Ever the master of situational ethics — the belief that in any situation at all, what helps the Democrats has to be ethical — E.J. Dionne chose to chide the Republican Party for its efforts to repeal the ever-contentious Affordable Care and Patient Protection Act (aka ‘Obamacare’). He did so by employing the justly famed Thomas Jefferson adage that “Great innovations should not be forced on slender majorities” as his justification and guide. The irony is that in 2009-2010, when the bill was being passed against public opinion, he made exactly the opposite argument, saying the it should be rammed through on the smallest of margins, with no mind paid to the public at all. “Stop screaming and pass health reform,” he wrote on December 21, 2009, urging the party to cease all efforts to broaden the appeal of the bill and push it through on its tenuous super majority.
When that disappeared with the Scott Brown election, he became still more insistent: “The real problem is that some Senate Democratic moderates are petrified that Republicans will make terrible trouble is the amendments are passed through the ‘reconciliation process,’ which is fancy congressional talk for majority rule,” he said February 8, 2010. “If Democrats are that intimidated … they should just give up their majority … if democracy’s new role is that nothing gets done without 60 percent of the available votes, Scott Brown, who got 52 percent in Massachusetts,” would not be in the Senate at all. Dionne’s view prevailed, the bill was rammed through, and in three of the four next elections (the exception being 2012, when Obama himself was on the ballot) the Democrats suffered disastrous losses; losing the House; losing the Senate, losing two-thirds of all the state houses, in 2016 losing the White House, and reaching their lowest point in the nation since 1928.
The lesson of this should be to take Jefferson seriously, ignore Dionne’s advice of an earlier season, and repeal the bill in a way opposite to the way it was passed in the first place — seriously, with an eye towards inclusion, with a major attempt to create a consensus, and the consent of the public in view.
In fact, the best way to approach the repeal of this measure might be to study the way the Obama team passed it, and then do the opposite thing. When Roosevelt and Johnson tried to impose their “great innovations,” they set them up on the broadest of possible bases, ensuring support from the opposite party before their ideas were proposed. Obama picked out a cause that only his base thought important, ignored opposition when it rose in his party, took pleasure in the fact he could steamroll his rivals, and counted on passage to make the bill popular, an event that would never occur. Instead, resentment burned on through the next four elections, and the haste with which the bill passed made it still more chaotic. “No piece of legislation is permanent, but must be sustained politically,” as John Judis wrote later. “If it is passed over the opposition of a rival party and [it] comes to power, it can always repeal it …The Affordable Care Act has proven to be a nightmare to implement, and has already had consequences that the public, if not the politicians, did not foresee.”
Republicans should make sure that repeal, if and when it occurs, should not share the fate of the act it succeeded. They should reject the mindset that brought on this debacle: The misguided hubris of Barack Obama, and the situational ethics of E.J. Dionne.
Noemie Emery, a Washington Examiner columnist, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
