Let’s not make it worse by confirmed Trump’s pick
for Supreme Court
To watch this video on
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP9fKQiW_BE
House Speaker Paul
Ryan, in his press conference following the demise of his bill to replace
Obamacare, blamed Republicans who had failed to grasp that the GOP was now a
“governing party.”
“We were a 10-year
opposition party, where being against things was easy to do,” said Ryan. “You
just had to be against it. Now, in three months’ time, we tried to go to a
governing party where we actually had to get 216 people to agree with each
other on how we do things.”
It was, he said, “the
growing pains of government.”
Rubbish.
According to
the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, it would have resulted in 24
million Americans losing health coverage over the next decade, hardly make a
dent in the federal debt, and transfer over $600 billion to the wealthiest
members of American society.
The so-called “Freedom
Caucus” of House Republicans, who refused to go along with the bill, wanted it
even worse. Essentially, their goal (and that of their fat-cat patrons) was to
repeal the Affordable Care Act without replacing it at all.
Ryan is correct about
one thing. Congress is in the hands of Republicans who for years have only said
“no.” They have become expert at stopping whatever a president wants to do but
they don’t have a clue how to initiate policy.
Most of the current
Republican House members have not shared responsibility for governing the
nation. They have never even passed a budget into law.
But their real problem
isn’t the “growing pains” of being out of power. In reality, the Republicans
who are now control the House – as well as the Senate – don’t like government.
They’re temperamentally and ideologically oriented to opposing it, not leading
it.
Their chronic
incapacity to govern didn’t reveal itself as long as a Democrat was in the
White House. They let President Obama try to govern, and pretended that their
opposition was based on a different philosophy governing.
Now that they have a
Republican president, they can no longer hide. They have no philosophy of
governing at all.
Sadly for them – and
for the rest of the country, and the world – the person they supported in the
election of 2016 and who is now president is an unhinged narcissistic
child who tweets absurd lies and holds rallies to prop up his fragile ego.
His conflicts of
financial interest are legion. His entire presidency is under a “gray
cloud” of suspicion for colluding with Russian agents to win office.
Here’s a man who’s
advised by his daughter, his son-in-law, and an oddball who once ran a white
supremacist fake-news outlet.
His Cabinet is an
assortment of billionaires, CEOs, veterans of Wall Street, and ideologues, none
of whom has any idea about how to govern and most of whom don’t believe in the
laws their departments are in charge of implementing anyway.
Meanwhile, he
has downgraded or eviscerated groups of professionals responsible for
giving presidents professional advice on foreign policy, foreign intelligence,
economics, science, and domestic policy.
He gets most of what
he learns from television.
So we have a congress
with no capacity to govern, and a president who’s incapable of governing.
Which leaves the most
powerful nation in the world rudderless.
The country on whom
much of the rest of the world relies for organizing and mobilizing responses to
the major challenges facing humankind is leaderless.
It is of course
possible that Republicans in congress will learn to take responsibility for
governing. It is possible that Donald Trump will learn to lead. It is possible
that pigs will learn to fly.
But such things seem
doubtful. Instead, America and the rest of the world must hold our collective
breath, hoping that the next elections – the midterms of 2018 and then the
presidential election of 2020 – set things right. And hoping that in the
meantime nothing irrevocably awful occurs.
ROBERT B. REICH is Chancellor's Professor of Public Policy at
the University of California at Berkeley and Senior Fellow at the Blum Center
for Developing Economies. He served as Secretary of Labor in the Clinton
administration, for which Time Magazine named him one of the ten most effective
cabinet secretaries of the twentieth century. He has written fourteen books,
including the best sellers "Aftershock", "The Work of
Nations," and "Beyond Outrage," and, his most recent,
"Saving Capitalism." He is also a founding editor of the American
Prospect magazine, chairman of Common Cause, a member of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences, and co-creator of the award-winning documentary,
INEQUALITY FOR ALL.