RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Obama does few favors for Republicans, but he did them a parting one this week when he sojourned to Capitol Hill, where he exhorted Democrats to defend ObamaCare. The vision of the president calling on his party’s members to—yet again—lay down their political lives for his “signature” law was a reminder of how this disaster began. Only if Republicans remember that history do they have a chance of succeeding where Mr. Obama failed.

The media are already labeling the Republican strategy of “repeal and replace” a mess, obsessing over the GOP’s lack of a fully formed “replace” plan. The suggestion is that disorder and disunity reign. This is the same media that all of seven weeks ago was assuring the GOP it needn’t even bother drawing up a bill, since President Hillary Clinton would veto any changes to ObamaCare.

True enough, eight years ago congressional Republicans were clueless about health-care policy. But a great deal has changed in that time—in ideas, education and the quality of the GOP caucus. Witness Rep. (and Dr.) Tom Price, the nominee to be the next secretary of health and human services, who offered in Congress his own detailed replacement plan.

Republicans already agree on the general contours of a free-market proposal—one based on tax credits, entitlement reform, freer insurance markets, portable policies and fewer mandates. The internal debates are over scope and details, not approach.

The bigger point is that what might undo Republicans isn’t policy so much as politics. This is where they’d do well to reflect on all that President Obama did wrong. Long before ObamaCare cratered on the merits, it had failed in the court of public opinion—because of both the manner and the means by which it became law. The first test for Republican lawmakers and the Trump administration is whether they prove foolish enough to repeat those obvious mistakes.

Senior Democrats crafted ObamaCare in lobbyist-filled backrooms, forgoing hearings, markups, even input from their own colleagues—much less Republicans. It was an exercise in secrecy and control. Those now calling on the GOP to present a fait accompli “replace” plan, and to ram it through alongside repeal, are advocating essentially the same high-handed approach.

So yes, it’s imperative that Republicans move to implement a replace plan this year, while they still retain maximum political capital. But they should build in time for hearings, debates, modifications. A coalition must be built. The public needs to know that, this time, the job is being done right.

In 2009 Democrats were so convinced of their health-care righteousness, and in such a hurry, that they never bothered to sell their plan to the public. Many of them probably didn’t even know what they were meant to sell, since they hadn’t read the 2,700-page bill and, per Nancy Pelosi, were waiting to pass it to find out what was in it. CONTINUE AT SITE

This first week of the 115th Congress has been the coming out party for new Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and he isn’t disappointing his fellow Democrats. The New Yorker made clear in a speech on the Senate floor that he intends to do everything he can to use his 48-seat minority as a bulwark against Donald Trump’s agenda.

Mr. Schumer offered up the possibility of compromise on “issues like infrastructure, trade and closing the carried interest loophole,” though the public-works spending must be “significant, direct spending,” not tax credits. You almost have to admire his Stakhanovite dedication to the tiny carried interest tax provision, though we’re willing to bet Mr. Schumer will find other reasons to oppose a serious tax reform that eliminates it.

But that was it for the olive branches, saying that on most Republican priorities “we will resist.” He laced into Mr. Trump’s appointees as “stacked with billionaires, corporate executives, titans of Wall Street, and those deeply embedded in Washington’s corridors of power.” He did not mention that two of those “titans” hail from Goldman Sachs, source of many donations to Senate Democrats.

The Minority Leader saved his most partisan remarks for MSNBC, aptly enough, where he all but promised to block any Trump nominee to the Supreme Court. “We are not going to settle on a Supreme Court nominee. If they don’t appoint someone who’s really good, we’re gonna oppose him tooth and nail,” he said. When the MSNBC host asked if Mr. Schumer would do his best to keep the current vacancy on the High Court open, he responded “absolutely.”

Give him credit for candor. Democrats are sore that Senate Republicans refused to consider President Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland, after Antonin Scalia died in February. And they’re eager for payback. CONTINUE AT SITE

President Obama and Vice President-elect Mike Pence both paid a visit to Capitol Hill Wednesday, in the first formal engagement over the future of the Affordable Care Act. Republicans finally have the power to repeal, but the question is whether they have the grit to replace ObamaCare.

Mr. Pence told Republicans that repeal and replace is the Trump Administration’s “first order of business,” while Mr. Obama ordered Democrats not to “rescue” the GOP by helping to pass a “TrumpCare replacement.” Going by his business background Donald Trump won’t mind putting his name on a health-care plan, or anything else, but Republicans need to appreciate the reality that they will soon own ObamaCare. Until they pass a coherent and market-oriented substitute, as a political matter ObamaCare is TrumpCare, like it or not.
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This isn’t a great political position, given the law’s large and ongoing failures on almost every measure: premium trends, enrollment, limited doctor and hospital networks, insurer participation. Affordability, choice and competition are due for another tumble next year under the status quo.

Mr. Trump seems to appreciate the political danger, tweeting Wednesday that “Republicans must be careful in that the Dems own the failed ObamaCare disaster, with its poor coverage and massive premium increases,” adding “Don’t let the [Democratic Senator Chuck] Schumer clowns out of this web.”

But Mr. Trump isn’t some candidate bystander any more. What was the point of Mr. Pence’s visit to Congress if not to encourage Republicans to proceed with their plans for a quick repeal? Does the President-elect have any better ideas on legislative strategy, or is he merely going to toss around the sayings of Chairman Donald from Trump Tower?

Some Republicans think they can repeal ObamaCare and blame Mr. Obama for the fallout, but they are kidding themselves. Republicans were elected on a promise to repeal and replace, and the statute of limitations on blaming Mr. Obama will soon expire. Voters tend to punish politicians who can but don’t solve problems, even if they didn’t cause them.

Lawmakers in the Golden State are so worried about the future actions of President-elect Donald Trump that they have recruited a former U.S. attorney general to help deal with them. Incredibly, the California Legislature has chosen former Attorney Gen. Eric Holder “to serve as outside counsel to advise the state’s legal strategy against the incoming administration.”

Via the L.A. Times:

The unusual arrangement will give Holder, leading a team of attorneys from the firm Covington & Burling, a broad portfolio covering potential conflicts between California and the federal government.

“He will be our lead litigator, and he will have a legal team of expert lawyers on the issues of climate change, women and civil rights, the environment, immigration, voting rights — to name just a few,” Senate leader Kevin de León (D-Los Angeles) said in an interview.

It’s not clear why California’s new attorney general, Democratic Rep. Xavier Becerra, has not been deemed fit for the job, as it would normally fall under his purview. Becerra is replacing former Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris, who now serves in the U.S. Senate.

It’s also not clear why the California legislature thinks they’re going to get any sound legal advice from a guy whose record with the Supreme Court was historically abysmal.

As Obama’s attorney general, Holder racked up twenty humiliating 9-0 losses in the Supreme Court, and even more if you include cases in which the administration filed an amicus brief.

“Typically, the Justice Department does very well before the Supreme Court. Holder has made that a losing record,” John Fund and Hans Von Spakovsky wrote in The New Yorker in July of 2014 after Holder had reached that dubious milestone.

That’s because, as legal scholar Ilya Shapiro says, the administration has “relied on outlandish legal theories that pushed a constitutional interpretation of extreme federal power.”

Holder and Obama have argued that we as Americans don’t have the right to free speech, the right to privacy, the right to due process or the freedom of religion.

Apparently, this failed record of government overreach is exactly what California Democrats are looking for.

Here’s a Washington Free Beacon “Supercut” of Holder’s finest moments as Obama’s attorney general:

Here’s a Washington Free Beacon “Supercut” of Holder’s finest moments as Obama’s attorney general:

Is it that there’s a new sheriff in town, here to save the GOP from its penchant for self-destruction – or at least to stop the bleeding earlier than usual? Is it an incoming Republican administration versed in the art of Clintonian triangulation against its own party in Congress? These questions will be answered in due course after January 20. For now, suffice it to say that President-elect Donald Trump induced House Republicans to reverse their politically inept decision to trim the sails of an independent ethics panel.

Tuesday morning, Trump tweeted out his displeasure at the GOP conference’s unilateral decision, on the eve of the new Congress, to rein in the powers of the Office of Congressional Ethics, an unelected in-house watchdog. Or as the New York Times hyperbolically put it, to “gut” the OCE. Though the tweeted rebuke was mild by Trump standards, it helped raise the volume of hysteria already pouring out of the Left, portraying the Republican move as a harbinger of unprecedented corruption. Following Trump’s tweet, House leaders scrambled to convene an emergency conference meeting, at which the ethics proposal was scrapped before the new session commenced.

Before the story dies a welcome swift death, it is worth pointing out that the GOP’s bad politics was actually good policy, and certainly not corruption.

To be sure, one can only shake one’s head at the GOP’s all too familiar ham-handedness. Republicans have an ambitious agenda now that they control both chambers of Congress and the White House. Yet, they allowed themselves to be portrayed as prioritizing – over the repeal of Obamacare, tax reform, and a host of significant initiatives – a watering down of ethics protocols ostentatiously adopted in 2008, when Democrats were making hay over Republican corruption scandals. Monday night’s OCE gambit – pushed over the objection of Speaker Paul Ryan by a bloc led by Judiciary Committee Chariman Bob Goodlatte (R., Va.) – was a unilateral GOP move, taken in the course of voting on rules for the new session. Naturally, the media-Democrat echo chamber pounced, accusing Republicans of meeting in secret to grease the wheels of graft.

“On Tuesday, January 10,” President Obama said Monday in Hawaii, “I’ll go home to Chicago to say my grateful farewell to you, even if you can’t be there in person.” The president sees his remarks “as a chance to say thank you for this amazing journey, to celebrate the ways you’ve changed this country for the better these past eight years, and to offer some thoughts on where we all go from here.”

Since 2009, the president added, “we’ve faced our fair share of challenges, and come through them stronger. That’s because we have never let go of a belief that has guided us ever since our founding—our conviction that, together, we can change this country for the better.”

The president’s chosen venue of Chicago certainly isn’t much better. In 2016 a full 762 homicides took place in Chicago, up from 485 in 2015 and the biggest increase in 60 years. The 762 homicides, an increase of 57 percent, are more than New York and Los Angeles combined. In Chicago, shootings also jumped 46 percent to 3,550, and most of the victims lived in poor and minority neighborhoods. True to form, on this president’s watch, the entire nation has become a more dangerous place.

The president supports the Black Lives Matter narrative that racist cops are out to gun down African Americans. The president has hosted leaders of this hatemongering group, which celebrates the killing of police officers. In 2016, at least 64 law enforcement officers have been shot and killed, the most in five years. In July, Micah Xavier Johnson assassinated five police officers in Dallas, Texas.

President Obama wants to admit more Islamic refugees, whether or not they are sufficiently vetted, and this has made universities more dangerous. Last November Abdul Razak Ali Artan, a Muslim refugee from Somalia, rammed his car into a building at Ohio State University then began stabbing people, injuring 13.

American nightclubs are also more dangerous, as Omar Mateen killed 50 people at the Pulse club in Orlando, Florida. It was the deadliest mass shooting in American history, but not the only one. In December of 2015, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik gunned down 14 innocents at a holiday party in San Bernardino, California.

As police learned, Farook and Malik had plans to attack schools and motorists on the freeway. In similar style, sporting events have also become a target-rich environment for terrorists. The 2013 Boston Marathon bombers were two Muslims from southern Russia, Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his brother Dzhokhar.

On President Obama’s watch, even U.S. military bases have become sites of terror attacks. At Ford Hood in 2009, self-described “Soldier of Allah” Nidal Hasan gunned down 13 unarmed American soldiers while screaming “Allahu Akbar!” Nidal’s attack claimed twice as many casualties as the first attack on the World Trade Center in 1993. The Fort Hood victims included private Francheska Velez, 21, pregnant and preparing to go home.