Andrew Sullivan is puzzled:
Why Won't Republicans Help Reform Obamacare?But Republicans aren't really "uninterested in governing" -- they're certainly plenty interested in governing at the state level, where they have all kinds of Koch-fueled ideas about taxation and union-busting and abortion and voter eligibility and guns. In D.C., Republicans like Paul Ryan have a wealth (as it were) of similar ideas. We know the D.C. GOP's health care ideas: limits on malpractice awards to individuals; allowing sales of health insurance policies across state lines (which would pave the way for one state to develop an exceedingly business-friendly, consumer-hostile set of laws that all insurers could follow); voucherizing Medicare; etc., etc. These are terrible ideas, sure -- but they're ideas.
The obvious answer is that Obama created it -- and they're that petty. But it is based in many parts on a moderate Republican idea -- the kind of market-friendly, private-sector-based reforms that George H W Bush and Mitt Romney backed (not to speak of Heritage, which has gone from providing some of the core features of the ACA to screaming like a rabid wolf at the moon)....
Jonathan Bernstein calls the GOP a "post-policy" party:It's not just failure to, say, draft an alternative to the Affordable Care Act. It's also about refusing to distinguish between aspects of the Affordable Care Act they really hate and those which they only mildly dislike (or, if they were really honest, those they actually support)....They're just increasingly uninterested in governing....
What Republicans are uninterested in, obviously, is governing in cooperation with the rest of us. The party -- not just the Cruzite crazies, but the whole party -- believes that any government action originating with Democrats is illegitimate, and must be blocked rather than negotiated, or overturned rather than modified if it's already law.
But if they win the White House and the Senate back, just watch -- they'll be governing like crazy (in multiple senses of the word). Sure, they'll be governing the way they've governed recently in Wisconsin, North Carolina, and Texas, but it'll be governing of some sort.
