Losing a Lot to Get Little
Gabriella Demczuk/The New York Times
Senator Ted Cruz, center,
Republican of Texas, told reporters, “Unfortunately, the Washington
establishment is failing to listen to the American people.” More Photos »
By JEREMY W. PETERS
Published: October 16, 2013
WASHINGTON — For the Republicans who despise President Obama’s health care law,
the last few weeks should have been a singular moment to turn its
problem-plagued rollout into an argument against it. Instead, in a
futile campaign to strip the law of federal money, the party focused
harsh scrutiny on its own divisions, hurt its national standing and
undermined its ability to win concessions from Democrats. Then they
surrendered almost unconditionally.
Republican Leaders Speak
Related
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Hands Empty but Spirit Unbowed, House Republicans Take Stock (October 17, 2013)
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Obama Calls for New Spirit of Cooperation in Washington (October 18, 2013)
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Shutdown Over, Government Slowly Gets Back to Normal (October 18, 2013)
“If you look back in time and evaluate the last couple of weeks, it
should be titled ‘The Time of Great Lost Opportunity,’ ” said Senator
Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, among the many Republicans who argued
that support for the health care law would collapse once the public saw
how disastrous it really was.
“It has been the best two weeks for the Democratic Party in recent times
because they were out of the spotlight and didn’t have to showcase
their ideas,” Mr. Graham added.
Now, near the end of a governing crisis that crippled Washington and
dismayed a nation already deeply cynical about its political leaders,
Republicans are struggling to answer even the most basic questions about
the cause and effect of what has transpired over the last few weeks.
They disagree over how, or even whether, they might grow from the
experience. Many could not comprehend how they failed to prevent such
avoidable, self-inflicted wounds. Others could not explain why it took
so much damage, to their party and the millions of people inconvenienced
and worse by the shutdown, to end up right where so many of them
expected.
“Someone would have to explain that to me,” said Senator John McCain,
Republican of Arizona. “I knew how it was going to end,” he added.
“I’m trying to forget it,” said Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, still
in disbelief that many of her fellow Republicans could not grasp that
this was a losing battle. “Here we are. Here we are. We predicted it.
Nobody wanted it to be this way.”
All the while, they had the public on their side on the other issues
that they could have litigated in the court of public opinion, like the
need to get control of the nation’s long-term debt. And though they
started the process last month with major advantages — a president on
the defensive over an unsteady response to the war in Syria and an
agreement by Democrats to keep financing the government at levels that
many liberals felt were far too low — their fixation on the health care
law prevented them from ever using their leverage.
“We managed to divide ourselves on something we were unified on, over a
goal that wasn’t achievable,” said Senator Roy Blunt, Republican of
Missouri. “The president probably had the worst August and early
September any president could have had. And we managed to change the
topic.”
The question so crucial to the Republican Party’s
viability now, heading into the 2014 Congressional elections and
beyond, is whether it has been so stung by the fallout that the
conservatives who insisted on leading this fight will shy away in the
months ahead when the government runs out of money and exhausts its
borrowing authority yet again.
It is not an abstract question. The deal reached Wednesday would finance the government only through Jan. 15 and lift the debt ceiling through Feb. 7. Some top Republicans suggest that this confrontation, one some of the most conservative Tea Party-aligned
Republicans have been itching for since they arrived, ended so badly
for them that it would curb the appetite for another in just a few short
months.
Many Republicans are already calling for a refocusing of priorities,
saying the party must turn to bigger issues like revising the unwieldy
and unpopular tax code and reducing the long-term deficit. As for the
health law, some believe there is a more winnable fight to be had with
tough Congressional scrutiny of its rollout over the next year.
“Now we’re going to shift to oversight of the health care law, and
clearly there are huge problems,” said Representative Dave Camp, the
Michigan Republican who leads the powerful tax-writing Ways and Means
Committee. “Now we’re going to have to pursue what is this law really
doing for Americans. Is it working and is it delivering?”
Representative Adam Kinzinger, Republican of Illinois, said, “We can all take a deep breath and basically refocus.”
In the Senate, there were already signs that an emergent group of 14
centrist senators from both parties was looking to make an impact on the
fiscal battles ahead. The group, led by Susan Collins, Republican of
Maine, and Joe Manchin III, Democrat of West Virginia, has already
planned to meet in the coming weeks. Mr. McCain, also a member, said
Wednesday, “We are not going to let this kind of partisanship cripple
this body and injure the American people.”
Speaker John A. Boehner’s strategy always involved a gamble that his
members would come away from this clash chastened. He intentionally
allowed his most conservative members to sit in the driver’s seat as
they tried in vain to get the Senate to accept one failed measure after
another — first to defund the health care law, then to delay it, then to
chip away at it. His hope was that they would realize the fight was not
worth having again.
The worry among many Republicans is that the Tea Party flank will not
get the message, mainly because their gerrymandered districts are so
conservative they do not have to listen.
Some fear that history is repeating itself. After Mitt Romney’s defeat
in which the Republicans lost the popular presidential vote for the
fifth time in six elections, the party tried to regroup. Its
establishment warned that it had to stop being so shrill, so
exclusionary and so narrowly focused on issues that alienate large
chunks of voters who might otherwise think about being Republicans.
Certainly, the budget fight showed that Congressional Republicans have divergent ideas about how to heed that advice.
On Wednesday, Representative Mick Mulvaney, Republican of South
Carolina, offered his party some thoughts on what it should do about the
health care law come January and February.
“The natural inclination is to say, no, it’ll be exactly the same,” he
said. “But if we can figure out a way to drive that message home that
this is about fairness, this is about principle,” he added, “then the
outcome may well be different.”
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