Less than fourteen days after the unveiling from the GOP ObamaCare replacement, the party is already staring in to the abyss.
The bill has already established the worst rollout associated with a major bit of legislation in memory, and failure is an option. When the proposal falters, it will be a political debacle that may poison President Trump's relationship with Congress.
That relationship is awkward and tenuous. This is an uneasy accommodation between a GOP Congress that will look for a natural partner in a President Rubio, Cruz or Bush, and a President Trump who would, presumably, be happier to work with Speaker Dave Brat – the populist congressman from Virginia – than with Speaker Paul Ryan.
This is a product of how the Republican sweep of 2021 was won on separate tracks. Trump tore up many Republican orthodoxies and went out and found a different way to unlock the electoral map, winning within the industrial Midwest.
Congressional Republicans pretty much stuck with the usual script, kept Trump at arm's length and held their majorities in the House and the Senate.
As a result, there is no significant Trumpist wing in Congress. The faction best to him, the home Freedom Caucus, is made up of ideological conservatives whose philosophy is at odds with Trump's economic populism, otherwise his anti-establishmentarianism.
And there wasn't any off-the-shelf Trump legislation Congress could begin on immediately. Within the campaign, Trump identified a constituency and a message, however the agenda was often symbolic (Mexico will pay for the wall) or nebulous (better trade deals).
The natural reflex, then, was to defer to the Republican leadership in Congress. Trump could've come roaring from the gate and among his distinctive proposals, the $1 trillion infrastructure plan, and wooed Democrats to support it and dared Republicans to oppose it. Instead, which has been put off towards the second year, and may not happen whatsoever.
The congressional priorities are ObamaCare repeal and tax reform, each of which could easily have been the first-year agenda items of these Presidents Bush, Rubio or Cruz. They've got to become passed without Democratic votes and through the Senate reconciliation process that circumvents the filibuster.
It's correct that Trump promised to provide on both, but neither was part of his core message or won over marginal Trump voters.
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For now, it's within the interest of Congress and Trump to make the shotgun marriage work. The speaker is pursuing repeal and replace simultaneously because which was Trump's preference, and the president has been supportive of Ryan's bill while maintaining flexibility.
This is sustainable so long as things go smoothly; the test is when everything doesn't. House leadership is relying on Trump to help get its bill over the top, but at the same time it realizes he might seek an off-ramp when it looks like leadership is failing.
If the bill falters in the House, it will likely be probably the most fraught moment of GOP tension because the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape. Except the issue won't be whether congressmen and senators dump Trump, but whether Trump dumps them.
Even more than most politicians, Trump doesn't have interest in owning failure. The explanation of the president and his supporters won't be he backed a flawed strategy and bill in the House and paid the price. It will be that he was stabbed within the back. He went along with a GOP establishment politics that doesn't understand or care about Trump voters, and that he can never make that mistake again.
There's very little question that Trump would win any blame game. He'd possess the larger megaphone, the more intense supporters and far sharper elbows. He could instantly define Paul Ryan like a creature of the Washington swamp and choose to triangulate from the GOP Congress rather than work with it.
This means Trump will be a president not without a party necessarily, but without a Congress. It might make major legislative accomplishments impossible, although if ObamaCare repeal-and-replace fails, that might be the truth regardless.
Some skeptics of the Ryan bill hope that it is defeat allows the party to quickly proceed to tax reform. But that will not be easier. It, too, is highly complex, involves painful trade-offs and can disappoint populists, since the Republican template cuts taxes for that rich without much thought about working-class voters.
It's better for everyone if ObamaCare repeal-and-replace succeeds. Ryan should amend his bill to, amongst other things, boost coverage making it a sturdier vessel for the turbulence ahead. The choice is a defeat that could precipitate an awful, perhaps enduring, split inside a party eager to paper over its divisions.
