If you’ve been hatin’ on House Speaker Paulie Ryan as long as I have, seeing Paulie finally take the beatdown he so richly deserves is schadenfreude beyond a Paulie hater’s wildest dreams.
Perhaps the best of the many, many drubbings Paulie has received is administered by the hitherto unknown (to me) Philip Klein, who hangs his hat at the right-wing Washington Examiner,1 who tells us, “GOP cave on Obamacare repeal is the biggest broken promise in political history”.2
“What’s so utterly disgraceful,” Klein says, “is not just that Republicans failed so miserably, but that they barely tried, raising questions about whether they ever actually wanted to repeal Obamacare in the first place.” It does raise that question, because it’s hard to believe that anyone who knows anything about health care could have “crafted” such a neither fish nor fowl, cross-purposed, self-contradictory beast in the first place, though it’s always possible that, as Jonathan Chait has frequently argued, what Ryan really wanted to do was give the rich a trillion-dollar tax cut via health care “reform”, so that he could give them another trillion-dollar tax cut down the road. Which leads to the strong suspicion that Paul Ryan is very ignorant, very stupid, or very mendacious—or, perhaps, a combination of the three.
Ryan continued to defend the amended bill in defeat, despite the merciless ridicule the bill received from conservative health policy specialists like Avik Roy, claiming that the right-wingers in the House destroyed “the good, the very good” in pursuit of the “perfect”. In fact, the heterogeneous amendments piled on top of an already heterogeneous bill made it even more dysfunctional. All of which strongly suggests that Ryan is simply an idiot, that he constructs a bill by taking five “conservative” ideas, three “moderates”, and one “liberal” and throwing them into a bag.
Ever since the Reagan Administration, Republicans have sought to defund the social welfare state constructed by the Democratic Party by asserting that government is the problem and the free market is the solution. We don’t need welfare because the free market will provide jobs for everyone. We don’t need socialized medicine because the free market will bring down medical costs for everyone. We don’t have to worry about anything, because the market will take care of everything.
In fact, when it comes to health insurance, the market doesn’t take care of everyone; it only takes care of insurers, because the way you make money selling health insurance is not by selling the best damn health insurance at the best damn price but by not selling health insurance to anyone who’s likely to get seriously sick—you don’t sell to anyone with a “pre-existing condition”. In particular, you don’t sell to geezers, because they all have the same pre-existing condition, the sickness unto death.
Most Americans are protected from the harshness of free-market health insurance by what “recovering Republican” Chris Ladd calls “white socialism”, subsidized health insurance provided regardless of pre-existing conditions offered through employers and Medicare—socialism for “good people”.
As author Ira Katznelson describes in his book When Affirmative Action Was White, when Franklin Roosevelt brought European-style social welfare legislation to the U.S., he worked hand in glove with southern racists to create a system that indirectly but effectively excluded most blacks. Legislation first passed during World War II and then expanded in 1954 specifically stating that employer-provided health insurance was not taxable income continued the trend, because most of the “good jobs” that offered health insurance were held by whites.
U.S. society integrated slowly—very slowly—during the fifties and sixties, and Democrats persistently expanded America’s stunted social welfare system to include more of the poor, which disproportionately assisted blacks, who were disproportionately poor. During the “Reagan Revolution”, right-wingers like Reagan sought to overturn what the Democrats had done. They couldn’t, of course, say they hated black people.3 They just hated government! Whenever it helped black people!
Reagan’s work of implicit rather than explicit racism was continued by many after he left office, perhaps most notably by such organizations as Grover Norquist’s American for Tax Reform, the League for Growth, and the refashioned Heritage Foundation. The whole “movement” was supercharged by the “Tea Party”, created very largely in response to President Obama’s decision to press for the national health insurance first proposed by Harry Truman, effectively replacing “white socialism” with, you know, socialism.
Paul Ryan is both heir and epitome of this disastrous mixture of deceit and self-deception. He represents a district in Wisconsin, one of the “ground-zero” states for the clash between urban blacks and suburban whites. He can get elected by shouting “Down with government!” but he can’t pass legislation that way. It’s “interesting” that such an “utterly disgraceful” character is the only thing that’s holding Republicans in the House of Representatives together. Paulie almost makes a reptilian vote-counter like Mitch McConnell look good, though when it comes to Donald, even Paulie can’t turn the trick.
Afterwords
To jump back to Philip Klein’s piece, “GOP cave on Obamacare repeal is the biggest broken promise in political history”, the kicker di tutti kickers is that Phil doesn’t even mention the biggest broken promise of all—the Republicans’ endlessly repeated vow to restore the $800 or so billion that Obama cut out of Medicare to fund the ACA—which Ryan completely ignored when he put together his bill. The GOP broke so many promises, even Phil couldn’t keep track of them all.
- The Examiner is owned by right-wing billionaire Philip Anschutz, a Colorado oilman with an unusual passion for soccer. Anschutz saved Major League Soccer in the U.S. from bankruptcy and oblivion, bankrolling numerous teams through numerous lean years. In 2009, Anschutz bought William Kristol’s Weekly Standard from Rupert Murdoch. The Examiner is composed in part by remnants from the now almost forgotten though still existent Washington Times, founded in 1982 by Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church as an alternative to the loathed Washington Post. Moon funded the Times lavishly, and during the Clinton years the paper provided an unending stream of leaked secret information from the Pentagon and the CIA. Because in those days conservatives thought leaks were a good thing. ↩︎
- For more laughs, see Harold Pollack’s “Paul Ryan Failed Because His Bill Was a Dumpster Fire over at Politico. ↩︎
- To say that Reagan hated black people is to say too much. But he did despise the American civil rights movement, which he explicitly regarded as a communist plot, and he was contemptuous of the poor. Success was the reward of virtue; poverty was the punishment of weakness. Bruce Bartlett, in his book, Wrong on Race, which attempts to “prove” that it is the Democrats rather than the Republicans who are “wrong on race”, acknowledges uncomfortably that Reagan, though “of course” no racist, had no blacks on his staff. Bartlett’s portrait of Reagan as committed to “colorblind” society is thoroughly unconvincing. Reagan disputed all efforts by the federal government to disassemble segregation but once in office furiously assaulted affirmative action as “racist”. Racism was bad except when it helped white people. ↩︎
