< ------------ Some Guy ?! .... !!!!!!! :
https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-is-a-republican-for-1493852370" What Is A Republican For? "
" If the GOP can’t pass ObamaCare reform, voters may return Congress to the Democrats. "
By Daniel Henninger
" Republicans may be close to turning their party into fake news.
“Fake news” is a phrase open to many meanings, but in my recent experience people watching the melodrama of the Trump presidency unspool aren’t sure who or what they should trust or believe these days.
The mainstream media, no matter how many righteous speeches got delivered at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner, is on a bigger credibility bubble with the American public than it imagines. Now a Republican Party fantastically unable to deliver on its promise to repeal and replace ObamaCare is close to creating its own credibility bubble.
If, after voters delivered control of Congress to them in 2016, these same Republicans can’t—or will not—produce an ObamaCare reform, those voters may reasonably ask in 2018: Why do we need these people? What is a Republican for? Even by current bread-and-circuses standards, the GOP elephants are losing their entertainment value.
On Tuesday, Congressman Fred Upton of Michigan, which Donald Trump won, flamboyantly announced he could not support the Trump-Ryan American Health Care Act.
This desertion popped eyes open because Mr. Upton has worked for years with the House leadership to fashion an ObamaCare alternative.
But by noon the next day, Mr. Upton was supporting the health bill, presumably because he’d gotten another $8 billion into it for the fake-news issue known as pre-existing health conditions.
Why fake? It’s fake because the AHCA already commits a staggering $100 billion to help states pay for virtually every imaginable health nightmare that falls beyond the reach of normal insurance.
House Republicans should get the health-care vote behind them before it kills them—if it hasn’t already.
A book could be written about how Republicans arrived at this stalemate, whose origins go back long before many Americans discovered Donald Trump.
Ideological tensions have existed between conservatives and moderates at least since the 1950s. Rockefeller, Goldwater, Reagan, Ford and Bush are all one-word signposts on this long odyssey. Then came Ted Cruz.
Elected to the Senate in 2012, Mr. Cruz brought with him a plan to divide Republicans along lines that would carry him to victories in the 2016 GOP presidential primaries. He and his allies drove a wedge between “real conservatives” like himself and a vague lump dismissed as “the establishment,” which included pretty much every other Senate member.
In the event, Donald Trump swallowed Mr. Cruz, his strategy and the Republican Party. But they or any Republican president was heading inevitably toward the same problem when trying to repeal and replace ObamaCare. One notable difference is that the Republican moderates negotiating now with Mr. Trump would not have picked up the phone to talk to Mr. Cruz after years of being vilified as sellouts.
There currently are some 200 million voters in the U.S. For the purposes of governance, the U.S. House of Representatives is divided into 435 congressional districts. Of these, 238 are now Republican districts.
Believe it or not, those 238 House Republicans are not all from Texas or Alabama. They are from everywhere else in America, and those districts—whether in Ohio, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, North Carolina or Arizona—are not alike in terms of their political self-identity, gerrymanders notwithstanding.
Modern media and much political writing blands out these distinctions. Hillary Clinton didn’t lose because of misogyny or James Comey. She lost because Democrats lulled themselves into thinking they could impose a homogenized, politically correct liberalism on a resisting Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.
The first significant Republican moderate to bolt from the health bill was Appropriations Chairman Rodney Frelinghuysen. Mr. Frelinghuysen’s New Jersey district in Morris County is not close to being like Freedom Caucuser Jim Jordan’s district in Central Ohio. That’s the maddening wonder of the U.S. system, a product of the country’s complex history and for which inconsolable partisans can blame the Founders.
The original ObamaCare reform, assembled over months by the House leadership, was constructed explicitly to avoid opening this Pandora’s box of political interests inside the GOP. It was written so that a North Carolina Republican and a Pennsylvania Republican could be on the same page for one big vote.
For some “real conservatives,” the bill had the stench of compromise, an anathema in their world. One all-American reality that no amount of ranting will reverse is this: Unless you get more votes than the other guy, you lose. You will lose on health care, spending and taxes.
The cost of losing is high. If this Congress’s Republican moderates and conservatives are seen as incapable of working their way through political realities evident to the average American voter or campaign donor, then a resurrected Speaker Nancy Pelosi will be smiling through her weekends at Mar-a-Lago after 2018. That will not be fake news. "
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