Thank you for continuing to share these messages with your friends, if you are not already on our mailing list, please click here to be added to our list. You can also follow me on Facebook. The more people we can reach, the more we contribute to this growing movement. We share these posts on our blog, A Path Forward to November 3, 2020, every two weeks, which means there will be a total of 100 missives before the Presidential election of 2020, in which our country will select a whole new course.
This upcoming week will be consequential, again.
It may seem like Mitch McConnell won't get a Republican health care bill through the Senate, but don't be certain about that. The reason he continues to look for a way forward with this horrible, horribly unpopular bill is that he is convinced that his party will be in worse political trouble if they don't pass it than if they do. That's counterintuitive, but it comes down to this:
If you are a Republican Senator, you can choose between 1) passing it, and having independent voters be disgusted with you at least until the 2018 midterm elections (with a hope that you will find a way to mitigate that disgust), or 2) failing to pass it and having the 30-35% of the voters who are your base be outraged at you for an even longer period of time because you promised them Obamacare repeal for seven years.
McConnell's Senators can't win elections without the base, so he will continue to look for an opening, even though the political dangers of losing the independent vote are also huge, and even though working together we will make those dangers even greater. These Senators didn't expect Trump to win and make repeal even faintly possible, and their countless votes to repeal when the Democrats held the presidency were just political theatre. They are the dog that chased the car and can't figure out what to do when it caught it.
For eight months, Republicans have wondered and wrestled about what to do about Donald Trump. What they have come up with so far is the worst sort of bargain. Nearly every Republican in Congress has decided to sign on to this deal.
They get to criticize Donald Trump for thuglike or boorish behavior or nonsensical actions. They can compose and send clever tweets to signal their disapproval, or display a raised eyebrow to the cameras. With impunity, they can mitigate the worst of his budget proposals, maintain sanctions against Russia and anticipate reports from Richard Burr's Senate Judiciary Committee and special investigator Robert Mueller on election abuse.
That is what is permitted. In return, these Senators will vote for any Cabinet nominee, however unqualified. They will maintain the known fiction that Donald Trump is able to fulfill the office of President of the United States. They will let Trump and Scott Pruitt decimate the EPA and environmental law. They will stand by as he walks away from the most important global environmental effort ever. They will say a silent prayer to Tillerson and Mattis and watch as Trump destroys our nation's relationships with long time global partners, even those whose soldiers have died in wars we asked them to join.
This is a sordid implicit deal that guides the Senate Republicans. You can be in Congress for a long time without being personally subjected to the harsh judgments of history, but these Republican Senators will not have that luxury.
This is not and will not be permanent change in the bold American democratic experiment that has continued for 230 years with all its dreams and blemishes.
The mid-year elections of 2018 will foretell the return of a democratic, Democratic presidency in 2020. At some time in the not so distant future, we will look back and wonder how Republican Senators could have put the country and the Constitution at such peril.
And the answer will be that they couldn't bear to not get a little benefit out of Trump being president. They want some judicial appointments, some reductions in budgets of least favored agencies, and some tax cuts for people who do not need tax cuts. In a time where many of them know in their hearts that the President of their party is not capable of governing, they cannot bear to put country ahead of party.
As the full implications of the Trump presidency become known, it may be that we will be seeing fewer empty actions of Republican opposition and more principled actions. Maybe this will begin now with Republicans standing in the way of the McConnell health care proposal. There are some additional Senators finding their voice. Shelley Moore Capito of West Virginia said that her commitment is to vulnerable populations and that gives her the strength to provide the deciding "no" vote. John Hoeven of North Dakota is worried about the viability of rural hospitals if the bill passes, since as much as 70% of their revenue comes from Medicaid which will suffer serious reductions in funding. Conservative Jerry Moran of Kansas is worried about decreased protection for those with pre-existing conditions.
The rules of the Senate provide motivation for these Senators to set aside these concerns and go with McConnell. This is because the tax breaks for millionaires included in the present version of the Senate bill count as budgetary savings. Under budget reconciliation rules, they would be able to "use" these savings when they seek to "reform" the tax law by giving more tax cuts to people who don't need them. Because they have these savings, they would be able to pass a tax bill with 50 votes. I am not making this up.
We hope the access to care for many millions of people will prevail, and that we will return to health care that represents what we can do with and for each other. To help these notions carry the day, we need to do these three things.
| 1) Widening our List of Targeted Senators | |
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Let's respond to the relatively recent signals of three Senators, none of which were initially thought to be a possible "no" vote. Please call their principal legislative assistant for health care. Say that the Senator was right to voice her or his concerns, and that the problems with this bill are not going to go away. At this point it is all about the volume of calls, which is not a bad thing, because it reinforces the narrative that even in red states, Senators support this bad bill at their political peril. Call and/or email these three aides:
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| 2) Speak Out for Rural Hospitals | |
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The dilemma faced by rural hospitals has received little attention during the health care debate. It has been overshadowed by Medicaid cuts, a diminution of protections for people with pre-existing conditions, and attempts to redefine and thus limit essential services. The Chartis Center for Rural Health has identified over 600 rural hospitals that are at risk. The National Rural Health Association vehemently urges a no vote. See this as an issue that many Senators have ignored. Send the article to your own two Senators to reinforce their concerns if they have any, or to seek to develop some concerns if they have none. |
3) Remember Key Environmental Battles |
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Because of administrative rule making authority contained in many of the major environmental laws, Trump and Scott Pruitt have been able to make some inroads in weakening environmental regulations. Now environmental organizations are getting some traction on the Obama era rule requiring monitoring of methane emissions from public lands. Three Republican Senators joined Democrats in blocking the Trump rescission of the rule. When Trump and Pruitt moved to rescind the rule by executive order they were blocked by a lawsuit filed by the Natural Resources Defense Council and others. Let's celebrate by sending the NRDC a contribution to support this critical legal work. |
The resistance continues. The recent disclosures on collusion with Russia may make Republican Senators a little bolder in any principled stands on Trump. Whether or not they become bolder we will prevail in these efforts. We do not have another option.
David Harrison
Bainbridge Island, Washington
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