What now?

So it has come to this. The Republican Party has put its central rallying cry of the last seven years on the legislative agenda, and found that it is unable to pass it even through one house of Congress. Had the bill managed to pass through the House of Representatives, it would have been dead on arrival in the Senate. In the face of unified opposition to repeal of the ACA from Democrats, the deep divisions on the healthcare issue among Republicans have made action impossible.

It is a development that should surprise no one. Healthcare has never been a natural issue for Republicans, who have viewed it as a rule as beyond the scope of federal authority. The haste and secrecy with which the bill was prepared, and particularly the fact that no stakeholders - doctors, hospitals, nurses, insurance companies, etc - were even consulted in its drafting, show that its primary aim was ideological rather than practical. As with any proposal that prioritizes ideological considerations over practical ones, it has provisions that alienate an impressive proportion of the population. The public outcry and subsequent failure of the bill were predictable. The Republicans will likely simply move on to a tax bill, which is a much more comfortable issue for them, but their unity and ability to govern have been called into question by abject failure in their first major legislative push.

It would be easy, and tempting, for someone as critical of the modern GOP as I have been to attribute the ineptitude of the push to the peculiar weaknesses of that party. However, the failure is indicative of a broader trend that extends well beyond the current administration. Scorched-earth partisanship and unified opposition have made a political system intentionally designed with an abundance of legislative bottlenecks utterly ineffective. Since 2010 the leglislative branch has been simply impotent, and only supermajorities for the Democrats before that prevented unified opposition from paralyzing the first two years of the Obama administration as effectively as the last six. What do we do as a country when a political system predicated on legislative supremacy has a series of Congresses unable to act?

In the last six years of the Obama administration, that question was answered. The President, frustrated with the intransigence of his oppostion, decided to push the bounds of executive action as far as he could in an attempt to advance his agenda. In some places he was successful, in others the courts stepped in. President Trump has not only continued but accelerated that trend, specficially with his travel orders. More ominously, he has continued the free use of executive orders in policymaking in spite of the fact that his party controls the Congress. The failure of the Republican health push suggests that control of Congress is in any case only a marginal advantage in the days of Total Opposition.

It is telling that the most intense political battles of the first two months of the Trump Administration have not been between the parties in Congress, but between the executive and the courts. That state of affairs is directly attributable to the long-term incapacity of the legislature to legislate. It should alarm anyone committed to procedural democracy and separation of powers. If congress continues to be inactive the conflict between executive and judiciary will only intensify, and may well become the primary focus of the partisan struggle. Not only policy, but important questions about how our government operates would then be thrown into doubt.