Republicans have controlled Washington for seven months. They have virtually nothing to show for it.
Returning home this week to face voters for the first time since the party failed to get an Obamacare repeal through a Senate where it had a majority, lawmakers are now struggling for a message that they can spin as a win.
“No party can remain in power by lying to the American people,” said Sen. Ted Cruz before leaving the Capitol for a trip home to Texas.
“They're going to have to answer hard questions of people who look them in the eyes and say, 'Why did you lie to me?’" Cruz said.
Republicans this year control both the White House and Congress for the first time in 10 years. And historically, a new president uses his mandate to get a major initiative passed by the August recess.
Not this year. Instead, the paucity of political victories spells danger ahead of the 2018 and 2020 elections for the party that promised over and over to repeal Obamacare, get the government out of people’s lives and dramatically cut spending and taxes.
The collapse of the GOP’s health care effort, scuttled when three Republicans joined 46 Democrats and two independents to defeat the latest version, was the most glaring, embarrassing example of how the party could get nothing big done.
“It’s an epic fail for the Republican Congress,” said Tim Phillips, president of the conservative Americans for Prosperity.
The inability to deliver on a promise after seven years of campaign pledges to rid the nation of Obamacare, he said, “is the height of cynicism and the reason so many Americans distrust and dislike politicians.”
Republicans now face a huge political dilemma. They have to choose between answering the siren call from the base and returning to the heavy if not impossible lift of remaking the nation’s health care system – or working with party moderates and Democrats on shoring up insurance markets in danger of cratering in some states.
Collaborating with the political enemy will be a tough sell to the GOP’s conservative base. But working with only conservatives will probably mean into another intractable health care war.
Instead, many conservatives want to look ahead to overhauling the tax code, and fast.
Phillips, who will host an event Monday in Washington to discuss tax reform with Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and the White House Director of Legislative Affairs, said conservative groups expect the party to make Obamacare repeal a “long term effort.”
Failure to deliver at this point, he said, “raises the stakes even higher on tax reform. It makes it a must do.”
Trouble is, rewriting the country’s tax code is a complex process that historically has taken years, and probably can’t be done without Democrats.
And it will be up against a conservative base that’s not going to stop demanding Obamacare repeal. Iowa Republican Party chairman Jeff Kaufmann said he that while expects tax reform to become the party priority, it must return to health care. Iowa historically hosts the nation’s first presidential caucus.
“The people are not going to let this go,” Kaufmann said. “You saw the anger that led to the election of Donald Trump. They’ve not done a thing to make that anger subside. Indeed, they’ve thrown gas on the fire.”
EDITORS: STORY CAN END HERE
The Tea Party movement, which was largely responsible for Republicans winning control of the House in 2010, feels the same way. Tea Party Patriots co-founder Jenny Beth Martin insisted the health care debacle was “failure only for this week” and urged Senate leadership to take a harder stance against the holdouts.
“It is time to 'crush' the moderates and 'punch them in the nose,’” she said.