Are Republican Voters Interested in What Republican Lawmakers Are Doing?
"Those Republicans in Washington never do anything!" Actually, the House of Representatives spent last week passing 18 bills dealing with opioid addiction; the Senate passed one big comprehensive bill earlier. The legislation that passed the House aims to fight the crisis in a number of ways, "including helping pregnant mothers who suffer from addiction, increasing access to naloxone (a drug that can reverse the effects of an overdose), and creating a task force of patients, medical officials, advocacy groups, and federal agencies to establish guidelines for prescribing pain medication." The other bills would allow "patients to only partially fill opioid prescriptions, require the Food and Drug Administration to work with expert advisory committees before approving opioid products and drug labels and expand residential treatment programs for pregnant and postpartum opioid addicts." Maybe you think these are good ideas to address the country's addiction problems, maybe you don't; maybe you think this is a top priority, maybe you don't. Democrats are complaining that these bills authorize funds but they don't appropriate them -- i.e., give the federal agencies permission to spend the funds this way, but don't actually transfer the money. Republicans say funding will be addressed in the appropriations bills passed later this year. You can argue whether it's better to address the issue with one big bill, the way the Senate did, or to consider each idea separately. But it's impossible to dispute the House's action received a small fraction of the coverage that the Donald Trump-Paul Ryan summit received. And one of the biggest complaints revealed in the GOP primary is the argument from primary voters that Republicans on Capitol Hill aren't doing anything; they're out-of-touch, they're insulated, they have no idea about the kinds of problems that ordinary Americans face every day. Are Republican legislators really that insulated and out-of-touch? Or is it that voters hear exceptionally little about what Congress is actually doing? Doesn't a preponderance of the evidence suggest the political press -- following their audience -- finds legislation boring? It doesn't get clicks, it doesn't get ratings. It's much more fun and interesting to debate, "Did Donald Trump pretend to be a fake personal spokesman back in the 1990s?" than to calculate how much funding you need to provide for postpartum opioid addiction programs in order to see a real change in the scale of the problem. Meanwhile, President Obama's weekly video address also focused on addiction . . . and featured Seattle hip-hop artist Macklemore. Obama said, "This week, the House passed several bills about opioids -- but unless they also make actual investments in more treatment, it won't get Americans the help they need." But remember, Donald Trump is the worst for reducing politics to a celebrity-obsessed reality show! Julian Castro Surrenders to Progressives, Hoping to Preserve Veep Chances Back in the April 12 Jolt, we noted that the same Democrats who find Hillary Clinton to be too moderate and friendly to Wall Street see the same flaws in Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julian Castro. The former mayor of San Antonio and perpetual Democratic-party star of tomorrow has been hyped as Hillary Clinton's likely running mate since his 2012 convention speech, and HUD is perhaps best seen as the training-wheels stage for vice-president-in-waiting Castro. Progressives are objecting to the Distressed Asset Stabilization Program, which "allows mortgages going toward foreclosure to be sold to what HUD calls 'qualified bidders and encourages them to work with borrowers to help bring the loan out of default.'" Those qualified bidders include Wall Street banks, and in the progressive mind, those banks are the root of all evil. Deep in Politico's article from April we learned, "The mortgages in question tend to be delinquent for over two years." In the minds of Castro's progressive critics, if you don't pay your mortgage for two years, it's considered too mean and harsh to have your mortgage handled by a Wall Street bank. What's more, last year, HUD announced that in a change to the program last year, "loan servicers will now be required to delay foreclosure for a year and to evaluate all borrowers for the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) or a similar loss mitigation program." You don't pay your mortgage for two years, and they're still not allowed to foreclose for another year. But all it took was a little bad press, and Castro again started shifting the rules: The Federal Housing Authority will put out a new plan requiring investors to offer principal reduction for all occupied loans, start a new requirement that all loan modifications be fixed for at least five years and limit any subsequent increase to 1 percent per year, and create a "walk-away prohibition" to block any purchaser of single-family mortgages from abandoning lower-value properties in the hopes of preventing neighborhood blight. HUD officials say that the timing isn't a response to the activist pressure or the presidential campaign calendar. Uh-huh. Sorting Out the Bad Choice Before Us in November I'm #NeverTrump for life, but I hope my brethren recognize that if we think Trump is terrible choice for president (and he is) and Hillary is a terrible choice for president (and she is), then someone who concludes Trump is slightly less terrible than Hillary . . . is not that far from our own assessment. I find the incoherent authoritarian populist demagogue as bad as the corrupt oligarchic progressive pathological liar. (Cue jokes: "Wait, which one is which?") But if you find the incoherent authoritarian populist demagogue slightly less bad than the corrupt oligarchic progressive pathological liar . . . eh, it's not like we're miles apart. The bet of pro-Trump conservatives is that the ideologically unmoored, detail-averse mogul will get more right (and Right) by accident than Hillary, who will get everything wrong (and Left) deliberately. Those aren't particularly good odds, and the potential for Trump going wrong seems pretty catastrophic, but I can see that calculation. The real problem is when a self-described Constitutional conservative starts arguing that the incoherent authoritarian populist demagogue is a good choice. Similarly, if a conservative barely prefers the corrupt oligarchic progressive pathological liar devil that he knows over the incoherent authoritarian populist demagogue devil that he doesn't, that's not an outlandish perspective either. But once a conservative starts chanting, "Hooray for the corrupt oligarchic progressive pathological liar!". . . the distance between us starts to feel interstellar. 
Our old friend Daniel Hannan, British conservative member of the European Parliament and one of the loudest pro-American voice in that continent's politics, takes a look at the choice: Don't vote for an unfit candidate simply because you dislike another unfit candidate. Doing so makes you complicit. It means endorsing one of two amoral, power-hungry people who would very probably ignore their oath of office. As Vaclav Havel used to say in Czechoslovakia, living under a Communist regime doesn't mean that you have to legitimize it. A citizen can still retain his or her integrity by refusing to vote for the approved list, refusing to display party posters, refusing to repeat official slogans. And integrity matters. Indeed, at present, it's pretty much all that American conservatives have left. For the love of God, cousins, don't throw it away. ADDENDA: My podcast co-host, writing about the generational battle: "Generation X as a whole are pragmatists; we leave the optimism to our kids, the Millennials. We leave the pessimism to the Boomers. We're usually just trying to figure out how to make whatever situation is happening, work . . . Considering that the entire world has turned into a bad episode of VH-1's "I Love the '90s," maybe it's time to listen to the experts." Come on, it's not the 1990s again, just because Clinton is running for president, and there's talk about Newt Gingrich being veep, and Donald Trump is on the cover of People, and Prince is the top-selling musician lately, and Kurt Cobain is still releasing new music, and there's controversy about a sexually explicit Calvin Klein underwear ad, and musicians are wearing flannel again, and Batman is in the movie theaters, and Twin Peaks is coming on television . . . oh, wait a minute. I'm scheduled to appear on American Heartland with Dr. Grace on WBIX in Boston around 11:35 a.m. today, discussing Heavy Lifting. My book, a lighthearted look at the joys of adulthood, marriage and parenthood co-authored with cam Edwards, is just $16.03 on Amazon right now, 43 percent off the cover price.  | 
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