A mini-drama played out Thursday on Capitol Hill, one of those little controversies that is often dismissed as part of Congress’s daily and ridiculous inside baseball.
But such a dismissal would be unwise in the case of the missing Obamacare bill, which is perhaps absurd but isn’t a laughing matter. It would be perilous for a Republican House majority that was built on a commitment to legislative transparency and regular order to ignore those concerns as it tries to repeal Obamacare.
The drama began when Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., heard that House Republicans on the Energy and Commerce Committee had a copy of their Obamacare replacement bill in a secure room in the Capitol building. He brought a group of reporters with him and demanded to see it. He was turned away by a staffer. Democrats quickly got wind of what was happening, and joined the fun, playing a little hide-and-seek game of “Where’s the bill?”
The House GOP apparently doesn’t want to make its draft available at present. Doubtless, this is partly because they fear criticism and, knowing some provisions will be dropped or changed, they want to avoid unnecessary hits for controversial elements they don’t actually approve.
In Paul’s view, however, the cloak-and-dagger approach to legislation is being used to delay debate and force the Senate, in the end, to accept whatever the House passes. He expects it to be something conservatives won’t like.
Whatever the motivation, we don’t blame Paul for highlighting this shabby way of drafting legislation. There’s more to it than just the fact that the optics are terrible. Conservatives believe in regular order — Speaker Ryan promised a return to it — because as an ideological matter they favor an open market of ideas over central planning by a supposedly wise and well-meaning few.
Politically speaking, they should know better. They don’t have to think far back to recognize the mistake they make in hiding the ball. In 2009 and 2010, GOP candidates for House shrewdly used then-majority Democrats’ closed-door construction of Obamacare against them.
President Barack Obama had promised during his first campaign that negotiations over his healthcare bill would be televised on C-SPAN. Instead, it hinged on a series of secret agreements with the drug industry, union and other lobbyists who traded favors for their support. And Democratic leaders did themselves no favors with comments that only made this more apparent, such as John Conyers’ “What good is reading the bill?” and Nancy Pelosi’s “We have to pass the bill so that you can find out what’s in it.”
Republican candidates in the 2010 cycle focused on the cynical process by which the Democratic leadership had brought their first bill to the House floor, where most members hadn’t even read it and rammed it through along party lines. The results were brutal; Democrats lost an astounding 63 seats and control of the House that year, in no small part because the voters saw what they were doing and became convinced they’d been had. Indeed, they had.
Republicans are making a mistake if they think they can act similarly and not suffer the same fate.
Yes, transparency is inconvenient. There will be opposition to this or that idea, both from within and from without GOP ranks. No one is going to be completely happy with whatever they come up with, and leftist mobs will continue to show up at town halls decrying the end of the world no matter what they try to pass.
But at this point, years of promises have been made, and the voters have spoken. Republicans must have faith in those voters, faith in the legislative process, faith in their own willingness to be reasonable and faith in the ability of President Trump to persuade them to send him something he can sign. Otherwise, they will render the last six years an immense waste of conservatives’ time.
