What if Republicans and Democrats worked together?

Republicans can't cobble together enough GOP votes in the Senate to pass a law to repeal Obamacare and replace it with something else. They can't even cobble together enough Senate votes to simply repeal Obamacare — a goal they've been boasting about for seven years. So the Senate's Republican leaders don't know what to do about it. They are at an impasse. Even though their party controls the House, the Senate and the White House, they can't pass legislation they've been promising for seven years.

What CAN they do?

Here's an idea: Instead of insisting on legislation that is supported only by Republican votes, what if they tried putting together legislation that could attract the requisite number of Republican AND (gasp!) Democratic votes? They'll need 51 votes, but Republicans have been able to hold onto about 47 or 48 GOP votes for whatever version of repeal-and-replace legislation they dream up. Suppose the GOP leadership approached the Democrats and asked for their support, with a willingness to compromise on some details of the health care legislation that would make the new bill palatable to conservative or moderate Democrats.

That's the way congressional legislation used to be passed. The 1964 Civil Rights Bill, the creation of the Interstate Highway system, the creation of NASA and the race to put astronauts on the moon, and the Voting Rights Act were all passed with votes from both sides of the aisle. Why not do it again?

It's possible that otherwise sympathetic Democrats will refuse to participate in any Republican deal. After all, the atmosphere has been so poisoned by harsh rhetoric that both parties are wary of any deal that might help the other side. But it's the only effective way to get legislation in the national interest passed. Democrats should have learned the dangers of partisan voting in the passage of the Affordable Care Act and the resulting nearly decade-long assault by the other party.

But bipartisan leadership and legislating has worked before. It can work again. Won't somebody give it a try?

Campaign promises get in the way of legislating

When you stake your entire political being on the repeal of one legislative act, and you keep banging that drum for six or seven years, you paint yourself into a corner. 

The Republican efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, have come to this: With control of the White House and majorities in both the House and the Senate, Republicans can do what they have tried to do dozens of times since 2010 — repeal the Affordable Care Act. Doing so, the GOP leaders remind their colleagues persistently, carries out a long-standing campaign promise repeated during four congressional elections. Failure to keep their promise about repeal would reveal them as ineffective, or as Spiro Agnew might have said it, "effete snobs."

The problem, which the GOP leadership ignored for seven years, is that American voters care more about their health care than they do about campaign promises. And many Americans, despite Republican attempts to persuade them otherwise, liked the ACA. It made it possible for them to have health insurance for the first time in years. The percentage of covered Americans topped 90%.

So the GOP leadership backed off a little. Instead of just repealing Obamacare, they shifted their rhetoric to "repeal and replace" Obamacare. Replacing the expansive law was not so easy. As President Trump confessed, "who knew" health insurance could be so complicated?

Republicans now have two Obamacare replacement bills, one in the House and one in the Senate. Both would sharply curtail the ACA promise to make it possible to get insurance coverage if you have a pre-existing condition. Both would knock down the fiscal underpinning of the ACA, the taxes on medical devices, insurers and others, and both would sharply cut Medicaid, which millions of Americans depend upon.

Republicans may have the votes in the Senate to pass their replacement legislation, but they don't have the magical ability to persuade Americans struggling to find medical coverage that they are better off with the Republican solutions to that campaign promise the GOP had kept making over and over like a mantra. Because of those promises, the GOP could not do the sensible thing, which would be to make adjustments to Obamacare so that it is more fiscally stable and practical.

Promises, promises.