G
Guns Guns Guns
Guest
Among Congressional Republicans, the decision was made early not only to oppose the White House’s health care push, but to offer almost nothing in the way of policy alternatives.
There was no meaningful Republican plan for reform during the heat of the original debate, and for all the notional talk about repealing and replacing, much the same void exists today.
Individual conservative politicians and policy wonks have plans, but the party leadership has deemed it too risky to counter the Democratic legislation with anything save boilerplate.
Paul Ryan has personally proposed a health care alternative, but his House budgets have conspicuously lacked one.
This “just say no” approach made a certain amount of political sense, for many of the same reasons the White House’s “all in” approach turned out to be so politically risky.
But it left the Republicans with no leverage on policy: they had nothing to offer wavering Congressional Democrats (from Ben Nelson to Bart Stupak) who had problems with the legislation but wanted to vote for some kind of reform, and they had nothing substantial to put forward when Scott Brown’s victory seemed as if it might force the White House back to the negotiating table.
As a result, now that the bill has been passed and the Supreme Court has declined to do their work for them, the Republicans are left to thread a very narrow needle.
First they need to take the Senate as well as the White House, and then they need to find a way to pass a party-line repeal bill while lacking any clear consensus on a replacement.
Otherwise they will have combined a political victory with a once-in-a-generation policy defeat.
Neither the victory nor the defeat is inevitable: there’s still time for Mitt Romney to lead his party to some kind of consensus on a health care alternative...
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/opinion/sunday/the-price-of-health-care.html
There was no meaningful Republican plan for reform during the heat of the original debate, and for all the notional talk about repealing and replacing, much the same void exists today.
Individual conservative politicians and policy wonks have plans, but the party leadership has deemed it too risky to counter the Democratic legislation with anything save boilerplate.
Paul Ryan has personally proposed a health care alternative, but his House budgets have conspicuously lacked one.
This “just say no” approach made a certain amount of political sense, for many of the same reasons the White House’s “all in” approach turned out to be so politically risky.
But it left the Republicans with no leverage on policy: they had nothing to offer wavering Congressional Democrats (from Ben Nelson to Bart Stupak) who had problems with the legislation but wanted to vote for some kind of reform, and they had nothing substantial to put forward when Scott Brown’s victory seemed as if it might force the White House back to the negotiating table.
As a result, now that the bill has been passed and the Supreme Court has declined to do their work for them, the Republicans are left to thread a very narrow needle.
First they need to take the Senate as well as the White House, and then they need to find a way to pass a party-line repeal bill while lacking any clear consensus on a replacement.
Otherwise they will have combined a political victory with a once-in-a-generation policy defeat.
Neither the victory nor the defeat is inevitable: there’s still time for Mitt Romney to lead his party to some kind of consensus on a health care alternative...
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/01/opinion/sunday/the-price-of-health-care.html