Alfonse D'Amato

Special elections sent a special message to both parties

Posted

The recent special congressional elections should send a signal to both parties. The outcomes weren’t really surprising, because the seats were held by Republicans who took appointments in the Trump administration. But the way the campaigns were waged, and their potential impact on the Trump agenda as well as the 2018 midterm elections, cannot be overlooked.

Democrats and their far-left allies tried to turn these elections into referendums on President Trump. In the race in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District alone, they raised and spent millions of dollars in an attempt to pummel Republicans. But the results merely confirmed and hardened the divisions between the parties.

Democrats sent an ominous sign that simply being against Trump and his policies may not be enough to change the balance of power in Washington. In fact, to the extent that the special elections pitted the president against a principal leader of the Democrat party, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, her overwhelming unpopularity hurt her party’s candidates and helped the Republicans.

For Republicans, the special elections also sent a clear message that they’d better get down to the business of pressing a pro-growth, pro-working-middle-class agenda if they hope to control Congress after the midterm elections and solidify the GOP’s hold on power. If the president and the Republican Congress don’t produce legislative successes that keep the economy growing and the country slips into another recession, Republicans could very well lose Congress in 2018 and the White House in 2020.

The best thing the president and Congress can do now is move aggressively to close a deal addressing looming health insurance cost increases and make needed reforms in Obamacare so they can turn to the pressing need for tax reform. To do it, the party will need to reach past “repeal and replace” rhetoric to come up with practical solutions aimed at containing health care costs and providing Americans with the broadest possible access to basic health care.

GOP leaders would be wise to listen to Republican members of Congress and GOP governors who have argued for repairing Obamacare’s flaws without throwing millions of people off health insurance. They should remember that many of these people are working, middle-class voters who supported Trump because of his promise to focus on job growth and improving their economic outlook. And they should recognize that when people lose insurance coverage, they flood hospital emergency rooms, shifting huge costs to hospitals’ “charity care” and all the insured who help carry this uncompensated expense.

Once health care reform legislation clears Congress, lawmakers must quickly turn to a vigorous job-growth agenda. Our economy is growing at an anemic pace. We need to boost business expansion and encourage more hiring to lift more people into the workforce. By lowering the U.S. corporate tax rate and repatriating up to $2 trillion in corporate assets now stranded overseas, our country would have ample financial resources to rebuild our crumbling infrastructure, and potentially create lots of good-paying middle-class construction jobs.

Washington must address the “skill gap” that has left behind too many Americans who aren’t working, as a result of shrinking industries and lack of transferrable skills. Trump recently addressed the need to retrain these workers and help companies hire them. The U.S. should also look carefully at job-training programs in places like Germany, where government policies help ensure job creation and retention. This is an approach that could get broad bipartisan support, making it easier to actually get something positive done.

And even in other areas of contention, the president should keep pushing ahead with creative solutions. Take the proposed border wall. Say what you will about building a wall along the Mexican border, you have to give Trump credit for coming up with the idea to transform it into a green-energy project on a massive scale by covering it with solar panels (preferably made in the USA) along much of its length. This could turn obstruction of illegal immigration into a modern-day Hoover Dam project. And in an ironic twist, the “energy wall” would generate so much power that some of its electricity could be sold on the Mexican side of the border, meaning that Mexico might help pay for the wall after all.

Add some long-overdue tax reform, unleashing more domestic energy production to keep energy costs down, relieving unduly burdensome regulation of U.S. businesses and making trade fair for American exporters, and these initiatives could unleash the extra growth that would help create jobs and raise the economy to new heights. That would help make and keep America great!

Al D’Amato, a former U.S. senator from New York, is the founder of Park Strategies LLC, a public policy and business development firm. Comments about this column? ADAmato@liherald.com.