.

All of that would be much less of a problem if Liberals were in favor of the bill. Even with the overwhelming loathing they feel for Trump and his administration, it may have been possible to chip off enough votes from the Democrats to pass the thing. We seem to be witnessing one of those rare moments of bipartisan consensus. Unfortunately for Trump it is against the bill, rather than for it.

Democrats loathe almost everything about it. Not only is there no mechanism to fund the rebates after the old tax increases are grandfathered out, but the removal of the mandate makes the whole thing unworkable. If insurance companies are being asked to pay more that money will either come from higher premiums or more government subsidy. They are understandably skeptical of protestations that neither will occur. To them, it ammounts to throwing out everything worth having in the messy and compromised ACA and throwing the very Americans it was designed to help under the bus. Senators from left to right have come out in opposition to this bill, and it seems certain that it would not pass even if a filibuster is avoided.

The bigger problem for the GOP is that ‘Obamacare’ is having a bit of a renaissance as far as public opinion is concerned. Public support for the provisions of the bill has increased substantially over the last few months, and it seems quite clear that a repeal without a salable replacement would be politically risky at best. And so they must try and reconcile the irreconcilable.

It must have no mandates for coverage, but cover pre-existing conditions. It must have no subsidy, but not increase premiums. It must lead to better coverage for more people without providing more money to fund that coverage. These circles cannot be squared. But as with so much in Washington the question isn’t whether you will do it or not, but how exactly you are going to not do it, and who exactly you can afford to alienate.

In any case, those who wondered if the entire edifice of the Republican party would meekly fall in behind Trump and whatever he proposed have their answer. As we watch this bill die, either drowned in amendments or suffocated quietly in some committee, spare a though for Paul Ryan. This isn’t the first time he has had to be in charge of the sacrificial lamb, and it certainly won’t be the last.