While President Trump keeps doing or saying utterly benighted things at the border, on trade, and in smearing his own Justice Department, the Trump-Pence administration is making good policy moves on other fronts.
Already this week, the administration has acted wisely on four different issues that could make a real, positive difference in human lives.
The first involves a tiny nod toward fiscal sanity in the fact of a looming debt crisis. The administration made a real effort to convince senators to pass a “rescissions” package that would have kept Congress from “repurposing,” for other boondoggles, $15 billion of unspent appropriations. As I wrote here last month, “if these theoretical funds are taken away now, they can’t be used to hide more profligacy later.”
Alas, two Republican senators defected on the vote Thursday afternoon, thus killing the measure and saddling taxpayers with more waste, but the administration pushed hard for the right thing.
The second good administration move, one that prior administrations should have taken, is the decision to withdraw the United States from the woefully misnamed United Nations Human Rights Council. Nikki Haley, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., rightly calls the council a “cesspool of political bias.” Actually, “political bias” is putting it mildly. The UNHRC is a locus of international evil.
The UNHRC’s membership includes notorious human-rights abusers Venezuela, Cuba, China, and the Congo. It repeatedly refuses to say (much less do) anything against massive political imprisonment, torture, or killings in those countries or in places like Iran. It won’t condemn open terrorism when it manifests itself from Gaza. But it passes resolution after resolution, year after year, condemning Israel — and indeed has a permanent agenda item (Item 7) on its docket to accuse Israel of human rights abuses.
“If the Human Rights Council is gonna attack countries that uphold human rights, and shield countries that abuse human rights, then America should not provide it with any credibility,” Haley said. Bingo.
The third and fourth Trump-Pence decisions worthy of praise both involve healthcare policy. First, very concretely, the administration this week announced a new rule that will encourage the formation of “association health plans” – basically, a way for employees of small companies to band together to secure medical coverage at rates presumably lower than Obamacare’s.
As Robert Moffitt of the Heritage Foundation explained on Tuesday, “Association health plans could have a substantial impact in the health insurance markets, reducing the costs and expanding health insurance coverage for millions of Americans. … There are 11 million Americans who are uninsured because they work for a small firm that does not offer coverage who could directly benefit from this option. Moreover, there are 9 million Americans in Obamacare’s individual markets who get no taxpayer subsidy, for whom the new association health plans would be an attractive option.”
This is important. It finally puts small businesses and their workers on an even footing with mega-sized firms. And it will help put power in the hands of healthcare consumers (in other words, patients) rather than bureaucrats, because it provides options for patients (or potential patients) to shop around for the best deal for their own circumstances. The new rule will let the power of the market work. And it will absolutely work, if consumers take advantage of the option.
Speaking of giving more choices for healthcare and/or insurance, on Wednesday a coalition of conservative groups released the plan about which I’ve written for months, providing a commonsense replacement for (and repeal of most of) Obamacare. The new plan would give states more leeway to provide more options for healthcare; it would require that states provide at least one option for insurance apart from Obamacare; and it would tremendously expand the availability and workability of health savings accounts, which are the best way for people to exert personal, individual control over their care choices.
And, for months behind the scenes, and now more openly, the administration is supporting this effort (and encouraging Senate leaders to pass it). If Senate Republicans have any gumption, and any political sense, they will do so – and the public will be immensely better off.
So that’s four things the Trump-Pence team is doing right this week: one on spending, one on foreign affairs, and two on healthcare.
Credit where credit is due.
Quin Hillyer (@QuinHillyer) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a former associate editorial page editor for the Washington Examiner, and is the author of Mad Jones, Heretic, a satirical literary novel published in the fall of 2017.
