What do people think of the “Trump Humiliated By Health Care Failure” and “Health Care Rejection Shows Trump Is Already Lame Duck” and “Paul Ryan: Worst Speaker Of All Time?” discourse?
Most people I trust seem to think the health care bill was crap. Blaming people for writing a crappy health care bill seems fair enough.
But there seems to be more of an element of picking on them for being too weak to pass the bill, as if now they’re losers and we can never respect them again.
Can we just say something like “Elected officials should propose bills that they and their constituents want, give the rest of the country a chance to weigh in, and if the rest of the country says no, that means democracy is working and they should come back with something better”?
Like, this is complicated because I don’t want Republicans to pass a health care bill right now. But if this were actually important legislation, I would want the government to say “Good thing the American people made their voices heard,” roll up their sleeves, and then write a better bill.
Whereas now it seems like the incentive is to never propose anything that doesn’t have a 100% chance of getting passed the first time. And the other incentive is to desperately try to steamroll your legislation over everyone’s opposition and never admit you’re wrong, because if it fails (even for good reason) everyone will make fun of you.
Or am I missing something important here?
That is exactly the incentive and everyone in Washington except Trump and Bannon knows it.
Specifically, the idea with controversial legislation is to not call a vote unless you already know you have the votes to pass it, in order to protect your party’s marginal members (that is, who were elected with a small margin of victory) from going on record with a controversial vote that can be used against them.
So with regards to controversial legislation, the ideal case is to pass the bill with only people whose constituency are fully on board with it, the okay case is to endanger your marginal party members but only in pursuit of a worthwhile legislative victory, and the absolute worse case is to endanger your marginal party members and then lose anyway.
I’m not sure how this could really be avoided so long as there are both purple districts and the “abstain” vote.
However, the particular response to this specific case seems to me to have more to do with the alleged, overconfident bumbling of intra-party politics, such as described here, which, if accurate, would be a classic tale of someone thinking they can tell someone what to do, and that someone telling them to fuck off with no apparent consequences. Accountability to the people need not enter the picture.