The dog chased the car and caught it. Yikes!

Donald Trump calls the election of 2016 a "tremendous victory" and a mandate for change.  

 

It is more fun for dogs to bark and chase cars hoping to bite the tire than it is to chase it and catch it. Dogs that catch the car get crushed.

A college classmate summarized the Republican predicament:

    "Call me callous or vindictive, but if a bunch of Trump-supporting coal miners with black lung disease lose their health care and only then start to realize that their Emperor has no clothes, I am just fine with that.  Actions have consequences, suckers."

Repeal Obamacare.  Well, maybe on second thought. . . .   Republicans campaigned saying Obamacare was terrible and they won the message war.  A vast majority of Americans think Obamacare as currently implemented is bad.  Candidate Ben Carson said Obamacare was worse than slavery.  The GOP position is consistent at every level, presidential, House, Senate, think tanks, and partisan media:  Obamacare is an utter disaster.   I am aware of not a single Republican who speaks well of it, including Mitt Romney who shepherded the predecessor of it.  

Forbes Article

They want to repeal it but then they are stuck.  If it is just a repeal there will be a healthcare disaster.  There was a reason Democrats pushed for health care reform.  The Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation--bi-partisan entities with enormous credibility--report straight out:

"A repeal of the individual mandate would cause a substantial reduction in the number of people with health insurance CBO and JCT estimate.  Under current law, about 28 million people under age 65 in the United States would be uninsured in 2026.  This option would change that number as follows:  Abo9ut 2 million fewer people would have employment-based coverage, about 6 million fewer people would obtain non group policies (insurance people can purchase directly either in the marketplaces or from insurers outside the marketplaces), and about 7 million fewer people would have coverage under Medicaid.  All together, the agencies estimate, 43 million people would be uninsured in 2026."

It is the vast body of uninsured people who show up on the doorsteps of emergency rooms and who are bankrupted by health costs which made the pre-Obamacare situation untenable.  Hospitals said they were being bankrupted by people who could not possibly pay.   Employers that provided health insurance for their patients were subsidizing the un-insured because hospitals hiked up the rates on them to cover the huge losses from the health care freeloaders, i.e. the bankrupted uninsured.

There is no replacement that is politically acceptable.  (Medicare-for-all would perhaps be acceptable to Democrats, but not to Republicans.)  They are currently trying out the idea of repealing Obamacare, crippling it some more, then leaving it in place through the 2018 elections so they can continue to criticize it.   "Repeal and delay" is the name for the strategy.  Democrats are already gearing up to make certain that Republicans pay the political price for failing to replace Obamacare, for failing to govern.

Abortion, too.  A similar situation is in play with Planned Parenthood and abortion.   GOP candidates spoke to GOP crowds promising the end abortion and defund Planned Parenthood.  It is an ideal situation for them.  They got to campaign against it  but it was still available to women who sought it.  Now the GOP has the potential to enact legislation that makes contraception harder to get and abortions much harder to get--and with the right appointments of 1 to 3 judges, impossible to get in America. 

The issue is more appealing to argue than to win.  There will immediately be hard cases, embarrassing cases, deeply unpopular cases if abortion becomes illegal.   The Bill Clinton formula of "safe, legal, and rare" is a policy that gets majority support and provides a safety net for the hard cases.   The daughters of the donor class of Republicans want to know that abortion is available and in any case they could fly to Sweden to get it done if they need to. But a great many American women don't have that option and it is the stated policy of the GOP to take it away from them.  

Balanced budget, too.  Trump criticized the deficit and thrilled the budget hawks in the Freedom Caucus of the GOP when he did so.   Now he is saying we need to cut taxes and increase spending because, after all, it is absolutely necessary to stimulate jobs with spending.  And to increase the military.  And to cut taxes.  

Medicare and Social Security, too.  The GOP has wanted to reduce the costs of Social Security and Medicare by cutting back on benefits.  Trump said he disagreed but has yet to put in place a budget director which puts more and more of the budget authority in the hands of people who have wanted budget power for decades, the House GOP caucus.  Now, at long last, American can implement the Ryan budget.

The GOP party of protest is now the party with the power to govern.   Republicans thrived as a party of protest while Democrats struggled to deal with the problems of the real world of financial crisis, automation, competition from low wage countries  Islamic fundamentalism, poverty and violence just across our southern borders, drugs, crime, and the other results of human folly and avarice.    Now Republicans will have to govern and they would prefer not to because the issues that put them in office are better to criticize than to fix.  

Democrats did not fail to fix them because they were stupid.  They failed to fix them because the problems are intractable and largely unfixable by government.