Good riddance to Rep. Mark Meadows, who announced Thursday morning that he is retiring from Congress after just four terms. He has been one of the most destructive members of the House Republican caucus, and his legacy is one of a more poisonous political process.
More than any other member of Congress, including the late Sen. John McCain, Meadows was to blame for the failure of Republican majorities and a Republican president to repeal and replace Obamacare. By leading the all-noise-but-no-sense House Freedom Caucus to make the perfect the enemy of the good, the North Carolina Republican and his henchmen killed the single most likely vehicle to eliminate that horrid healthcare law.
It is a well-established political maxim that a new president’s first big legislative initiative has a far better chance of passing while political momentum is still flowing from his inauguration. Once interrupted, though, the momentum is useless. In the case of Obamacare repeal, which President Trump had made his first priority, House Republican aides had crafted legislation which may not have been perfect, but was clearly an improvement over the status quo and was entirely good enough for that stage of the legislative process. That’s the bill Meadows led his Freedom Caucus to kill –- infuriating even solidly conservative, but not radical, Republican colleagues, such as Alabama’s Bradley Byrne, who excoriated their short-sightedness.
The reason the bill was perfectly good enough was that no matter what passed the House, the Senate would alter it anyway. For one thing, complicated procedural issues existed such that the House could not be certain which provisions would or would not withstand challenges under the so-called reconciliation rules that allow a simple Senate majority, rather than 60%, to pass a bill. The House job was to pass as good a bill as possible, as a template, while momentum was still fresh, but not to sweat every detail, because the Senate and then a Conference Committee would later work out those details.
Instead, the Freedom Caucus, playing holier-than-thou games for its hard-line base, killed the bill when it still had a good chance to make it through the process. Meadows quite publicly and loudly led the way. It then took several more months before House Speaker Paul Ryan and Rep. Gary Palmer found a way to revive it, by which time all momentum for Senate action had evaporated.
It is a simple fact that the version of repeal that the Freedom Caucus killed was far more comprehensive, and far more in line with conservative ends, than the pathetic shell of “skinny repeal” that McCain later famously killed because he rightly saw it as a sham.
It was the height of hypocrisy for Meadows and company to blast McCain for not “keeping alive” a repeal process on a bill that by then was as flimsy as gossamer after they were the ones responsible for killing a far more robust vehicle.
Yet that was Meadows’ style all along, on issue after issue. Rather than adopt Ronald Reagan’s wisdom that achieving 80% of a desired goal is better than demanding 100% and achieving zero, Meadows always was of the all-or-nothing ilk. Meanwhile, he burned rather than built bridges with moderates, adding to the ideological and partisan divides that now tear our political fabric. Few members of Congress in recent decades have ever been so destructive.
Alas, the North Carolinian says he is merely retiring from Congress but not from public life, because he plans to continue working with Trump in some capacity. What a shame. Instead of public life, Meadows should be put out to pasture.
