Young Guns : A New Generation of Conservative Leaders (12 page)

So President Obama comes to our retreat and we have a substantive exchange about our different visions for spurring job growth and reforming our health-care system.
Then we have lunch. And as I’m sitting there, surrounded by my family and other House Republicans, with my six-year-old son on my knee, the president picks me out of the crowd and starts talking to me. Just days before, I had released my Roadmap for America’s Future, a detailed blueprint for how we can bring spending under control, secure the future of Social Security and Medicare, and reclaim the American idea. We had been sparring, civilly but seriously, with the president about many of the challenges addressed in the Roadmap, so when the president singled me out, I expected to be barraged with criticism. Instead, I was showered with compliments.

President Obama called my Roadmap “a serious proposal.” He called me a “pretty sincere guy.” He even said I have a “beautiful family.” It seemed too good to last.

It was.

It took less than seventy-two hours for the president’s budget director, Peter Orszag, to attack my plan as a risky scheme. Democrats circulated a so-called “fact sheet” peppered liberally with fighting words like “privatize” and tired hits against President Bush. They charged that my plan was a tax cut for the rich, which would expose seniors to “greater risks and/or lower-quality coverage.” And then, just to be sure they got their point across, Democratic House members held a conference call with the media to hyperventilate that Roadmap supporters are “frozen in the ice of their own indifference.” I’m not making this up.

There is something about the alternative vision I put
forth that must have really gotten under their skin. In fact, my plan was the polar opposite of what the Democrats were charging it was, and I think they knew that. Far from “gutting” entitlement programs for retirees and the needy, my plan would save these programs from looming bankruptcy. But too often in Washington you can judge the veracity of a political argument by its decibel level: the less substantive the talking points, the louder they are shouted. And Democrats were screaming at the top of their lungs.

As I look back on it, the coordinated effort to change the subject from their budget-busting policies and to demagogue an alternative that actually tackles the fiscal crisis they’re accelerating makes sense. It fits the pattern of the way public policy—particularly health-care reform—has been “debated” in Washington over the past eighteen months.

All of us learned in grade school (and from watching
Schoolhouse Rock!
) the way a bill becomes a law. It starts with an open debate. There is opportunity for bipartisan input. Then there is an up or down vote in both houses—the House and the Senate—on the merits of the bill. Then, if the House and Senate bills are not absolutely identical, there is a conference with members from both houses to
reach a compromise that will satisfy both. This is followed by what is usually a final vote in the House and Senate on the “reconciled” bill. Then—and only then—does the president sign the measure into law. Sure, there’s always been some level of horse-trading and deal-making, but the Constitution sets out this process as the method by which the people govern themselves in America through their elected representatives, and that process has generally been faithfully adhered to. That’s the regular American way of our national democracy.

But business in Washington these days isn’t being conducted the way our Founders envisioned—and certainly not in a manner that respects the consent of the governed. We have seen over the past two years a new Washington Way, raised from the depths to new heights of political corruption in the health-care debacle.

This new Washington Way isn’t open debate broadcast on C-SPAN; it’s closed-door, backroom deals. The Washington Way doesn’t seek input from both sides of the issue; it muscles through bills on strict one-party votes. And the Washington Way isn’t interested in honest up-or-down votes on transformational programs. It rigs the process to produce the outcome it desires through any means necessary. The ends justify the means. Bend the Constitution to keep up with the change.

In short, the defining feature of the new Washington Way is that it strips the power of making law away from the people, whose consent is the basis for our democracy. The
new Washington Way is designed to transfer lawmaking to a small elite group who know what is best for us. And from start to finish, the way President Obama and the Democratic majority went about supposedly fixing our health-care system has been conducted in the new Washington Way.

The American people were cut out of the Democrats’ health-care reform vision from the beginning. Remember the Emmanuel Doctrine: “Never let a serious crisis go to waste”? From the outset, the Democratic strategy was to use a national crisis—the financial meltdown—as an excuse to pass their version of government-driven health-care reform. The treacherous plan was to exploit Americans’ sense of urgency about jobs and the economy to sneak through an unrelated government entitlement. That strategy could hardly be more antidemocratic.

But then the majority party encountered a roadblock: the more Americans learned about their health-care reform plan, the less they liked it. So supporters made the strategic decision to create an inverse relationship between the public’s support for the policy and its input in the plan’s formulation. As opposition to Obamacare escalated, the American people were more and more shut out of the legislative process.

The initial goal was to pass the bill before the August recess. But when that deadline wasn’t met, tens of thousands of Americans got the opportunity to express their opposition to the bill when members went back to their districts for town hall meetings. Suddenly, news reports and
YouTube were full of videos of angry citizens confronting often dazed and defensive members of Congress. Immediately after that, the president and a small number of advisers and Democratic leaders retreated behind closed doors to write their health-care bill. They didn’t like what they were hearing from Americans, so they told us, in no uncertain terms, to shut up and sit down.

But the American people refused to be silenced. Next, voters in Virginia and New Jersey showed their displeasure with Democratic government in the 2009 off-year elections by electing committed pro-market, limited government candidates. The candidates who had run as supporters of the big government, Democratic agenda lost, and the message was not lost on lawmakers in Washington DC. The price of passing the increasingly unpopular health-care bill got higher. So the White House, along with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, resorted to bribing skittish Democratic lawmakers. Thus were born the “Louisiana Purchase,” in which $300 million in extra Medicaid funding was given to Louisiana to secure the vote of a senator from that state; the “Cornhusker Kickback,” in which the taxpayers permanently picked up the tab for the expansion of Medicaid in Nebraska—and Nebraska alone—to buy off a Nebraska lawmaker; and “Gator Aid,” in which 800,000 Florida seniors were exempted from Obamacare’s cuts to Medicare in order to win the support of a senator from Florida. And that, we know now, is just a partial list.

And with every new backroom bribe, Americans intuitively understood that if legislation had to be passed through a series of corrupt deals with alliterative names, it was neither worthwhile on its own terms nor legitimate by democratic standards. The Republicans’”Bridge to Nowhere” once rightly disgusted the American people. Now the Democrats’ string of constitutionally suspect sweetheart deals was making all previous corruption look amateurish.

And then, last but certainly not least, came the health-care reform endgame earlier in 2010. Voters in Massachusetts had dealt what many believed at the time was the death blow to Democratic health-care reform when they elected Sen. Scott Brown (R) in January to fill the seat of the Senate’s premier advocate of a government-driven health-care program, the late Sen. Ted Kennedy.

Scott Brown’s victory in Massachusetts had made passing Democratic health-care reform through the democratic process impossible. In the campaign, Brown had promised the voters of Massachusetts he would be the forty-first vote in the Senate against Obamacare and they took him up on his offer. Without the sixty votes necessary for a filibuster-proof majority to pass their version of health-care reform, the majority party became desperate.

The only way left was the new Washington Way. If supporters of government health care couldn’t summon the votes necessary to pass health-care reform through the democratic process, they would just bypass the democratic process.
Self-government stands or falls on integrity, not only in those who represent you but in the enactment of law.

In the Senate, that meant employing what Progressivists and their friends in the mainstream media had called the “nuclear option” when Republicans considered it, but was now, in the gentle hands of Democrats, deemed a simple “up or down vote.” This process, known as budget reconciliation, requires only a simple majority of fifty-one votes to pass a bill. It was created to align spending and tax laws with the levels spelled out in the budget. Over time, it came to be used mainly to reduce budget deficits or, more broadly, to limit the growth of government. It had never been used—never—to push through a $1,000,000,000,000 expansion of government and to seize control of one-sixth of the economy.

In the House, a process called “deem and pass” was essentially the same thing: legislative trickery to enact legislation that does not have majority backing. It meant that the House would pass the 2,700-page health-care bill without
ever actually voting for it
. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said it all when she said, in the final days of the debate, “But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”

Let me say that again: the Democratic leader in the House was telling the American people that they would pass the bill first, and we could ask questions later. This was the government “transparency” that President Obama had promised? The arrogance, the paternalism, and the
condescension marking the Democratic leadership’s radical method for getting health-care reform through were breathtaking in their repudiation of popular consent and the implications for the future of popular government under the current leadership.

Public outrage and the protests of both Republican and Democratic members compelled Speaker Pelosi to back away from the “deem and pass” strategy of passing the bill without actually voting on it. The ugly health-care debacle finally came to an end with final passage of the overhaul in the House on March 21, 2010—signed into law two days later. The Left in Washington celebrated what they called the “third wave” of big government progressivism. Two hundred and nineteen House Democrats voted for the bill, thirty-four opposed it. No Republican, in the House or the Senate, voted for the bill. For the first time since before the Civil War, the minority party was so completely excluded from the shaping of major reform legislation that it voted unanimously against the final bill.

The convoluted legislative charade by Democratic supporters of government health care last spring demonstrates how far the Democratic majority has wandered from real health-care reform and cost control. They had come to the point
where the debate was no longer about doing what was best for the American people. It was about winning at any cost.

And that’s unfortunate, because there are real problems in health care waiting to be fixed. President Obama was right when he argued that to get a grip on our exploding debts we need to rein in health-care costs. The problem is, he and his allies immediately jumped to the mistaken conclusion that health-care spending can be brought under control if you make
government
do the spending.

Getting a grip on health-care costs is both a budgetary necessity and a moral imperative. It will not only save our country from bankruptcy, it will expand access to health care, and avoid saddling our children and grandchildren with unbearable debt. But the inescapable truth of Obamacare is that it fails to address this central problem of skyrocketing health-care costs. The independent, nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimates that families’ premiums could rise 10–13 percent under government health care. Private sector analysts put that number even higher.