Because Democrats understand that any progress toward their ultimate goal strengthens their position. Republicans want all or nothing, and usually end up with nothing
When it comes to achieving policy goals, Democrats are smart and Republicans are dumb
Democrats' policy ideas are terrible. They damage this country. They invariably expand the scope of the federal government and war against the productive sector. They make problems like poverty, crime and moral depravity worse. They promote corruption. They accrue debt.
To summarize, their policy ideas suck. Left unchecked, they will destroy this country.
Republicans are not perfect by any means, but their policy ideas are superior to those of the Democrats in almost every conceivable example.
That said: Democrats are smart and Republicans are dumb. Not in a policy sense. But in a strategic and tactical sense
That said: Democrats are smart and Republicans are dumb. Not in a policy sense. But in a strategic and tactical sense, Democrats are so much smarter than Republicans it's almost embarrassing at times to be a Republican voter. Sending Republican majorities and Republican presidents to Congress - only to see them inevitably fail to implement effective policies - makes you feel like a sucker. It's the reason some conservatives understandably talk about abandoning the GOP and forming a new party that would actually fight and win - rather than constantly getting rolled by Democrats in spite of who wins elections.
But that misdiagnoses the problem. The problem is not that Republicans are insufficiently conservative or that they "don't fight." The problem is they're stupid idiots, and I'm not only talking about the moderates you want to label as "RINOs." I'm talking about the conservatives too. In fact, I'm especially talking about the conservatives - the people who advocate the policies I tend to agree with. They are very good at articulating what policies we should have and why. They are terrible at making them happen, or even at making progress in that direction.
The reason for this is that they are strategically inept. They don't understand, as Democrats do, that policy is a long game, and that you have to take advances whenever and however you can.
The American Health Care Act was not a great bill. It was nowhere near as good as it could have been. But it was about as good a bill as could have been crafted to pass both the House and the Senate in the current political environment. And it would have done a lot of good. It would have repealed all ObamaCare's taxes, mandates and coverage requirements. It would have reversed a baked-in spending trajectory that will put this country on a path to fiscal ruin in a very few decades. It would have given states more flexibility in Medicaid spending, and would have halted the expansion of Medicaid in just a few years. It also would have expanded the use of Health Savings Accounts, which give health care consumers more power over the dollars they're spending.
This is not everything the bill could have been or should have been, but it was a gigantic step in the right direction
This is not everything the bill could have been or should have been, but it was a gigantic step in the right direction. When Democrats are asked to vote on a bill like that, their extreme liberals complain that it's not socialist enough, and they try to drive it further left to the extent that they can before the vote. Then they all vote for it. Why? Because it moves the ball in their direction, and Democrats understand that this is a long game. If it were up to the Bernie Sanders wing of the Democratic Party, every bill would put the entire country and everything in it under the control of the federal government and ban Republicans forever. But that is not politically possible, so every chance they get, they vote to expand the power, scope and influence of the federal government. If it's only a little expansion, they'll take it. If it'a a gigantic expansion, they'll take it. They # that they want more, but ultimately they take what they can get every single time.
And the result of their doing this over the course of many decades is that the federal government spends $4 trillion a year, is $20 trillion in debt and controls everything from our employment agreements to our health care purchases to where we can source our gasoline.
They did not do this all at once. They did it a little at a time over decades. And even now, every chance they get to take a little more, they take.
Republicans do not do this. They're too stupid. They insist on bills that solve every imaginable problem all at once, or they refuse to vote for it. Going a little ways in the right direction and then living to fight another day for more is anathema to them. The House Freedom Caucus - the most conservative members of the House, along with libertarian Ron Paul disciple Justin Amash - are very proud of themselves today because they defeated the bill they called "ObamaCare Lite." The AHCA wasn't perfect enough for them, so they made sure the Republicans would make no progress whatsoever toward the restoration of free health markets.
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Do me a favor: Name one major piece of conservative legislation that's been enacted at the federal level since Ronald Reagan left office
The bill I would have preferred was probably pretty close to the bill the House Freedom Caucus would have preferred. But for a lot of reasons - the razor-thin Republican majority in the Senate, Senate parliamentary rules and more - that will had zero chance of becoming law, all at once, right now. A vote for the AHCA would have been the first of many needed steps in the right direction, but the most important thing it would have done is repeal ObamaCare. Yet the people who claim to be most opposed to ObamaCare ended up saving ObamaCare by insisting on an impossible-to-achieve perfection in replacing it.
And today some people think they are heroes because they "stood up for conservative principles." Bang up job, guys, What did you achieve in the interest of those conservative principles? Nothing. You kept in place one of the worst pieces of liberal legislation ever shoved down the collective throat of this nation.
Idiots.
Do me a favor: Name one major piece of conservative legislation that's been enacted at the federal level since Ronald Reagan left office. A single conservative policy achievement. Go ahead. Think.
I'll spot you the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003, and the banning of partial-birth abortion. Maybe you could include the capital gains tax cut of 1997, which the Gingrich Congress passed and Bill Clinton signed into law. If you can think of anything else, let me know, but the more you try to think of anything the more you'll realize there hasn't been much. Why? Because Republicans don't understand how to take what they can get.
It's been almost 30 years of little or no achievements on the policy front for Republicans, while Democrats chip away, like a football team driving down the field two and three yards at a time - rarely throwing the deep ball but always ending up scoring points because they're relentless and they simply won't stop.
On Friday, the Republicans showed that they haven't learned a thing - or at least that not enough of them have. So ObamaCare remains, and Republicans have still accomplished nothing.
Because they're too stupid.
