OK, folks, and I’m looking at you, progressives, friends. It’s the end of the world as we know it, and we don’t feel fine.
You thought your worst nightmare was Donald Trump winning the presidential election, but you’re waking up to a new worst nightmare. Trump didn’t just win the election; in two months, he’s going to be inaugurated as the 45th President of the United States.
Yeah, holy shit, right? How cold is it in Canada again?
How it’s all going to shake out is another story for another day. The best I can tell you right now is, it ain’t going to be nearly as bad as you think it’s going to be.
And no, I didn’t start sniffing glue last night as a coping mechanism. My confidence is in the antiquated system that our founders devised for us in an endless series of compromises back in the 18th century.
If you get frustrated that things don’t get done in any kind of timely manner, it’s because that’s the design.
We’ve known for at least 40 years, for example, that we desperately need to follow the model of the rest of the industrialized world in instituting universal healthcare, not just because it’s the right thing to do in terms of looking out for our fellow man, but because it makes sense in terms of our economic competitiveness.
The closest we’ve come to universal healthcare, of course, is the Affordable Care Act, passed in 2010 by slim majorities in Congress, basically a watered-down version of a plan devised by conservative hacks as an alternative to the Clinton healthcare proposal of 1993.
As much as President-elect Trump and the GOP Congress is promising to repeal and replace ACA, it’s effectively the law of the land, and will be despite their efforts. Our system doesn’t turn on a dime; it’s more like a ship trying to turn in the ocean. It takes a while, and even when it does get moving in a different direction, it hasn’t moved very much.
Senate Democrats will take on the approach of Senate Republicans over the past six years to use the rules of the senior chamber to block anything significant from taking place with regard to healthcare reform. You can bank on that.
Also bank on Senate Democrats blowing up the nonsense that Trump sold to voters on the campaign trail about building a border wall and getting Mexico to pay for it. That’s just a nonstarter of an issue, as he has known since he uttered the words 15 months ago.
Progressive friends fear rollbacks of gains made in recent years through legal action, particularly in the area of civil rights for the LGTBQ community. A lot of things have to happen for that to be an issue, first being the expected retirement of a slew of Supreme Court justices, who you now might expect will be encouraged to hang on as long as they can before stepping down, at least four years, right? And two, pending a retirement or two, again, the rules of the Senate, used so well in the past year by Republicans to block the consideration of Merrick Garland, get turned back around on Republicans.
And that’s assuming Republicans in Congress lock-step in line behind Trump, after running away like rats trying to get off a sinking ship for months. Trump is far from being guaranteed a two-term mandate, as we’ve seen given to the past three presidents – Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. As is the case with anyone elected to a public office, he has to be assumed a lame-duck until he proves otherwise.
For all the chutzpah from Trump on the campaign trail about Hillary Clinton going to jail and the rest, the next president is as likely, if not more so, to inspire four years of investigations into any number of matters involving personal and business matters. Democrats will have a slightly harder time pressing their case compared to Republicans in the Bill Clinton and Barack Obama eras, when the GOP controlled the House for long stretches, and could authorize endless investigations, but the minority party nonetheless has ample opportunity to use the system to gum up the works, in a manner of speaking.
Do Republican leaders step in to defend the new president who ran as hard against them as he did against Hillary Clinton and Democrats? It’s a legitimate question.
This isn’t at all good for democracy, of course. What I’m laying out here is the course that a lot of us as progressives have bemoaned in terms of Republican tactics over the past six years. When you use the rules of the system to prevent anything bad from being done, in the end what you do is prevent anything from being done, the bad and the good.
You’re certainly not going to see anything substantive to address the college-debt problem. The wrangling to come on ACA is going to guarantee that the costs of healthcare and the number of uninsured is going to continue to move in the wrong direction.
And if what motivates you is meaningful reform in addressing income inequality, which ironically was a motivating factor for the Trump base to vote in the numbers that they did, because Trump talked directly to working-class whites, in particular, about how the system as it is now passes them by, well, we’re not going to see any movement there.
A key reason for that is that a central tenet of the Trump message to those working-class whites in the Midwest, the linchpin of his unlikely realignment of the electoral map, in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, that he will rip up any number of trade deals and renegotiate them on terms more acceptable to U.S. interests, is another nonstarter, if only because trade deals don’t work that way.
Those realities will sink in for the Trump inner circle in the coming months, and how they pivot will be fascinating, at times almost comical, to watch in real time.
Dude has promised folks an awful lot, and if he fails to deliver, and he’s going to fail to deliver, because look back at history, every president promises an awful lot, and every one has failed to deliver, every single one, it’s not going to be easy to sell that it was because the system was rigged against him, though, yeah, in a way, it could easily be argued that this is the case.
The system that we have had in place dating back to George Washington is rigged against any would-be king, by design. There are so many moving parts, between Congress, the courts, the Supreme Court, the executive branch bureaucracy, the federal system that we so value with a central government sharing power with the states and, in the terms of the 10th Amendment, we, the people.
Our side, progressives, listen up, we have to assume the role of loyal opposition, and you remember how to do this from just a few years back, in the George W. Bush years.
Focus on what you can do outside the levers of Washington, D.C. Your city, your county, your neighborhood, deserve your continued attention. Continue to fight for important causes. Stand up for what’s right.
You know how to do that; it’s what you’ve been doing since you knew how to walk. Doing the right thing is what defines you.
You’re bitter right now, waking up in this new America that seems to have voted to slide the train off the rails and over the embankment.
Have a latte. Hey, at least late-night TV will be fun to watch again.
Column by Chris Graham
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Chris Graham
