It's a funny thing about solving problems, especially in politics. You want to solve problems, of course. You campaign on your ability to do so, and on the culpability of the other side in having created the problem in the first place.
In that respect, rarely has a problem set itself up more advantageously for the Republican Party than ObamaCare. Not a single Republican voted for it. And just about every Republican warned it would be a disaster. The public agreed, opposing the idea by large majorities before Democrats went ahead and passed it anyway in 2010.
And a disaster it has been - throwing people off insurance plans they liked, costing them the right to see the doctors they liked, narrowing coverage options, driving up premiums and driving insurers out of the market.
The public has noticed, punishing Democrats at the ballot box in the mid-term elections of 2010 and 2014, and ultimately taking the presidency away from them in 2016 while maintaining Republican majorities on Capitol Hill. It's taken too long, but the public has finally handed the GOP the numbers they need to repeal ObamaCare.
Hurray!
But oh no.
Republicans have reaped quite the political windfall from ObamaCare. If the Iraq War and the mortgage market collapse were the gifts that kept giving to Democrats in the waning days of the Bush Administration, ObamaCare was the Democrats' recriprocation. Without a single Republican fingerprint on it, it's become an almost addicting habit for the GOP to campaign against it, denounce it and vow to get rid of it. And that was easy to say, especially when political realities basically made it impossible to do it.
Procedural maneuvering to get past the filibuster
But when you actually catch that car you've been chasing, then what do you do? Republicans have the repeal of ObamaCare within their reach now. It might require some procedural maneuvering to get past the filibuster, but the GOP has the numbers to get rid of the law and replace it with a better one.
That's wonderful news. And perhaps for them, terrifying. Because once the fix is in place, they will own it and they know it. Whatever they do will be better than ObamaCare - it would be hard to be worse - but it won't be perfect. There will be things that go wrong. The system we had before ObamaCare was very flawed, as it relied far too heavily on employer-based insurance and third-party payers. ObamaCare doubled down on that and made it worse, but it wasn't that good before.
And you can't go back to that anyway. You've now got millions of people on ObamaCare plans that had no insurance at all before. You have to figure out what to do about that. However you do the transition, there's a pretty good chance it will be messy. Some of them - maybe most of them - won't like it. And the news media will play up every glitch in the transition as if it's the end of mankind.
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I expect there will be some Republican reluctance for that very reason. ObamaCare has been awful for the country but great for them
This is the nature of problem-solving. At some point you have to stop bludgeoning the guy who caused the problem and actually fix it, and once you do, you own the solution. Your political windfall is over and you have to start taking responsibility for what you did, not just beating up the other guy for what he did.
I expect there will be some Republican reluctance for that very reason. ObamaCare has been awful for the country but great for them. There was the hope both in 2012 and again in 2015 that the Supreme Court would throw out ObamaCare and spare the Republicans the responsibility of doing it and owning whatever might come next.
No such luck. They're facing the departure of the best political friend they ever had. Because they finally caught the car and now they have to figure out what to do with it.
