Daniel Greenfield:

A civil war has begun.

This civil war is very different than the last one. There are no cannons or cavalry charges. The left doesn’t want to secede. It wants to rule. Political conflicts become civil wars when one side refuses to accept the existing authority. The left has rejected all forms of authority that it doesn’t control.

The left has rejected the outcome of the last two presidential elections won by Republicans. It has rejected the judicial authority of the Supreme Court when it decisions don’t accord with its agenda. It rejects the legislative authority of Congress when it is not dominated by the left.

It rejected the Constitution so long ago that it hardly bears mentioning.

It was for total unilateral executive authority under Obama. And now it’s for states unilaterally deciding what laws they will follow. (As long as that involves defying immigration laws under Trump, not following them under Obama.) It was for the sacrosanct authority of the Senate when it held the majority. Then it decried the Senate as an outmoded institution when the Republicans took it over.

It was for Obama defying the orders of Federal judges, no matter how well grounded in existing law, and it is for Federal judges overriding any order by Trump on any grounds whatsoever. It was for Obama penalizing whistleblowers, but now undermining the government from within has become “patriotic”.

There is no form of legal authority that the left accepts as a permanent institution. It only utilizes forms of authority selectively when it controls them. But when government officials refuse the orders of the duly elected government because their allegiance is to an ideology whose agenda is in conflict with the President and Congress, that’s not activism, protest, politics or civil disobedience; it’s treason.

After losing Congress, the left consolidated its authority in the White House. After losing the White House, the left shifted its center of authority to Federal judges and unelected government officials. Each defeat led the radicalized Democrats to relocate from more democratic to less democratic institutions.

This isn’t just hypocrisy. That’s a common political sin. Hypocrites maneuver within the system. The left has no allegiance to the system. It accepts no laws other than those dictated by its ideology.

Democrats have become radicalized by the left. This doesn’t just mean that they pursue all sorts of bad policies. It means that their first and foremost allegiance is to an ideology, not the Constitution, not our country or our system of government. All of those are only to be used as vehicles for their ideology.

That’s why compromise has become impossible.

Our system of government was designed to allow different groups to negotiate their differences. But those differences were supposed to be based around finding shared interests. The most profound of these shared interests was that of a common country based around certain civilizational values. The left has replaced these Founding ideas with radically different notions and principles. It has rejected the primary importance of the country. As a result it shares little in the way of interests or values.

Instead it has retreated to cultural urban and suburban enclaves where it has centralized tremendous amounts of power while disregarding the interests and values of most of the country. If it considers them at all, it is convinced that they will shortly disappear to be replaced by compliant immigrants and college indoctrinated leftists who will form a permanent demographic majority for its agenda.

But it couldn’t wait that long because it is animated by the conviction that enforcing its ideas is urgent and inevitable. And so it turned what had been a hidden transition into an open break.

In the hidden transition, its authority figures had hijacked the law and every political office they held to pursue their ideological agenda. The left had used its vast cultural power to manufacture a consensus that was slowly transitioning the country from American values to its values and agendas. The right had proven largely impotent in the face of a program which corrupted and subverted from within.

The left was enormously successful in this regard. It was so successful that it lost all sense of proportion and decided to be open about its views and to launch a political power struggle after losing an election.

The Democrats were no longer being slowly injected with leftist ideology. Instead the left openly took over and demanded allegiance to open borders, identity politics and environmental fanaticism. The exodus of voters wiped out the Democrats across much of what the left deemed flyover country.

The left responded to democratic defeats by retreating deeper into undemocratic institutions, whether it was the bureaucracy or the corporate media, while doubling down on its political radicalism. It is now openly defying the outcome of a national election using a coalition of bureaucrats, corporations, unelected officials, celebrities and reporters that are based out of its cultural and political enclaves.

It has responded to a lost election by constructing sanctuary cities and states thereby turning a cultural and ideological secession into a legal secession. But while secessionists want to be left alone authoritarians want everyone to follow their laws. The left is an authoritarian movement that wants total compliance with its dictates with severe punishments for those who disobey.

The left describes its actions as principled. But more accurately they are ideological. Officials at various levels of government have rejected the authority of the President of the United States, of Congress and of the Constitution because those are at odds with their radical ideology. Judges have cloaked this rejection in law. Mayors and governors are not even pretending that their actions are lawful.

The choices of this civil war are painfully clear.

We can have a system of government based around the Constitution with democratically elected representatives. Or we can have one based on the ideological principles of the left in which all laws and processes, including elections and the Constitution, are fig leaves for enforcing social justice.

But we cannot have both.

Some civil wars happen when a political conflict can’t be resolved at the political level. The really bad ones happen when an irresolvable political conflict combines with an irresolvable cultural conflict.

That is what we have now.

The left has made it clear that it will not accept the lawful authority of our system of government. It will not accept the outcome of elections. It will not accept these things because they are at odds with its ideology and because they represent the will of large portions of the country whom they despise.

The question is what comes next.

The last time around growing tensions began to explode in violent confrontations between extremists on both sides. These extremists were lauded by moderates who mainstreamed their views. The first Republican president was elected and rejected. The political tensions led to conflict and then civil war.

The left doesn’t believe in secession. It’s an authoritarian political movement that has lost democratic authority. There is now a political power struggle underway between the democratically elected officials and the undemocratic machinery of government aided by a handful of judges and local elected officials.

What this really means is that there are two competing governments; the legal government and a treasonous anti-government of the left. If this political conflict progresses, agencies and individuals at every level of government will be asked to demonstrate their allegiance to these two competing governments. And that can swiftly and explosively transform into an actual civil war.

There is no sign that the left understands or is troubled by the implications of the conflict it has initiated. And there are few signs that Democrats properly understand the dangerous road that the radical left is drawing them toward. The left assumes that the winners of a democratic election will back down rather than stand on their authority. It is unprepared for the possibility that democracy won’t die in darkness.

Civil wars end when one side is forced to accept the authority of the other. The left expects everyone to accept its ideological authority. Conservatives expect the left to accept Constitutional authority. The conflict is still political and cultural. It’s being fought in the media and within the government. But if neither side backs down, then it will go beyond words as both sides give contradictory orders.

The left is a treasonous movement. The Democrats became a treasonous organization when they fell under the sway of a movement that rejects our system of government, its laws and its elections. Now their treason is coming to a head. They are engaged in a struggle for power against the government. That’s not protest. It’s not activism. The old treason of the sixties has come of age. A civil war has begun.

This is a primal conflict between a totalitarian system and a democratic system. Its outcome will determine whether we will be a free nation or a nation of slaves.

Kevin D. Williamson:

Undivided government is not going to last forever. It never does, and, with a mercurial president and a Republican caucus caught between needful but unpopular conservative reforms and the realities of electoral politics, it may not last very long at all. Best to make the most of it, and take the opportunity to hit Schumer et al. where it hurts: In the bank account.

Among the many criticisms of the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting is that they are basically full-employment programs for Democratic hacks and activists. They should be eliminated entirely — cutting their funding is not enough, because funding can be restored in the future. Also on the chopping block: AmeriCorps, the Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation, the Legal Services Corporation, and the Title X Family Planning Program, which is essentially a federal allowance for Planned Parenthood.
Congress should also target grants and other federal funding directed to political organizations. For example: La Raza, through its banking operations (of course it has banking operations!) has received millions of dollars in federal subsidies. While the federal government probably cannot adopt a general prohibition on nonprofit organizations that receive federal funding from lobbying and electioneering with their own money (this would violate the First Amendment), the comptroller general has found routine violations of existing laws against using federal funds for political advocacy and lobbying activities. There is in fact a federal criminal law against using federal appropriations to underwrite lobbying. You will not be surprised to learn that this law — which has been on the books for nearly a century — apparently never has been enforced. “The exact parameters of this law, adopted in 1919, are not precisely known,” writes the Congressional Research Service, “as there appears never to have been an enforcement action or indictment returned based on the provision.” Time to tighten that up.

Congress should also adopt a general prohibition on distributing federal settlement funds to nonprofit organizations. Billions of dollars in federal settlements have been directed to “non-victim entities” such as the Urban League and La Raza, which are fundamentally political organizations. If Republicans cannot bring themselves to act out of prudence and principle, then they at least ought to have a sense of self-preservation sufficient to stop funding campaigns against themselves.

The Left has a weakness: It is dependent upon government money. It has long accepted that arrangement complacently, on the theory that its friends will generally control the government, if not always at the elected level then at the administrative and bureaucratic level. (The Left has not been wrong about that.) According to the Congressional Budget Office, about 17 percent of all federal outlays take the form of assistance to state and local governments — funds that in turn account for about a quarter of all state and local government spending. A fair portion of that money ends up simply passing through to nonprofits and politically connected contractors who provide dubious “outreach” and “development” services. If Republicans are looking for a little leverage over New York, there it is.

And when they get around to tax reform, Republicans also should eliminate the deductibility of state and local taxes against federal taxes. The GOP can finally say it is for a tax increase on the rich — so what if it’s mainly rich Democrats in Connecticut and New York?

“Defund the Left!” has been a conservative battle cry for some time, but one that has produced relatively little in the way of results. But Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi have made it abundantly clear that the Democrats simply do not intend to act as partners in government. It may be that this is the Republicans’ best opportunity to leave them with a permanently diminished base — financially and, hence, politically. Now is the time for a little petty partisanship in the public interest.

Would ending the deductibility of state and local taxes harm Wisconsin? Probably, but it would also provide a powerful incentive for the Republicans who control state government to do something they haven’t done nearly enough of — cutting state and local taxes. (Need a matching budget cut? A state employee costs the state $71,000 on average in salaries and benefits. Divide your amount of budget needing to be cut by 71,000, and proceed from there.)

So much for Donald Trump’s ability to make deals, as Peter Suderman notes:

The House bill to partially repeal and replace Obamacare is officially dead.

The American Health Care Act (AHCA), which was scheduled for a vote this afternoon, has been pulled from consideration. The move means that GOP’s years-long quest to repeal and replace the health care law has failed. For the foreseeable future, at least, Obamacare will stay on the books.

President Trump stumped for the bill aggressively over the last several weeks, and White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer said today that the president “left everything on the field when it comes to this bill.” But in the end Trump couldn’t make it happen.

The GOP legislation was ill conceived from the start. Partly as a result of the need to follow a special process that would allow the bill to pass with a simple majority in the Senate, it left much of Obamacare’s essential structure in place—including insurance regulations, subsidies paid through the tax system for individuals purchasing coverage on the individual market, and a mandatory penalty, assessed by insurers, for those who go without coverage and seek to regain coverage.

The bill would have transformed Medicaid into a per-capita block grant system, but not until the next decade, and in its initial form would have created incentives for states to expand the health program. It also would have resulted in individual insurance premiums rising 15 to 20 percent in the short term, and some 14 million people losing their insurance as of next year, according to the Congressional Budget Office. A final amendment to the bill, released late last night, might have sent the individual market into a complete and immediate meltdown.

The bill failed in part because it could not establish a balance between the concerns of moderate Republicans, particularly with regard to the way it treated the Medicaid expansion, and more conservative members of the House Freedom Caucus, who argued that the bill was too much like Obamacare, retaining its core scheme of subsidies and regulations.

But it also failed because Trump proved himself an ineffective negotiator and dealmaker—one whose preference for shallow political victories over substantive policy wins ultimately proved insufficient in a complex policy negotiation.

Throughout his life, Trump has portrayed himself as a master dealmaker. As far back as 1984, for example, he argued that the U.S. government should let him manage the nuclear arms negotiations with Russia. “It would take an hour-and-a-half to learn everything there is to learn about missiles,” Trump, who on the campaign trail did not know what the nuclear triad was, toldThe Washington Post at the time. Trump has never been focused on details. The deal itself was always more important than what was in it. …

As House Republicans moved towards a vote on the health care bill, GOP lawmakers characterized his role similarly. This week, in advance of meetings with Republicans who opposed the bill, Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-North Carolina) called Trump “the closer.” Final support for the bill would be won by Trump, who would use his skills as a dealmaker to push it over the finish line.

Trump repeatedly promised to repeal and replace Obamacare with “something terrific.” But he never described the policy mechanisms of the replacement he preferred. And the outcomes he described—coverage for everyone, lower premiums, no changes to Medicaid—had little or no connection to the bill that House Republicans eventually drew up.

That didn’t seem to matter to the president. As has always been the case with Trump, making a deal—any deal—was all that mattered.

In the end, though, the bill died. Trump couldn’t close the deal. And one of the biggest reasons that Trump couldn’t close the deal is that he didn’t understand or care about the details.

There was little evidence that Trump understood the bill, or that he cared much about what was in it. …

“[Trump] is more interested in a win, or avoiding a loss, than any of the arcane policy specifics of the complicated measure, according to a dozen aides and allies interviewed over the past week who described his mood as impatient and jittery,” The New York Timesreported today.

Trump spent the last two weeks selling the House plan. He met with specific individuals and with various congressional factionsopposed to the bill. He personally called the offices of more than 100 legislators. He has cajoled and threatened, telling those who refused to back the legislation that they would lose their seats. He threw the entire weight of his personality and the office of the president behind the vote, saying that he backed the bill “one-thousand percent.”

But he never took the time to explain to either the public or congressional Republicans what the bill actually did. He did not make a case for the bill’s policy merits, preferring instead to describe it using generic superlatives. Contrast that with President Obama, who traveled the country making the case for his health care overhaul, and made a major prime time address outlining its provisions.

Trump, in contrast, was, by virtually all accounts, indifferent to the policy content of the bill so long as it passed and he could say that he had fulfilled his promise to repeal and replace Obamacare. …

Even that claim, however, would have glossed over important details. The bill only repealed parts of Obamacare, and it left many of its fundamental assumptions about the nature of health policy firmly in place. If anything, it made those assumptions even more difficult to upend by giving them bipartisan cover.

The bill Trump backed made no attempt to balance either the policy or political interests of the legislators, influence groups, or stakeholders involved. Trump spent the week negotiating changes to the bill, but because he neither cared nor understood what was in it, and what lawmakers wanted from the bill, he couldn’t act as an effective negotiator. A handful of last minute updates to the bill intended to pick up holdout votes backfired: One reduced the bill’s projected deficit reduction, while another was so imprecisely drafted that it ran the risk of killing the individual insurance market entirely, while leaving the federal government in control of the regulations it was supposedly devolving to states.

Trump, of course, shares some blame with Speaker of the House Paul Ryan. Ryan led the drafting of the bill, and the legislative process. The bill he put together didn’t really make sense, in large part because it was never really a health policy bill. The AHCA was a setup for tax reform designed to make it easier to permanently cut taxes in a future piece of legislation.

But it was Trump who managed the negotiations. It was Trump who was expected to seal the deal. And it was Trump who ultimately couldn’t make it work.

Health policy is hard because all of the policy pieces are interconnected. The various policy pieces, meanwhile, are just as interconnected with the politics, which is just as complex. You can’t separate any of it, and adjusting any one part of the system inevitably means a cascade of additional adjustments will be necessary further down the line. It’s a system of trade-offs, and Trump didn’t know or care what those trade-offs were.

This is the danger of a president who is so disinterested in policy particulars, especially when, like Trump, he expects to maintain a central role in the process. Trump’s character—his personal style and his habits of mind—prevent him from effectively negotiating complex legislation. And in this case, it meant that even with control of the White House and both chambers of Congress, Republicans couldn’t put together an Obamacare repeal bill that could pass, or was worth passing. It’s a problem that is likely to continue to haunt conservative policy goals for as long as Trump is president.

Trump didn’t care about the details. But health policy is all details. And it turns out it’s hard to make a policy deal when you don’t understand the policy.

One wonders if Trump’s art of the deal involves what The Hill reports:

White House chief strategist Stephen Bannon told a group of House conservatives they had no choice but to back the GOP’s ObamaCare repeal bill days before the bill was pulled, according to a new report.

Bannon confronted members of the House Freedom Caucus earlier this week during the White House’s push for the American Health Care Act, Axios’s Mike Allen reported Saturday in his newsletter.

“Guys, look. This is not a discussion. This is not a debate. You have no choice but to vote for this bill,” Bannon reportedly said.

A Freedom Caucus member reportedly replied: “You know, the last time someone ordered me to something, I was 18 years old. And it was my daddy. And I didn’t listen to him, either.”

The conservative group met with President Trump at the White House on Thursday, but the president reportedly did not want to discuss policy specifics of the healthcare legislation.

Freedom Caucus members were calling for additional changes to the GOP plan to further dismantle ObamaCare.

Friday’s traveshamockery is being blamed on the House’s Freedom Caucus. So it’s up to the Freedom Caucus, and for that matter U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (R–Kentucky), to introduce their idea of what should happen to get rid of ObamaCare.