Wednesday, November 06, 2019

Consensus

There are, of course, reasons for consensus and compromise. That legislation will endure and both people and politicians are broadly invested in its success are reasons. This was part of the not-crazy-for-a-time reason for the bipartisan ACA process. I don't want to debate what law Barack Obama really and truly wanted, or what fantasy bill could have been achieved some other way, but there was a process designed to get both parties on board. Lots of Republican amendments. And at the end of the process, Dems still had to ram it through, and Republicans still want to destroy it (or at least pretend to, some of both).

In the age of Trump, and in some imagined age of post-Trump, the only way to imagine that some other president can achieve consensus on the types of things that Barack Obama couldn't is that you, or Mayor Pete, or Barack Obama's best friend, think that that there was something special about Barack Obama that prevented him from doing it.

Might be true, but spell it out.