Senator Dean Heller, of Nevada, is a buff fifty-seven-year-old moderate
Republican from Carson City, a former stockbroker and the son of a
stock-car racer. On Friday, he appeared at a press conference alongside
the popular Republican governor of Nevada, Brian Sandoval, and announced
that he could not support his party’s health-care bill; he called the
Republican assertion that the measure would lower health-care premiums a
“lie.” With remarkable speed, a pro-Trump super PAC, America First,
announced that, in retaliation, it would spend a million dollars to
defeat Heller, who is up for reëlection next year. The group also called
out one of Heller’s legislative aides, Rachel Green, by name, in some
tweets denouncing her boss—a sign that the group was willing to be
especially cruel.
Republicans had insisted that their health-care bill would pass this
week, and Heller’s defection was a major blow to the bill’s prospects.
But the Republican leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, was said to be “privately
fuming” over the anti-Heller ads that America First has already begun to
run. McConnell has a majority of only two votes, for this legislative
fight and all the rest to come before the midterms. Why would the
President’s allies alienate a senator whom they will frequently need? On
Tuesday, McConnell’s office announced that the vote on the bill would be
postponed until after the summer recess.
For the past half-decade, McConnell has been arguably the most
consequential person in Washington. The rush to pass the health-care
bill was the kind of fight that’s supposed to be made for him. Going
into this week, members of the Republican leadership knew they didn’t have the votes,
yet they and the White House were optimistic because they had McConnell.
McConnell’s pattern is usually to make bills more conservative—to
placate the Party’s conservative flank—and then to cut enough individual
deals with moderates to win the votes he needs. Republicans had
prepared, as Politico put it yesterday, for a “furious round of
dealmaking.”
In the end, however, there were not enough deals to cut. The health-care
bill isn’t dead, but this weekend Republican senators will fly home to
their districts, and to what are sure to be contentious home-town
encounters and town halls. “People close to McConnell,” Politico
reported, “don’t fully comprehend how his strategy will play out.”
McConnell is not a policy wonk; his talent is in finding the right
political critique of liberal policies. On January 8th he appeared on
“Face the Nation.” Donald Trump’s Inauguration was still more than a
week away, but the topics under discussion were already the same as
those in the news now, and McConnell, who in public often looks like a
man preparing to be taken aback, was asked whether the twenty million
Americans who had gained health-insurance coverage under Obamacare
should be preparing to lose it. McConnell noted that twenty-five million
Americans still did not have health insurance. “If the idea behind
Obamacare was to get everyone covered, that’s one of the many failures,”
he said. Then he started to tick off others on his fingers: “Premiums
going up, co-payments going up, deductibles going up.” Even those who
did get insurance, he said, “have really bad insurance that they have to
pay for, and the deductibles are so high that it’s really not worth much
to them. So, it’s”—the word caught in his throat, but it was the right
word—“chaotic.”
At the time, this seemed like an effective way of talking about the
limitations of Obamacare: it was confusing, it didn’t cover everyone,
and it delivered less to many people than they had expected. In
retrospect, however, the argument seems less sharp, because the bill
that McConnell spent the weekend fighting to wrangle votes for would
deepen all of the problems he’d identified. It would have provided
lousier insurance with much higher deductibles, and would have raised
the number of uninsured people in the country by more than twenty
million. The images of resistance to the Republican health-care bill—the
packed district offices, the wrought testimonials of working people who
needed public health insurance to pay for life-preserving
medication—suggested what the bill would have done to the country. The
disabled activists whom Capital Police forcibly removed from their
wheelchairs when they blocked the entrance to McConnell’s office
confirmed the situation. The bill was pointing the country toward a
deeper chaos.
The Trump Administration is nearing the six-month mark; Republicans
control Congress, and yet they still have not been able to deliver a
single major legislative accomplishment. The White House has treated the
federal bureaucracy as a permanent antagonist, rather than trying to
weaponize it, and still has no real policy agenda, which is one reason
that it has so narrowly focussed on repealing Obama’s accomplishments.
In the House, Paul Ryan, the Speaker, has demonstrated that Republicans
can be marshalled for conservative causes. A more tenuous partisan
coalition exists in the Senate, and its cohesion depends upon
McConnell’s power to persuade.
Political genius is often more conditional than we allow. When Barack
Obama emerged this week, to defend his health-care reform, he did so
with a long post on Facebook that had some of the huffy texture and
self-conscious equanimity of a senatorial op-ed. This was his
Presidential style, but there was a dullness to it in the era of Trump’s
tweets. McConnell’s triumphs, in stalling Washington through much of the
Obama era, were organized around the view that if Washington was not
productive, the incumbent President’s party would be blamed. This was,
at least in the main, what happened. “We thought—correctly I think—that
the only way the American people would know a great debate was going on
was if the measure were not bipartisan,” McConnell told The Atlantic, in 2011, speaking about his opposition to Obamacare.
McConnell has come to embody a particular idea of how power is wielded
in Washington, through its process and not its personae, a tyranny of
“Robert’s Rules of Order.” “The least personal politician I’ve ever been
around,” McConnell’s own former chief of staff once said, meaning it as praise.
But his power depends upon his ability to preserve the Senate as a
sterile negotiating space in which he can persuade the fifty-two members
of his caucus, among them some of the most grandiose personalities in
American public life, to join an anonymous partisan mass. And in the
health-care debate there were certain things beyond his control. There
was the policy wreck of the bill itself, which could be denounced at
least as easily as McConnell himself once denounced Obamacare. And there was
the vindictive politics that have accompanied Trump into Washington and
which this week worked like a wedge on Dean Heller, pushing one of
McConnell’s members a little farther away from his caucus.
On Friday, McConnell will fly to Kentucky. The original plan had been to
pass the health-care bill this week and then turn, after the recess, to
tax reform. McConnell, over the Fourth of July, will now have to
reconceive the calendar. Many things depend upon his plans, among them
his reputation. Will his particular political genius still win the day? Or will he come to seem an emblem of the mania of the very recent past—Kissinger, but for the phlegmy partisan era, now maybe in its evening.