Remembering for Elephants
Ten years is a long time in politics. Lifetimes. It's time enough to forget, which is dangerous, especially for voters.
The Affordable Care Act (ACA), now known to everyone in the world as Obamacare, was proposed almost eight years ago. What is forgotten, or ignored, as the congressional Republicans attempt to repeal the ACA seems to be how that bill came to be, and how it came to be known as "Obamacare".
President Barack Obama may have adopted that nickname during his 2012 reelection campaign as an attempt to "own" it, but we must remember that it started like so many other nicknames people have felt they had to take ownership of, as a way to belittle people and hold those people back, as a way to keep them down.
Some people think taking ownership of a bully's means of attack is a way to take power from the bully, but that has never been the case. The reality is that it just reinforces the bully's attack by normalizing it, by taking language that should be both shunned and shamed and making it part of everyday life. Ultimately it becomes just one more epithet thrown around until no one knows how or why it started. You know, like welching on a debt or getting gypped. Or, you know, much, much worse. Exactly.
Republicans began calling the ACA "Obamacare" even before they'd read a word. It was meant to belittle Obama's intentions and his ability, much in the same way Republicans belittled Hillary Clinton's 1993 attempt at health care reform by calling it “Hillarycare". It was also, we must again remember, not simply a matter of resisting the ACA but part of a broader plan to obstruct Obama and the Democrats on anything and everything. That, not any principled concerns about the bill, was why the Democrats had to pass it without any Republican votes.
A lot of people seem intent and able to forget all of this, including most of the journalists covering the congressional Republican's "replace" bill, which is so much like the ACA that they called it by almost the same name, the Affordable Health Care Act. The good news about the Republicans' terrible bill is that it keeps much of what people liked about Obamacare, which is especially comforting if they remembered that Obamacare and the ACA were the same thing, "especially" being a relative term here.
A number of Trump voters had, of course, forgotten that they were the same, something the now-President campaigned on and has continued to exploit, or tried to as the threat of an actual repeal reminded them of the truth. That's the trouble with getting the opportunity to get what you want.
Campaigning against "Obamacare" was a lot like campaigning against abortion. As long as they never actually got the opportunity to rid themselves of it, Republicans could have campaigned and fundraised on it forever. Now they actually have to do something, and that means getting us to forget their roll in why the ACA was so flawed to begin with.
Having obstructed and undermined what they're now trying to replace, the Republicans have understandably come up with a bill only Republicans could vote for, one that keeps all those things time has proven are too popular to get rid of but also one that cuts funding to the people who need it most - poor families, underemployed individuals, and the elderly - while opening the door to employers to cut their own health care spending, which under the ACA is mandatory for companies with 50 or more employees.
Always be wary of anything that requires you to forget something. This really should be something of a litmus test for anything in life, but in politics especially so. The AHCA, or "Trumpcare" or "Ryancare", take your pick, requires a lot of forgetting, especially if Republicans genuinely want it to pass. Considering the far right wing of the party won't vote for anything requiring accountability to others, which is to say, the things that people liked that were kept in the new bill, odds are it won't pass, not even close.
The only way Ryan's "alternative" might have more credibility then would be if he was offering it as a cruel but brutally effective way to save Social Security. Credibility, of course, is something of a problem for Trump's White House, too. How could it not be? It would be easy to suggest that it's more how they do things than what they do, but we must be careful to remember their stated reasons for what they do and how every action they've taken so far reveals it.
For instance, let's take a quick look at the firing of the United States Attorneys this week, the most prominent of which, naturally, was Preet Bahrara, U.S. Attorney for New York's Southern District, aka New York City, aka Wall Street. Bahrara was responsible for prosecuting terrorists, corrupt politicians, and corrupt businesspeople. An Obama appointee, he was by all accounts very, very good at his job, with no compunction prosecuting Democrats as severely as Republicans.
That thoroughness and ethical purity, of course, may have been his undoing. However much we'd like to believe that judges and prosecutors stand above the political fray, we would be fools to believe it. Judges are either elected or appointed by those who have been. Prosecutors such as Bahrara and, once upon a time, the man who fired him, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, are appointed by presidents.
Yes, it is true that presidents generally do want their own people who share their own ideologies as U.S. Attorneys and do replace them when a new party takes over, but to fire them all at once simply adds more smoke to the dumpster fire that is the Trump administration.
The inference taken from the abrupt, blunt method of firing as well as reports of Trump's attempt to speak directly to Bahrara the day before, suggests once again that Trump or those close to him sought some sort of reassurance from Bahrara concerning investigations and/or prosecutions involving Trump or those close to him. It isn't exactly far fetched, not with Trump's other appointments already acting to make their departments and agencies less effective and less accountable to taxpayers.
Bahrara apparently rebuffed the phone call on the grounds that it would be ethically compromising. That, apparently, was enough. Ethics are important in a public servant. They are accountability put into practice. It's no wonder the right-wing has such a problem with them.
Ethics, of course, are at the core of judicial and prosecutorial independence. At least, they are what we'd like to think are at the core of it. It takes courage to say "no" in any job, which ultimately is what ethics amounts to in real life.
Remember when the Bush administration got into trouble for firing U.S. Attorneys? That was ten years ago, so easy to forget. Try, though, to remember David Iglesias, then U.S. Attorney for the District of New Mexico. He was at the center of that scandal, which involved New Mexico Republicans complaining to the Bush White House that he wasn't prosecuting Democrats, specifically Democrats running for office.
Karl Rove, the Steve Bannon to President George W. Bush, told them he'd take care of it. Soon enough, Iglesias and seven other prosecutors, all Bush appointees, were fired for "performance related issues". An investigation proved otherwise. The firings were proven to be political payback for "disloyalty". Rove, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, almost-Supreme Court nominee Harriet Miers, and others in the Bush White House were forced to resign.
Now, what we've seen in the past week involving the Trump White House may amount to a bunch of bullies just being dicks, but given what we've seen of their desire to "deconstruct the administrative state", we would be fools to forget it or what the Bush White House attempted just ten years ago.
