One question for the Republican party is where to go after Tax Reform and, unfortunately, I feel like they might go back to working on killing ObamaCare.
The thing is, though, if they do that, then it means that the leadership is going to continue to be locked in internal politics for much or most of 2018, trying to find a solution to the health care problem, as well as trying to run mid-term elections. That’s going to continue to swamp out their general oversight of what all is going on in the world.
And the thing is, while the Right has been focused on taxes and health care, the Left hasn’t been doing any better at watching what the Executive branch is doing. They’ve been more wrapped up in Trump calling Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas” and Russian Collusion, than they have been on the state of the Union.
The only real world thing that has bumped its way to the headlines every once in a while is North Korea, but all of the other realpolitik stuff is also pretty gloomy, and Trump is not up to the occasion to manage it.
Trump probably wants to can NAFTA. He’s going to cut H-1B visas, which could cause some major issues for most of the high-tech world (which is currently, predominantly located in the US) and cause much of it (and its money) to move abroad. He’s building up to a trade war with China. He’s handing Syria to Russia and spurring on the rest of the Middle East to have a good ol’ fashioned religious war. We need better cybersecurity or cyber-response methods, and we really need a national CTO with the power and insight to lead the way on that, not Jared Kushner and whoever this lady is. And, of course, there’s North Korea and the Department of State.
Overall, I regret to say that the only positive thing that I can think of that the President has done, as Executive, is to decide to start burning poppy fields in Afghanistan. Beyond that, the planet is basically being allowed to drift into a general state of lawlessness and disorder. And even if you might not care too much about that from a humanitarian standpoint, that’s still a big problem on the front of general commerce and national safety. And most people do care about the humanitarian side of things.
I, also, personally think that the nation has a domestic issue with a lack of cross-pollination of ideas, because of social media, and increased brain drain from South to North as people become more accustomed to moving away from where they grew up. The end result is going to be increased partisanship and, more worryingly, a continued decrease in the reasonableness and education of voters on the Republican side, leading to a decline in policy and a reduced ability to find compromise and shared values with the other side. There was already more serious talk of Californian secession than I’d ever really have expected in my lifetime, and I fear that that’s only going to become ever more likely, even if we get better leaders as an option in 2020. That’s going to be a slow boat to turn, and so it is important to get it started changing direction if there is any policy whatsoever that can do it.
I think it’s reasonably certain that the Republican party will lose the House in 2019, and suddenly that will become a major issue for the general functioning of the government. The Intelligence and Ethics committees of the House will be run by Democrats and they’ll start putting the gas pedal down on investigations into the President, and exposing all of it to the press as loudly as they can. Unless the President is actually clean, that’s going to be all everyone’s thinking about for at least most of 2019, if not all of the way through 2020 and the next election.
Basically, 2018 is the only year available to try and make sure that the world doesn’t go to hell while we’re waiting for a new President.
If you, the Republican party, choose instead to focus on health care reform, then you’re going to discover that there is a worse thing in life than buying cancer kids chemotherapy.
Please put partisan politics to the side for the next few months and pass some policy that makes sure that the ship is at least on a safe heading before you get pulled back into insanity, the election, and 2019.