The Independent Judge The Court Needs

March 24, 2017

Everyone knows that Supreme Court confirmation hearings can be dramatic, even emotional, events. The stakes are high.

As a Senator, there are few responsibilities more important than deciding whether to vote for a nominee to the Supreme Court.

Unfortunately these days, it seems like being nominated to the Supreme Court is a lot like running for office. As we’ve seen over the past few weeks, there are a lot of interest groups on both sides that have mobilized for this confirmation process.

Judge Gorsuch, however, is not a politician. The acrimony, duplicity, and ruthlessness of today’s politics are still foreign and unfamiliar to him. May that continue to be true.

In a former life, I had the good fortune of appearing before Judge Gorsuch as a practicing attorney, so I know from personal experience that he is one of the very best judges in the country. He comes to oral argument prepared and asks probing, fair questions that help everyone better understand the arguments.

Judge Gorsuch does not promote an agenda or grandstand. He writes thoughtful and rigorous opinions that are not only careful and well-reasoned, but also easy – even pleasant – to read.

Judge Gorsuch has the resume of a Supreme Court justice. Yet what’s most impressive about his legal career and his approach to the law is his fierce independence from partisan and personal influence.

The judiciary is set apart from the other branches of our republic because we allow it to invalidate actions of the elected branches. Our confidence in the American judiciary depends entirely on judges like Judge Gorsuch - judges who are independent and whose only agenda is getting the law right.

Senate Democrats tried to tear Judge Gorsuch down this week. But it did not work.

They tried to argue that Judge Gorsuch was outside the mainstream. But this is not what Democrats said the last time Judge Gorsuch appeared before this committee. In fact, Judge Gorsuch’s nomination to the Tenth Circuit was so uncontroversial that Senator Graham was the only member of the Judiciary Committee who bothered to show up at his confirmation hearing, and he was confirmed unanimously on a voice vote.

Senate Democrats questioned Judge Gorsuch’s independence, because, in their view, he hadn’t sufficiently criticized the President’s comments about judges. But Judge Gorsuch has made his views on this subject abundantly clear.

Democrats complained that Judge Gorsuch did not provide enough hints about how he would rule on certain issues. But that’s a reason for confirmation, not against it.

In our system, judges don’t provide advisory opinions, they decide cases and controversies only after each side has an opportunity to make its case before the bench. And they do so outside of political influence.

Senate Democrats also attacked some of Judge Gorsuch’s past rulings. They said he was hostile to particular types of claims or to particular plaintiffs. But you can’t evaluate someone’s judicial record by looking at who wins or loses in his courtroom. In our system, you face the same burden of convincing the court regardless of who you are, and judges don’t decide cases based on their own personal preferences. And the record shows that Judge Gorsuch has applied the law neutrally in all cases, without regard to the parties.

Judge Gorsuch’s reputation won’t be affected by how Democrats attacked him this week. The same, however, can’t be said of the Senate. The night Judge Gorsuch was nominated he said the U.S. Senate is the greatest deliberative body in the world.

I agree.

But these days, it seems like this title is more of a challenge than an observation. Hopefully Judge Gorsuch will be proved right when his nomination moves to the Senate floor in two weeks.

Keeping Our Promise to Repeal

March 10, 2017

“For five years, Senate Democrats have blocked our efforts to repeal Obamacare,” House Speaker Paul Ryan said on January 6, 2016. “That ends today.”

“With this vote, we are keeping a promise and putting a bill that repeals Obamacare and defunds Planned Parenthood on the president’s desk,” Ryan continued. “This budget reconciliation bill, which would reduce the federal deficit by a half trillion dollars, forces the president to confront the failures of Obamacare head on. But most importantly, it clears the path to repealing this law with a Republican president in 2017 and replacing it with a truly patient-centered health care system. We will not back down from this fight to defend the sanctity of life and make quality health care coverage achievable for all Americans.”

It is now 2017, and we have a Republican president in the White House. A bill repealing Obamacare should have been sent to President Trump’s desk weeks ago. Unfortunately, the House of Representatives is now debating a bill that not only fails to repeal as much of Obamacare as they voted to do in 2015, but it also affirms much of Obamacare’s current structure, thus making any future efforts to replace the system that much more difficult.

The House leadership’s health care bill simply is not the Obamacare repeal bill we’ve been waiting for. It is a missed opportunity and a step in the wrong direction.

It doesn’t repeal the Obamacare Medicaid expansion. It doesn’t repeal the Obamacare regulations that drive up the cost of premiums. But it does create a brand-new spending program whose size and cost are entirely unclear.

This is a bad bill. One that will almost certainly be made worse once the Senate parliamentarian gives it the “Byrd bath” required for it to go through the Senate with just 51 votes.

The simple reality is that Republicans do not have the 60 votes in the Senate they need to pass a bill that repeals all of Obamacare and replace it with a new conservative health care system designed from scratch.

But Republicans do have the 51 votes in the Senate needed to use the Reconciliation Process laid out in the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 to pass legislation that changes federal revenue or spending obligations.

But thanks to a rule created by former-Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV), changes to federal policy that are “merely incidental” to a bill’s budgetary components are not “privileged” and therefore are subject to a filibuster. Hence the term “Byrd bath,” which in this case could be used to knock out key provisions of the House bill, including prohibitions on tax payer funding of abortion and price controls on insurance premiums.

The good news is that we already have a bill that not only made it through the Byrd bath but was also voted for by every Republican: the 2015 repeal bill that Speaker Paul Ryan praised in the quote above.

Now, the 2015 bill is not perfect. It might be improved during a Senate vote-a-rama when the Senate parliamentarian might be convinced that Obamacare’s insurance regulations do in fact have a big impact on federal spending (almost every economist agrees that Obamacare’s insurance regulations drive up the price of premiums, which are subsidized by federal revenues). But it might not.

Either way, there will be a lot more work to do on health care reform. Work that can’t be finished in the narrow window of time between now and when the Senate needs to spend floor time confirming Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court in April.

So, let’s fulfill our promise to repeal Obamacare immediately and then take our time and make sure we get health-care reform right. Let’s pass the 2015 repeal bill that Republicans in both houses of Congress voted for just 15 months ago. Once Obamacare has been properly sent to the dustbin of history then we can begin a deliberative, open, and honest process to reform our nation’s health care system.

Dismantling the Administrative State

March 3, 2017

Last month, the Senate voted to use the Congressional Review Act to undo an Obama-era regulation issued by the Interior Department. In response, the director of the Department’s Office of Surface Mining Reclamation and Enforcement told Politico, “I believe there’s a good chance that […] a court will overturn Congress’ actions here as an unconstitutional usurpation of the executive branch’s powers.”

The constitutional illiteracy of this statement is simply breathtaking – and it would be funny, too, if it weren’t so prevalent within the federal government today.

How did this happen?

Article I of the U.S. Constitution begins, “All legislative power herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States.” And Article II obligates the president and his executive branch to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.”

And for more than the first hundred years of our republic, that is largely how it worked. Congress passed laws and the executive branch enforced them.

But in his first Inaugural Address, President Roosevelt called for constitutional change. He claimed the Depression should be treated as an “emergency of war,” requiring a “temporary departure from the normal balance of public procedure.”

Unfortunately, our government has been not-so-temporarily departing from the normal balance of public procedure ever since.

But it wasn’t until Roosevelt died and President Truman came to power that the government adopted a more systematic and codified framework that set the ground rules for America’s burgeoning administrative state. The cornerstone of this framework was the Administrative Procedures Act (APA).

Under the APA, Congress could delegate broad lawmaking powers to executive-branch agencies. To adjudicate this new and delicate sharing of lawmaking authority, the courts had the jurisdiction to review the propriety and scope of agency rule-making. At the same time, in an effort to retain as much of its legislative authority as possible, Congress began inserting more and more “legislative veto” provisions into these otherwise broad grants of power.

This framework was not completely static over the next 40 years, but in the 1980s two Supreme Court cases fundamentally changed the balance of power between the branches: INS v. Chadha and Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council.

Taken together these two cases caused a substantial transfer of power from the legislative and judicial branches to the executive branch. The result is an executive branch that has grown far too powerful and insulated from public control. But there are three pieces of legislation that would go a long way toward reinvigorating the separation of powers at the heart of our constitutional system.

First, the Regulations from the Executive in Need of Scrutiny Act (REINS Act) would help restore the balance between the executive and legislative branches by requiring Congressional approval for any new regulation that would have a major impact ($100 million or more) on the economy.

Second, the Separation of Powers Restoration Act would amend the APA and require judges hearing challenges to agency actions to review all relevant questions of law “de novo,” thereby ending the dysfunctional status quo that tilts the legal playing field in favor of federal bureaucracies.

Finally, the Agency Accountability Act would make federal agencies accountable again by directing most fines, fees, and unappropriated proceeds to the Treasury, instead of letting federal agencies keep and spend them as they see fit.

With President Trump in the White House, elected on a promise to “drain the swamp,” we have a unique opportunity to pass all three of these bills. Doing so would constitute a fundamental shift of power in this country – a transfer of power, to paraphrase President Trump’s inaugural address, not merely from one party to another, but from Washington, D.C., back to the American people.

Conservatism for the Forgotten Man

February 17, 2017

Donald Trump’s presidency represents a substantive – and long overdue – indictment of Washington’s political and policymaking consensus.

For too long, Democrats and Republicans alike have clung to policy solutions that are no longer relevant to our evolving world and that fail to address the most urgent problems of our generation: economic insecurity, unequal opportunity, political marginalization.

These problems are why Donald Trump ran for president and why he won. Government did not create these problems. They were mostly caused by larger forces – like globalization, technology, and changing social attitudes – that are beyond the realm of public policy. But what government has failed to do is see that for millions of Americans these forces have not been welcomed as exciting innovations of “Progress.” They have been endured as attacks on their lives and livelihoods.

President Trump was elected to help these Forgotten Americans. And conservatives have a duty to help them too. Not by pouring more money into the same dysfunctional government programs that take power away from American workers and give it to government elites, but by changing the fundamental ground rules of our economy so that the American Dream is within the reach of all Americans again.

For generations, the U.S. economy worked by aligning the interests of people who might otherwise be adversaries. In over-simplified terms, it brought together proverbial “rich people” with money to invest and “not-rich people” who have labor to sell. They formed cooperative, profitable partnerships that helped each other, their families, their countries, and the world.

But with globalization a lot of investments that used to flow to places like Michigan or Arkansas now flow to places like India and China. The rich in the United States and the not-rich in other countries are now better off, but the American middle-class is being left behind.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We can make America work again – for all Americans – by bringing more of the global economy here rather than sending more of the American economy abroad.

A simple but powerful two-step federal tax reform would go a long way toward accomplishing this goal: eliminate the federal corporate tax altogether, and then raise the rates on investment income – dividends and capital gains – to treat it like ordinary income.

This would accomplish three things:

First, this would allow U.S. corporations to raise wages. Economists estimate that up to one-half of corporate tax revenue come directly from workers’ paychecks. Second, it would level the playing field between American workers and American investors. Globalization has disproportionately benefitted American investors compared to American workers, and the tax code should not unfairly compound that inequity.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, this new tax framework would actually tilt the playing field in the global economy in favor of the United States. Rather than competing against foreign tax havens, the United States would become the world’s most attractive tax haven. For foreign investors, this tax reform would be an offer they couldn’t refuse: zero tax on profits produced by American-based companies and jobs.

Our broken immigration system needs a similar fix. While immigration provides real benefits to the immigrants who come here and to those who employ them, workers in the same industries as new arrivals – including foreign-born and naturalized citizens – often face real loss.

There is no silver bullet solution to this problem. No one “comprehensive plan” will balance everyone out. But there are some small things we can do on the margins to begin to level the playing field.

The president has begun work on a border wall and other enforcement measures to help reduce illegal immigration. My colleague Sen. Tom Cotton has suggested limiting legal immigration to nuclear and not extended families. Those policies would help. Reducing low-skilled inflows and recruiting more high-skilled immigrants would help too.

Whether we’re talking about tax policy or immigration reform, the point is that we cannot fix our broken status quo, from the right or left, by giving more power to the same government that has failed at so much for so long. President Trump made this very point in his inaugural address: “[T]oday we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another, or from one party to another – but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People.”

Together, we can forge a new conservatism for the Forgotten Families of our Republic, meet the challenge the American people have put before us, and – as the saying goes - make America greater than ever.

Earmarks Would Only Weaken Congress

February 10, 2017

In November the American people voted to give Republicans unified control of the federal government because, in large part, we pledged to "drain the swamp" — that corrupt political culture prevailing in our nation's capital that enables elites to manipulate the levers of government to their advantage.

Changing business as usual in Washington is a tough fight. But we would be going the wrong way if Republicans were to lift the current ban on earmarks — those infamous provisos attached to spending bills that funnel taxpayer money to pet projects and parochial interests — as some have proposed.

The most that can be said of the proposal to revive earmarks — a practice Republicans voted to prohibit in 2010 — is that it begins from a correct observation that political dysfunction is plaguing Washington today. Article I of the Constitution vests "all legislative powers" in Congress. But in recent decades, legislators have been giving away many of their lawmaking powers to the executive branch.

So today, just as the vast majority of the federal government's rules are written by unelected bureaucrats in the executive branch, these same bureaucrats often enjoy more discretion than members of Congress in deciding how federal taxpayer money is spent.

Republicans are rightfully frustrated by this state of affairs, which has led some of our colleagues in the House to float the idea of bringing back earmarks. As they tell it, reviving earmarks would strengthen Congress by reclaiming the legislature's most potent authority: the power of the purse.

Congress needs to assert its power of the purse, but not in this manner. Letting members of Congress take credit for federal money steered to their constituents does not fix the incentive problem at the core of today's congressional dysfunction. In fact, it would only worsen it.

As anyone who worked in Washington before 2010 will remember, earmarking was not the innocuous exercise of Congress' constitutional spending power; it was the tool lobbyists and leadership used to compel members to vote for bills that their constituents — and sometimes their conscience — opposed.

The good news is that there's a better way to strengthen Congress. Instead of reviving earmarks, which would ultimately only further weaken the legislative branch, there are other ways to reinvigorate Congress' power of the purse without also reinvigorating special interests in Washington.

For example, Congress can use the authorization process to reform how federal agencies spend taxpayer dollars to ensure the process for selecting funding priorities and recipients is transparent, merit-based and consistent with congressional intent. We can also rewrite our outdated budget process rules in a way that puts Congress back into the driver's seat instead of the current role of junior partner to the executive branch.

As the co-leaders of the Article I Project, a network of House and Senate conservatives committed to putting Congress — and, by extension, the American people — back in control of Washington, our mission is to make Congress once again responsible, both in discharging its constitutional duties and making itself accountable for the consequences.

Unfortunately, bringing back earmarks would not do this. It would make our job harder, make Congress weaker and make federal power more centralized, less accountable and more corrupt. That's why we'll be working to keep the ban in place, and we invite conservatives to join us.

An unabridged version of this article, co-written by Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-TX), first appeared in The Washington Examiner.

A Judge's Judge

February 3, 2017

Perhaps no other issue played a bigger role in the 2016 presidential election than filling the vacancy of Justice Antonin Scalia’s Supreme Court seat. “Millions of voters said this was the single most important issue to them when they voted for me for president,” President Trump said Tuesday night.

And President Trump then went on to make one of the best choices of his young administration. Judge Neil Gorsuch of the United States Court of Appeals for the Tenth Circuit is a tremendous pick for the Supreme Court.

First, Judge Gorsuch is unquestionably qualified. He graduated with honors from Harvard Law School and received a doctorate in Jurisprudence from Oxford. He clerked for three brilliant and well-respected jurists: Judge David Sentelle on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, Justice Byron White, and Justice Anthony Kennedy. In 2005, he joined the Department of Justice as Principal Deputy Attorney General, and he became a judge on the Tenth Circuit in 2006 – thanks to a 100-0 confirmation vote by the Senate – where he has sat for the last decade. You could not ask for a better legal education or a stronger record of accomplishment.

Second, and most importantly, Judge Gorsuch has the correct approach to the law. He is a judge’s judge. He is the type of judge who believes that the law has right answers and that the law is not simply a tool to achieve political goals. He decides cases based on what the law says, not what he may want the law to say. As Judge Gorsuch observed in his remarks accepting President Trump’s nomination, “A judge who likes every outcome he reaches is very likely a bad judge, stretching for results he prefers rather than those the law demands.”

This is the central insight of the conservative legal movement that Justice Scalia helped shape. Judges do not have a roving commission to address the big policy questions we debate in Congress and the public square. The judge’s role is to apply the law to the facts of the case before it and, in the case of the Supreme Court, provide guidance to the lower courts so that they can resolve difficult and consequential legal questions. Judge Gorsuch understands the difference between the judge, the legislator, and the citizen, and that’s reflected in his work on the bench.

Third, Judge Gorsuch’s written opinions are simply brilliant. They are digestible to lawyers and non-lawyers alike—and this is crucial because the judiciary belongs to everyone in the country, not just attorneys. Two cases in particular stand out.

In 1984, when the Court decided Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., they did not know they were issuing what would become one of the most cited cases in Court history. Chevron held that courts must defer to an agency interpretation of a statute if the statute is ambiguous. The problem with Chevron, as Judge Gorsuch pointed out in his dissent in Gutierrez-Brizuela v. Lynch, is that Chevron divests the courts of their obligation to “say what the law is,” as former Chief Justice John Marshall wrote in the seminal case Marbury v. Madison. It has led to a system in which executive agencies not only make the law and enforce the law but also interpret it. This is an egregious violation of the separation of powers at the heart of our constitutional republic.

Another notable case, in which Gorsuch was the lone dissenter, involved an 11-year old student who was arrested for generating fake burps in class. Gorsuch concluded that clearly established law prevented the arrest and that the child’s parents should prevail in a lawsuit against the school officials who called the police. This common-sense reasoning is far too rare in our justice system these days.

This Supreme Court vacancy was a central issue in the 2016 election and the people have now spoken. I plan to honor the election results by working as hard as I can to ensure that the Senate confirms Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, and I urge Americans of all political stripes to do the same.

The Opportunity to Defund Planned Parenthood

January 27, 2017

“Life is winning in America,” declared Vice President Mike Pence today as he spoke to the countless thousands of Americans assembled on the national mall for the annual March for Life. Vice President Pence’s presence at the rally was itself evidence of the momentum behind the pro-life movement in America. Today marked the March for Life’s 44th consecutive year, but it was the first time that a government official as high ranking as the Vice President attended in person to speak to the crowd.

This timing of the Vice President’s attendance was fitting, as it comes on the heels of President Trump’s momentous decision earlier in the week to reinstate the “Mexico City Policy,” which prevents American taxpayers from financing international organizations that perform or promote abortions abroad.

Established in 1984 by President Reagan, the Mexico City Policy was revoked by President Obama and then, in one of this first major actions after taking the oath of office, restored by President Trump. To account for the shifting landscape of today’s global health and foreign-aid environment, President Trump’s executive order also modernized the Mexico City Policy to ensure that it applies to other U.S. foreign-aid funding sources beyond simply the USAID family-planning account.

But despite these successes and reasons for optimism, there is still more work to do. Life may be winning in America, but it has not yet won. And it won’t ever win so long as the United States Congress permits a dime of taxpayer money to flow to the abortion giant Planned Parenthood.

Planned Parenthood doesn't just lead the abortion business in America – it performed nearly one million abortions between 2011 and 2013 – but abortions lead Planned Parenthood. Of the “pregnancy services” offered by the organization, 94 percent are abortions, according to their 2013-2014 annual report, while prenatal care and adoption referrals account for only 5 percent and 0.5 percent, respectively.
And what does this horrifying business model earn Planned Parenthood from the federal government? More than $520 million every year in taxpayer-funded subsidies.

This is indefensible and it must stop. Luckily, Congress will have an opportunity in the next several weeks to end federal funding for Planned Parenthood and transfer its subsidies to other women’s and community health clinics.

When the House and Senate vote to repeal Obamacare, as Republican leaders from both chambers have committed to do, we can attach a provision that would eliminate all taxpayer funding of Planned Parenthood. The privileged status of the Obamacare repeal measure, which requires only 51 votes to pass the Senate, presents a unique opportunity for Congress, once and for all, to revoke Planned Parenthood’s lavish government subsidies, which have long been a stain on our nation’s great history.

With today’s March for Life as our inspiration, I can think of no better reason for Congress to move swiftly and boldly to repeal Obamacare as soon as possible.

Inauguration Day

January 20, 2017

Inauguration Day is a hopeful time in America. A new president brings new opportunities to fix what’s broken in our government, to think afresh about old problems, and to recommit ourselves to the shared American project of working together to build a more perfect union.

But the inauguration of a new president – that fleeting moment when the past meets the future and power is peacefully transferred from one administration to the next – also encourages us to take stock of our present situation and reflect on the challenges we face as a nation.

Conventional wisdom holds that the great malady plaguing American life today is the toxic combination of political polarization and social fragmentation. And there’s a great deal of truth to this diagnosis. We are, as one astute observer put it, a “fractured republic,” fraught with intense divisions and deep anxieties that are not easily resolved.

But I believe our polarization is merely a symptom of a far deeper problem in America today – a problem that actually unites us, more than it divides us.

Ask the American people to share their opinions on a particular public policy – be it immigration, health care, same-sex marriage, or any hotly contested issue – and you’ll likely receive a wide variety of responses. These are our dividing lines. But ask them whether they think their opinions actually matter to those charged with making policy – ask them whether their elected representatives truly represent their interests – and the public is suddenly unified.

A recent public poll found that three-quarters of Americans believe most elected government officials “don’t care what people like me think.” What do they care about? Catering to the narrow agendas of the powerful and well-connected, according to the same supermajority of respondents, who said the federal government is “run by a few big interests” rather than “for the benefit of all the people.”

The American people know they are no longer in charge of their government. They know each year their elected representatives in Washington grow increasingly indifferent, if not downright hostile, to their interests and concerns. And they know – thanks to last year’s election – that they no longer have to tolerate a political establishment committed to taking power away from the people, first by pulling it up away from states and localities and toward the federal government, and then by consolidating it in the hands of Washington’s unelected bureaucrats.

This drive toward centralization of policymaking power is rooted in an unspoken distrust of the American people’s capacity to govern themselves. But the history of America, and the principles of the Republican Party, prove this distrust to be utterly unfounded. As Abraham Lincoln – America’s first Republican president – put it in his first inaugural address: “Why should there not be patient confidence in the ultimate justice of the people? Is there any better or equal hope in the world?”

On the eve of America's civil war, Lincoln placed his trust - and his hope for a brighter future - squarely on the side of the people. As we seek to heal the wounds of division in our own day, we should follow his lead.

Winning back the people's trust must be the primary goal of the Republican Party as we assume unified control over Congress and the presidency, and there's only one way to accomplish it: by putting our trust back in the people.

The First Step on the Road to Real Health Care Reform

January 13, 2017

This Thursday at about 1:30 pm, the United States Senate took the first step on the road to real health care reform: repealing Obamacare.

By a 51-48 margin, the Senate approved a budget resolution that instructs the relevant committees in the House and Senate to produce a bill by January 27 that will repeal Obamacare. Once that bill has been drafted, it can then be passed through both the House and Senate by simple majorities before it is signed into law by President Trump.

As big a victory as that will be – fulfilling a campaign promise that virtually every Republican has been making for the past six years – our work will only have just begun.

Although our nation’s health care system was far from perfect before the misnamed Affordable Care Act became law, it only got worse under the weight of Obamacare. So, it will take time to undo the damage Obamacare has caused and develop common-sense, consensus policies that actually improve our health care system. But the schedule included in this week’s budget resolution gives us the time – and the deadlines – we need to craft these fixes.

Many congressional Democrats do not want an Obamacare repeal effort to succeed, so they are spreading false stories to scare up opposition to Republicans’ reform plans.

They claim that repealing the floundering Affordable Care Act would immediately throw low-income families off Medicaid or raise insurance premiums for those with pre-existing conditions. This is nonsense.

Just as it took years for Obamacare to be implemented, it will take years for it to be undone. The repeal bill that passed the Senate and House last year included a two-year window for the existing Obamacare infrastructure to stay in place, during which time the architecture for a new system could be installed. The repeal bill that will come at the end of this month will look much the same.

What we do not want to do is repeat the same mistake that Democrats made in 2010: use a secretive process, driven by wealthy political insiders, to craft a multi-thousand-page bill that few people have read and even fewer understand, and then ram it through Congress on partisan lines.

Instead, we should develop a series of smaller, more targeted bills designed to increase the quality of health care while bringing down the costs, by removing unnecessary and harmful federal regulations and mandates. We should unbundle health insurance and health care by making it easier for Americans to buy catastrophic health insurance and use Health Savings Accounts. We should block grant Medicaid funding to the states so that they can tailor the program to the specific needs of their diverse populations.
All of this can be done separately, one policy change at a time. And we may well get some Democrats to help us.

But before we can make these reforms, before we can make affordable and high-quality health care available to all Americans, first we have to repeal Obamacare. And after this week, we are one step closer to accomplishing that.

The Right Way to Repeal Obamacare

January 6, 2017

Last November, the American people voted for change in Washington. They elected Republican majorities to both chambers of Congress and elected a Republican President because, as a party, we pledged to fix the broken status quo of the past eight years. Reforming our dysfunctional federal government and restoring sanity to our nation’s capital starts with relieving the American people from the burdens and excessive costs of our defective health-care system and requiring Washington to once again live within its means.

These objectives are two sides of the same coin. Enacting real healthcare reform that will clean up the mess created by Obamacare is a crucial step toward paying down our nearly $20 trillion national debt and putting the federal government on a path of fiscal sustainability. For this reason, some have called on Congress to use the first major legislative vehicle of the year – a budget resolution for fiscal year 2017 – to repeal and replace Obamacare and to balance the federal budget.

I, for one, would love to see a bill that simultaneously repeals and replaces Obamacare while also balancing the budget, but this approach fails to account for the protracted and piecemeal nature of the legislative process.

The bigger and more complex a piece of legislation is, the harder it is to build a consensus around it. So, instead of trying to accomplish everything at once, we should proceed step by step, starting with the measure that we know already has majority support: repealing Obamacare.

Since 2010 most Republican members of Congress – myself included – were elected and reelected because we promised to take any opportunity possible to end this disastrous law. In December 2015 House and Senate Republicans followed through on that promise and passed a bill, H.R. 3762, that repealed much of Obamacare. President Obama promptly vetoed the bill, but the exercise was not a fruitless effort because it established the minimum standards against which any future Obamacare repeal bills would be measured. H.R. 3762 zeroed out Obamacare’s individual and employer mandates, scrapped the taxes, revived health savings accounts, and rolled back the Medicaid expansion and subsidies.

Majorities in the House and Senate are on record voting for all of these items, and we owe it to the Americans who voted for us this past November to ensure that we do it again, this time with a President who will sign it into law.

That’s Step One, and we can take it next week by passing the budget resolution for fiscal year 2017. Step Two is to tackle our fiscal crisis, which will involve replacing Obamacare with a health-care law that actually works.

For the past six years, Republicans in Congress have been developing free-market health-care reform proposals that will lower costs, improve quality, and increase access for all Americans. But we have yet to build the consensus around a detailed plan that we can enact into law. So, Step Two is going to take some time to complete, but we can start by passing a budget resolution for fiscal year 2018 later this year that sets our new, unified Republican federal government on a path to balance in 10 years without the use of budgetary gimmicks or tax increases.

The American people voted for change in 2016. But they know it can’t all come at once. The Republican majorities in Congress have a lot of work ahead of us, and the only way we can do it all is to proceed one step at a time.