Darryl PaulsonFirst of two parts.
During the first year of President Obama’s first term, the American economy was in shambles and the public demanded that government focus on the economy and job creation.
In response, the administration passed a stimulus plan that Republicans thought was too large and Democrats thought was too small.
The economy continued to flounder and polls showed that Americans wanted Washington to do more. Instead, the administration pushed to pass a bill on climate change that further divided the two parties.
The Obama administration then pursued universal health care. Whether you like or dislike Obamacare, it was clearly not the top priority of Americans.
In August 2009, the president’s staff urged him not to pursue massive health-care reform. The votes were not there, they argued, and too much time and political capital would have to be spent to pass it. Obama pushed ahead, saying he “felt lucky.”
The Affordable Care Act passed, but not without a great political cost for Democrats, who ignored the will of the people to first tackle the economic issues.
In the 2010 midterm election, Democrats suffered a devastating loss of 63 seats in the House and control of that chamber. They also lost six Senate seats and hundreds of seats in state legislatures, which allowed Republicans to control the redistricting process for the next decade.
The ACA passed both houses on party-line votes. The bill passed the House 219 to 212; not a single Republican voted for it.
Democrats argue that Republicans did not want to help the president pass his signature legislation. Republicans retort that the President did nothing to reach out to them and railroaded the bill through Congress with no Republican input.
Two decades ago, Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., who had served as a domestic policy adviser for both Democratic and Republican administrations, tried to persuade the Clintons that universal health care was an unrealistic goal.
Sweeping, historic legislation should not pass narrowly or on a partisan basis. “They pass 70-30, or they fail,” noted Moynihan. Unless there was a political buy-in by both parties on major legislation, it was doomed to fail.
Obama’s chief-of-staff, Rahman Emmanuel, pleaded with Obama to settle for a more modest health-care bill. The administration, he counseled, would pay a terrible price for a partisan bill.
The President ignored the warnings of Moynihan and Emmanuel and pushed ahead. Although the ACA passed, the President guaranteed that the battle over Obamacare will go on for decades.
Social Security, the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Medicare were all passed after decades of debate and with bipartisan support. Because of that, those pieces of legislation won public acceptance.
The Civil Rights Act, parts of which were introduced in Congress three decades earlier, finally passed in 1964 because both parties realized that the time was right.
The Democrats and the President can say that Obamacare is “settled law.” It was passed by Congress, upheld in a 5-4 Supreme Court decision and reaffirmed by the re-election of Obama.
Republicans argue that history is filled with “settled law” that was overturned. The “separate but equal” doctrine was settled law that was upheld by the Supreme Court for a half century before being overturned in the 1954 Brown decision.
Settled law is not settled until both parties and the public accept the law. Polls reveal that more Americans dislike Obamacare than like it, and more than half want to repeal all or parts of the law.
As Robert Blendon of the Harvard School of Public Health recently observed: “The real issue is political. Programs don’t do well if one party doesn’t support it and public opinion isn’t for it.”
Fasten your seat belts. Obamacare is in for a bumpy ride.
Next: The problems with Obamacare: the substance.
