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Editorial Opinion

Marsha Blackburn’s “Unintended Consequences”

Sometimes in this trade, the act of choosing a headline can be a difficult matter. Not so in this case. The headline of this editorial happens to be the phrase used by 7th District U.S. Rep. Marsha Blackburn to describe the ill effects of a 2016 law she sponsored that loosened regulations on the prescription of addictive opioids, and it constitutes a wonderful irony.

Blackburn, now a declared Republican candidate for the soon-to-be-vacated U.S. Senate seat currently held by Bob Corker, has found herself in hot water as a result of her role in passing the law — as documented over the last weekend in a collaborative effort by the CBS newsmagazine 60 Minutes and the Washington Post newspaper.

Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn

Fallout from the investigation has been enormous and immediate and bipartisan and potent enough to force the withdrawal of Pennsylvania GOP Congressman Tom Marino as President Trump’s nominee to head the Office of National Drug Control Policy as the nation’s Drug Czar. Marino found himself in sudden and unexpected disgrace after the CBS-WaPo revelations that he had been among a handful of members who zealously pushed through Congress the Ensuring Patient Access and Effective Drug Enforcement Act of 2016. As the investigation demonstrated, that innocuously titled measure, pushed by self-serving drug manufacturers, camouflaged provisions that, according to former Drug Enforcement Administration official Joe Rannazzisi, purposely struck down important sageguards. The result, he said, was that “unscrupulous” pain-pill hucksters gained the virtually unlimited ability to ply their trade and inflate the nation’s current opioid-addiction crisis to pandemic proportions.

Rannazzisi also told investigators that Marino and Blackburn, two of the bill’s 14 sponsors, had been especially active in pressing the DEA and the Justice Department to withhold their initial objections to the legislation, which went on to virtual unanimous passage by Congress.

But, speaking of unintended consequences, “virtual” is a crucial qualifying word. To what may well be Blackburn’s future discomfort, a likely opponent of hers in the forthcoming GOP Senatorial primary is former 8th District congressman Stephen Fincher, who, either by choice or happenstance, happened not to be in Washington when the 2016 vote on the bill was taken. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Fincher has elevated the burgeoning opioid-addiction crisis to the very top of his potential issues to run on. And whoever gets the Democratic nomination for the Senate is likely to follow suit.

As one of the 2016 bill’s prime movers, Blackburn finds herself in the uncomfortable position of having been either classically negligent in relation to the bill’s dangerous provisions or willing to overlook them in the service of drug companies that had been especially generous in their donations to her political benefit.

In any case, she — like other members of Congress who failed to interdict this pernicious measure — will have to provide some convincing explanations for their dereliction, and we can at least hope for some enlightenment on that score in next year’s campaign.

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Editorial Opinion

Taking the Knee

This whole flag thing is arguably getting to be a serious over-reach — on both sides of the matter. Is it the National Anthem thing? Or patriotism in general? Or just what? The issue has certainly been muddled and became more so, not less so,
after the intervention of Donald Trump last week. To recall: The president was addressing a friendly crowd in Alabama in one of those ersatz campaign rallies that he likes to have, evidently by way of reminding himself that, yes, indeed, he did win the presidential election of 2016, and, in lieu of any substantive achievements in office, of celebrating the one achievement he can boast of as a political person.

In so doing, Trump does Charlie Sheen one better. It is his way of saying “winning!” with at least some nostalgic claim to accuracy. Never mind that every legislative proposal the president has attempted to float has either fallen to earth or failed altogether to launch. Never mind that his approval ratings, as measured by all the polls extant, are miserable and are at record lows vis-à-vis any former chief executive at this stage of an administration. And never mind that even his victory in the electoral college is sullied by ongoing charges, accompanied by increasing evidence, of improper influence over the election process by an adversarial foreign power.

He does have his base, and he clearly feels liberated every time he goes out on the stump and has the opportunity, sans the restrictions of a teleprompter, to free-associate and relive his victory, salting his feast of self-congratulation with whatever other subject happens to come to mind, the whoopier the better. Last week in Alabama, on the very eve of Week Three of the NFL season, he happened upon the subject of those African-American pro footballers, a distinct but determined minority, who had been indicating their discontent with the imperfections, inequalities, and hypocrisies of American life by opting, one way or another, not to stand for the pre-game playing of the National Anthem. The preferred method of dissent had come to be that of kneeling during the ritual — all things considered, a relatively tame form of protest.

Still, that kind of thing was, and is, at variance to long-established habits of national allegiance and, as Trump well knew, was downright anathema to the rowdier members of his base. Hence, his provocative insistence that the next “son of a bitch” to do so should be fired by the owner of his NFL team.

And hence, in turn, the paradoxical response of players and owners at the weekend’s NFL games, who by and large abandoned whatever natural labor/management dichotomy might normally divide them and acted in public unity, whether kneeling or standing en masse or both at once, and, by whichever mode, reinforcing the right of individuals to choose their mode of response.

Though he may not realize it yet, it was one more defeat for the president, and, as an unintended consequence of his actions, a clear victory for the right of dissent. That much has been established. And perhaps that, after all, is a victory of sorts for what the flag and the anthem that celebrates it are meant to represent.

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Editorial Opinion

SNAP Program Needs Scalpel, Not Ax

Back in 2008, the administration of Tennessee Governor Phil Bredesen, a Democrat, asked for and got a waiver on enforcement of the strict work requirements imposed on recipients of federal food assistance under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). It was a sensible decision; the state, like much of the nation, was hard hit by the recession, and jobs were hard to come by. Temporarily, at least, the restrictions imposed on the genuinely needy in Tennessee could be lifted, though a certain rhetorical bias against them, building ever since the Reagan era, continued to posit the existence of”welfare queens” and the unholy triad of “waste, fraud, and abuse.”

The predominant feeling of the nation’s ruling establishment could be summed up this way: “The current welfare system undermines the basic values of work, responsibility, and family, trapping generation after generation in dependency.” It wasn’t Republican Reagan who said that, by the way, or even his GOP successor George H.W. Bush. It was “New Democrat” Bill Clinton, apropos his shepherding into law the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act of 1996, which is still the governing framework for federal aid programs. There had gotten to be a bipartisan consensus of sorts, characterized by Clinton’s famous remark that “the era of Big Government is over.”

It really wasn’t, of course. The size and resources and perks of government simply were progressively redirected to the benefit of folks higher up in the national class system, to the point that spokespersons for the political left — including even the most genuinely revolutionary presidential candidate in modern American history, Bernie Sanders — habitually devote most of their verbal energy to solicitude for the “middle class.”

So, with the economy apparently still on a healing course, it was no great surprise when on Monday the administration of Tennessee’s moderate Republican governor Bill Haslam announced that the time had come to end the waiver and to restore stringent work requirements for SNAP — except for 16 counties still regarded as being in some measure of financial distress.

While professing to be “awaiting more details about how the governor’s workforce requirement policy for food stamps will be implemented,” 9th District Democratic Congressman Steve Cohen expressed concern about the effects of the policy shift on Memphis, which, as he noted, has “the highest poverty rate of metro areas with at least one million people.”  

Cohen made bold to suggest, “We need to be making nutrition assistance more available, not less.” Also skeptical was state House Democratic leader Craig Fitzhugh of Ripley, who said, “I want to make sure that we are not using an axe where a scalpel is needed in weeding out abusers of the system,” and insisted on “a targeted approach that ensures every Tennessean that needs help receives it.”

A cautious approach is certainly called for. The New Republic, in its current issue, surveyed some of the national consequences of overkill in the shift from welfare to workfare: “In 1996, nearly 70 percent of poor families received benefits. Today it’s less than 25 percent,” the periodical found. Further: “Since 1995 the number of Americans living on $2 or less a day has nearly tripled, including some three million children.”  

Something tells us the figures in Tennessee are at least that dreary.

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Editorial Opinion

Harvey, Irma, and Trump

Wonder of wonders, a poll surfaced this week essentially indicating that, for the first time since his inauguration, Donald Trump’s favorability ratings, which have consistently hovered at record lows for any given point in his presidency, have taken a modest bump upward.

It does not take an Einstein to figure out the reason why. Hurricanes Harvey and Irma, while catastrophe for Texas, Florida, and areas adjacent to both states, were, for Trump, the ill winds that, a la the proverb, could still blow somebody some good — the somebody being the government-bashing, divider-in-chief himself, forced by circumstance to represent all the people. Or at least to pretend to, in show-and-tell photo ops in Texas, with more to come in Florida, presumably, when the weather clears.

Never mind that Trump, for all we know, still disbelieves in climate change as being anything more than a hoax dreamed up by the Chinese  — who, ironically, have seemingly addressed themselves faithfully to the strictures of the Paris climate agreement of 2015, meanwhile becoming world leaders in an important environmental industry, the production of solar panels.

Trump, meanwhile, has, by his action to peremptorily withdraw from that international accord, attracted the the world’s scorn for himself and its patronizing pity for the nation that he was elected to represent. To borrow from the lingo of the president’s own tweeting style: Sad!

Sadder yet is the fact that, in advance of these eminently predictable weather disturbances, geometrically increasing in both frequency and intensity, Trump released a budget calling for Draconian cuts in funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA); for the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD), which has a vital role in the rebuilding and rehabilitation of devastated urban areas; and both the National Weather Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, whose job it is to foresee weather emergencies and prepare for them.

The president also brandished his ax at the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), calling for $3 billion worth of cuts and for the laying off of some 3,500 EPA employees. Only rear-guard preventive action by Congress has so far kept most of this folly from taking place.

Still, the president has indeed turned up in the general periphery of a few affected sites, marveling, campaign-style, at the turnouts, even when the crowds he is addressing are assemblages of dispossessed people gathered at relocation points, and (upon being pressed to do so) actually interacting with victims, to the point of picking up a child or two. Trump has even made bold to praise the emergency efforts of the very federal agencies that his budget proposals would eviscerate.

There is hypocrisy in this, and opportunism, obviously, but we do not begrudge the president for taking advantage of events in order to buttress his popularity. Nor do we discount the possibility of genuine sincerity in his attempts at compassion. This is a man who, to give him his due, feeds on the emotional responses of crowds, and if first-hand exposure to the needs of a stricken population helps enlighten him on the duties and profound responsibilities incumbent on him and the government he heads, so much the better.

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Editorial Opinion

Restore the DREAM Act

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

To say the least, President Trump is not renowned for either finesse or a judicious sense of timing. A case in point was the fact that, when North Korea last week was wagging its nuclear weaponry and making reckless threats against both the United States and staunch American ally South Korea, the president chose to unjustly accuse the South Koreans, who are in the Pyongyang regime’s direct line of fire, of “appeasement,” and to browbeat them for what he said was their unfair trade deal with the U.S.

Justin Fox Burks

DACA students at Rhodes College

Then there was Hurricane Harvey, the monster hurricane that savaged Texas, causing billions of dollars in damages, destroying countless thousands of homes, and dislocating the lives of the state’s citizens. If there was a high side to this catastrophe, it was the visible coming together of the people of Texas, across all class and ethnic lines, in heroic efforts to confront the emergency. It was a time when human fellow-feeling was the order of the day.

Not, evidently, for the current inhabitant of the White House, who, despite two showy visits to Texas, to suggest his concern, has once again flunked the test of compassion in his callous decision this week to phase out the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program (DACA), a 2012 initiative by President Barack Obama that has granted work permits to nearly 800,000 young people, the children of undocumented immigrants. Huge numbers of these “Dreamers” (a term deriving from  the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act, proposed — and still pending — legislation that would accomplish the same goals as DACA) were caught up in Harvey’s depredations, both as victims and as rescue workers.

In fairness to the president, he was up against a Tuesday legal deadline of sorts promulgated by 10 states threatening to double down on legal action to end DACA.

And, to be sure, Trump had campaigned last year on a pledge to terminate DACA (as well as every other Obama initiative he could think of). But, as recently as last week, in the course of one of his Texas photo ops, the president proclaimed, “We love the Dreamers,” giving rise to hopes that he might take another course of action.

Not so. As is so often the case, Memphis’ Democratic congressman Steve Cohen has aptly summed up the moment: “President Trump’s decision to end the DACA program is heartless, illogical, and un-American. DACA is a common-sense, compassionate program that helps protect from deportation young people who were brought to the United States by no choice of their own. According to the Center for American Progress, 95 percent of these DREAMers are currently either working or in school. The decision is not only harmful for the DREAMers, but also for America which relies on them for a more effective and productive workforce. I urge Congress to move quickly to protect these bright and talented young people who have significantly contributed to what makes America great.”

We agree. Congress should proceed at once to pass the Dream Act or some equivalent thereof. The benefits would accrue not just to the Dreamers but to the much-vaunted American Dream itself.

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Editorial Opinion

Monumental Democracy

Enormous amounts of rhetoric have been loosed, both locally and nationwide, regarding the monuments to confederate figures and confederate causes that were erected in years past, and action of some sort is sure to follow. Even before the unsettling recent disturbances involving a statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville, Virginia, a circumstance that saw opportunistic Nazis on the march and the resulting tragic death of a counter-protester, these statuary homages to a lost cause had potential for serious divisiveness.

New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu

Recognizing that fact, Mayor Mitch Landrieu of New Orleans had the foresight to remove the confederate monuments there. Baltimore has since dismantled its own, and, pending possible further action, Charlottesville has moved to cover up the statue of Lee and another of Stonewall Jackson. Other cities have done something similar, and, famously and urgently, Memphis has the ongoing quandary of what to do with its downtown statues to Nathan Bedford Forrest and confederate president Jefferson Davis.

The prospect for decisive action on the matter has mounted significantly of late, with Governor Bill Haslam joining city officials in calling upon the Tennessee Historical Commission to acquiesce in the statues’ removal, and the momentum is such that, one way or another, they could be gone even without such formal approval.

As it happens, Memphis is not just on the verge of abandoning an outmoded view of its history by junking one set of monuments, it also has the opportunity to refresh its horizons by erecting another set of memorials.

On Monday, the members of the Shelby County Commission voted unanimously to contribute significant funding to a memorial entitled Memphis Suffrage Monument: Equality Trailblazers, a permanent tribute in glass and bronze to Tennessee women who have loomed large in the expansion of voting rights.

This new memorial is to be a component of the Tennessee Womens Suffrage Trail, a statewide framework overseen by Memphian Paula Casey and Jacqueline Hellman, as well as of the Memphis Heritage Trail. It will also mark the 2020 Centennial of Tennessee’s decisive passage of the 19th Amendment for universal suffrage. It is the work of sculptor Alan Leguire, who has created other monuments to the suffrage movement and to women’s rights in Nashville, Knoxville, and Jackson.

The local memorial will be unveiled in August of 2018 in front of City Hall, and, on the way to the Suffrage Centennial, will also mesh with next year’s 50-year planned commemoration in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and with the 200th anniversary of the founding of Shelby County.

Plans are also afoot to create other monuments to equality in the general perimeter of the monument to the Equality Trailblazers, which will bear the busts of eight pioneers in the fight for, and exercise of, women’s suffrage — Elizabeth Avery Meriwether, Lide Smith Meriwether, Lulu Reese, state Representative Joe Hanover, Charl Ormond Williams, Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell, and state Representative Lois DeBerry, with additional tributes to Marion Griffin, Maxine Smith, and Minerva Johnican.

Monumental women, all of them.

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Editorial Opinion

Cometh the Change

Who, until weekend before last and Charlottesville, could have imagined a large contingent of neo-Nazis and their sympathizers marching en masse in public and claiming to speak on a subject of major national importance. That a gathering of progressive citizens rose up to resist them is only to be welcomed — even if those counter-demonstrators, as President Trump bent over backwards to contend, contained a militant element themselves.

The fact is that a term that was modish for a while in the ’60s and ’70s and then fell out of favor is likely due for a revival. “Participatory democracy” was how it went, and it denoted what was then a rising tide of direct action — demonstrations, marches, citizen interventions, and, in some cases, disruptions of both the planned and spontaneous kind — going on among masses of people who had not been elected to any sort of government.

There is an irony of sorts — or maybe an appropriateness — in the fact that, as our elected representatives in the Congress seem to have settled into a state of gridlock in which nothing (or at least nothing positive) can occur, citizens have taken to the streets to make things happen on their own.

The renewed demonstrations here locally at the site of the Nathan Bedford Forrest monument and grave and the new ones demanding the removal as well of the Jefferson Davis statue on the riverfront, are instances of an obvious sense of impatience and a developing shift in public behavior.

In Memphis, the issue is compounded by a state action taken expressly to counter the will of local government — namely, the Heritage Protection Act of 2016, which places all authority over monuments like those to Forrest and Davis in the hands of the state Historical Commission, which must approve changes in the status of the monuments by a two-thirds vote of its 20 members.

City government has already moved decisively to change the names of three downtown parks from prior appellations that paid homage to the confederacy, including the two parks with the offending statues. Mayor Jim Strickland and the City Council are on record as favoring the removal of those monuments. But the hands of city officials are tied — or seem to be — by the aforesaid state law. Those demanding immediate action point out, however, that the state law, which was rushed into being to prevent any change in the status of the Memphis monuments, lacks any penalty provisions.

Accused by some of the demonstrators as lacking in leadership, Strickland felt constrained to issue an angry rebuttal on his Facebook page, citing his prior actions on behalf of equality of all citizens and saying, “I want every Memphian to see the absurdity of someone accusing a mayor who is actually working on removing confederate statues as being an apologist for white supremacists.” The mayor cautioned against “an attempt to divide this city with the kind of racial politics that we should all reject.”

It is a warning well meant and well worth heeding. But there’s a corollary to it: that the times, they are once again a-changin’, and the order is, indeed, rapidly fading.

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Editorial Opinion

Defining and Defending the First Amendment

Amendment I. Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

The foregoing words are those of the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, an afterthought, as it were, to the hard work, good intentions, and labored-over compromises of the delegates from 13 heretofore independent colonies that had presumed to be independent states of the European kind and had adhered up to that point to a looser compact, the so-called Articles of Confederation.

It was taken for granted by the representatives in Philadelphia of these far-flung entities that the casual sort of association created by the Articles just wouldn’t do to protect the newly won independence of any or all of them. That is why they had agreed to meet in convention and why they availed themselves of guidance from the likes of George Washington, the military leader who had guided their revolt against British authority, and Jefferson, Madison, Adams, and the rest of those illustrious sorts who, in our own time, go by the name of Founding Fathers.

It was recognized that the 13 states so joined would have conflicting interests, the most obvious of which was slavery, an institution so glaringly in conflict with the ideals of a “more perfect union” that it would need, ultimately, to be abolished by the sword, at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives, North and South, and of an economic devastation of the latter territory that would take a century or more to repair.

Once that Civil War was ended and the union restored, virtually the first order of business was a series of new constitutional amendments, the 13th through 15th, all designed to safeguard the “new birth of freedom” that a martyred president had spoken of in the course of the war.

Interpreting those new anti-slavery amendments has, all things considered, been the major focus of Supreme Court concern ever since, and resistance to them has, more or less successfully, been contained by the liberty of expression guaranteed in that very first amendment cited above. Differences of opinion on the subject of equality still do exist, unfortunately, and they are protected by that amendment.

There are limits to free expression, however, and the Court’s 1919 decision in Schenck v. United States, spells them out succinctly as prohibiting dangerous speech, defined by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes as “shouting ‘fire’ in a crowded theater.”

Last weekend’s actions by the faux confederates and neo-Nazis who bore torches and arms to Charlottesville, Virginia, in a deranged last stand in defiance of both equality and free discourse, an un-peaceable assembly that began in violence and ended in murder, was clearly well beyond the limits prescribed by Justice Holmes, and it is likely to generate an updated definition of the limits of public expression.

We do not have to guess at the consequences of such actions, after all. The legacy of the aforesaid Civil War and the ravages of the Second World War are testament enough to them.

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Editorial Opinion

Republicans and Democrats Need More Political Self-Awareness

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

One of the most famous lines in the English language is actually of Scottish derivation, via the poetry of Robert Burns. As transliterated: “Oh, would some Power the giftee give us, to see ourselves as others see us.”

We would recommend that maxim to the cadres of the two major political parties, both of which had indulged — and perhaps over-indulged — in some positive thinking on their own behalf last week. (See “Politics,” p. 8.)

Consider, for instance, the appearance of Vice President Mike Pence as keynote speaker at the state Republican Party’s annual Statesmen’s banquet in Nashville. He and other prominent Republicans had a high time blowing their own horn, and who can begrudge them on an occasion like that?

Jackson Baker

Mike Pence

The problem was that, here and there, the GOP speakers over-spoke themselves in a way that was seriously misleading, and, worse, self-deceptive. Could the Vice President actually believe, as he stated to a rapturous audience, that President Trump is “restoring our traditional alliances” and that “the world is responding to new American leadership”?

With all due respect to the president (and how much is due is up for debate), and without our attempting to judge the long-range effect of his foreign policy, such as it is, even his closest associates acknowledge that Trump is viewed with wary suspicion by those aforementioned allies for his ever-fluctuating policy declarations, and with outright scorn for his decision to take the U.S. out of the Paris climate accords.  

Senator Lamar Alexander, as chairman of the Senate Health Committee, is taking the lead in breaking away from the hitherto closed ranks of Republican Obamacare decriers to hold hearings and entertain bipartisan negotiations on health care. Good for him. But to the crowd in Nashville, Alexander boasted of his prior votes with the rest of the GOP pack to “repeal and replace” the Affordable Care Act and vowed, “I’m not going to rest until the 350,000 Tennesseans who buy their insurance on the free market are able to go into that market and buy insurance that they choose to buy and can afford.” There’s nothing in that statement that an exponent of the ACA couldn’t also endorse.

Meanwhile, the five candidates for the chairmanship of the newly restored Shelby County Democratic Party spoke to some worthy goals in two Memphis forums last week. But almost all of them, including eventual chairman-elect Corey Strong, laid what seems to us misguided emphasis on a need to create the most forbidding litmus test possible for participation in party affairs — one that would almost guarantee, say, that anyone who had ever cast a Republican vote need not apply.

Really? Might as well put a sign on party headquarters: “Converts Not Wanted/Take Your Nasty Votes Away.”

All we are recommending, to the true believers in either party, is that they step aside from their accustomed bromides and bloviations and make an effort to examine their preconceived notions with a neutral eye. They might actually learn something.

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Editorial Opinion

Two Parties, One Goal

The Memphis City Council and the Shelby County Commission are 13-member bodies that meet with regularity, both in full session and in committee meetings. The way in which they both have come to operate might constitute a lesson of sorts to other legislative bodies supposedly higher up the chain of government. By that, of course, we mean the Tennessee General Assembly and the Congress of the United States.

The most direct contrast to those more rarefied legislative entities can probably be supplied by the county commission, because it, like the Tennessee legislature and the U.S. House and U.S. Senate, is elected according to the dictates of the two-party system, which pits Democrats against Republicans in electoral contests and thereafter requires the representatives of either party to sit in common assembly.

Increasingly, the commission provides a textbook example of how the two-party system is supposed to work. There are conflicts, sometimes ferocious ones, but these develop more often according to personality than to party lines. Differences that arise from the ideological divide of the two parties occur, of course, but they are usually resolved by the simple arithmetic of a vote-count (abetted in no few cases by some artful vote-trading).

Mitt Romney, father of Obamacare

After a stutter or two a few years back, the commission has resumed its “gentlemen’s agreement” tradition of rotating its chairmanship back and forth by party. This year’s chair, elected on Monday, is a Republican, Heidi Shafer, who succeeded Democrat Melvin Burgess.

During this past year, the members of the commission concurred across party lines on matters ranging from minority contracting to taxing philosophy to the essentials of a long-term “strategic agenda.” It is hard to make direct comparisons to the General Assembly, where the ratio of majority Republicans to minority Democrats is wildly disproportional, but the two houses of Congress are balanced enough between the two parties to allow for instructive contrasts. Rather infamously, the two-party system there is totally dysfunctional, and “gridlock” is too kind a name for it.

The nation has just witnessed the spectacle of one party in the Senate trying to abolish the nation’s prevailing health-care insurance system — and recklessly, without a real alternative. The scheme failed only because three members of the majority party were conscientious enough to scuttle it, calling instead for bipartisan action and consultative reform efforts.

What made the shabby repeal effort doubly ironic was that the Affordable Care Act, so tenuously rescued from Republicans acting in near-total lockstep, had been inspired by a Republican think tank and a Republican governor, Massachusett’s Mitt Romney, in the first place. The congressional GOP’s fanatic resistance to the act had been based on nothing more, ultimately, than a nakedly partisan pledge made eight years ago to oppose anything and everything offered by Democratic President, Barack Obama.

Now that Obama is out of office, that sordid motive is obsolete. Going forward, two parties, like two heads, can be better than one. But only if they genuinely take heed of each other.