July 24, 2014
Washington Post columnist Charles Lane must have been off the planet or at least out of the country in 2009. In a column on the recent appellate court ruling banning subsidies in the federal exchanges, he tells readers that the Republican obstruction was to be expected given the extreme Democratic positions on the stimulus, cap and trade legislation and the Affordable Care Act:
“Everything might have been different if Democrats and Republicans had operated in a spirit of compromise, the Framers’ hoped-for political solvent.”
If he had been following the debates at the time he would know that Obama asked for an $800 billion stimulus even though his top economic aides told him that he would need at least $1.2 trillion to get the economy back on its feet. He then allowed the Republicans to bargain this down so that the actual stimulus was just over $700 billion (sorry folks, the Alternative Minimum Tax fix doesn’t count as stimulus), with much of that sum going to tax cuts that had less impact than spending increases.
The cap and trade system is a market-based proposal for dealing with greenhouse gas emissions that was supported by many conservatives in academia. It was an alternative to a carbon tax that likely would have a higher cost to corporate emitters. This is also a conservative measure in the sense that it is charging polluters for the damage they cause to others. Our Framers would never have imagined a country in which some people got to freely dump their garbage and sewage on their neighbors’ lawns.
Finally, Obamacare was based on a proposal that came out of the Heritage Foundation. In its fundamental structure it is identical to the proposal signed into law by the Republican governor of Massachusetts and 2012 Republican presidential nominee. Furthermore, Obama worked very hard to pull Republicans on board, agreeing to dozens of amendments put forward by Republican members of Congress and allowing the bill to be tied up for months in the Senate Finance Committee as its chair Max Baucus sought a compromise that would win support from at least some of the Republican members.
In short, on all three of these issues Obama took the path of compromise urged by Lane. With virtual unanimity, the Republicans rejected every effort. As Republican minority leader Mitch McConnell said shortly after President Obama’s election in 2008, his job was to make sure that Obama was a one-term president. For some reason Lane is apparently ignorant of this history.
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