The GOP: Now the test begins

last updated 8 January 2015

“The most encouraging thing about the Republican triumph in last week’s midterm elections,” said Jeff Jacoby in The Boston Globe, “is that so many Republicans acknowledged that it wasn’t a Republican triumph.” Rather, the GOP’s retaking of the House, and its gain of seats in the Senate, was a “second chance” from an electorate alarmed by “the extremely liberal Obama-Pelosi agenda of the past two years.” To truly win the public’s support, Republicans must now show “they have learned from the failure of the previous GOP majority,” and reject the corrupt, “pork-and-earmark” budgeting culture and reckless deficit spending that turned voters against the party following the Bush years.

Americans say government is “too big” and “lacks accountability,” said Republican pollster Frank I. Luntz in The Washington Post. They want the new Congress to spur jobs growth, but not by “subsidizing government jobs with taxpayer dollars.” They want a balanced budget and a smaller, less-intrusive federal government. The Tea Party “has already put Republicans on notice: Deliver or get dumped.” To deliver, the new House majority must first whittle away at President Obama’s health-care bill, said Michael Tanner in the New York Post. Exit polls showed that about half the voters want to repeal the bill altogether—“an almost unprecedented level of opposition for a major entitlement expansion.” Obama can veto any attempt at full repeal, but Republicans can still “begin the step-by-step dismantling of Obamacare.” With House control, the GOP can refuse to fund the law’s implementation and roll back aspects of the bill that are also unpopular with Democrats. Republicans must also “lay out their own positive alternatives” for confronting “health-care costs and the uninsured,” such as permitting the purchase of insurance across state lines.

Positive alternatives would be nice, for a change, said Ross Douthat in The New York Times. The Democrats may have had the “wrong answers” to the country’s economic and budget problems, but for too long the Republican Party has often seemed “to have no answers whatsoever.” Republicans are against the health-care bill, tax increases, and cap and trade, “but have a world of trouble saying what they might actually be for.” How does the country slow the growth of Social Security and Medicare and health-care costs? Cut the budget deficit? Jump-start economic growth? Unless Republicans get “serious about policy,” they’ll “find themselves as unprepared to govern as they are today.”