young guns

A new gener Ation

of

ConservAtive Le A ders

eric ca ntor, paul rya n, and k ev in mcca rth y

New York

Threshold Editions London Toronto

Sydney

c h a p t e r f ou r

health-Care reform and the new way in washington

t was my fortieth birthday. The President of the United States was talking to me. And heres the kicker: he was complimenting me, my family, and my ideas. It happened in Baltimore, early in 2010, at the House Republicans yearly, members-only get together. When we were planning the meeting, we decided to do something different. We invited President Obama to come and talk to usnot something opposing parties usually do. But then the president, to his credit, did something different, too. He accepted. So President Obama comes to our retreat and we have a substantive exchange about our different visions for spurring job growth and reforming our health-care system.

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C ong r e s sM A n PAuL ry A n

Then we have lunch. And as Im sitting there, surrounded by my family and other House Republicans, with my sixyear-old son on my knee, the president picks me out of the crowd and starts talking to me. Just days before, I had released my Roadmap for Americas Future, a detailed blueprint for how we can bring spending under control, secure the future of Social Security and Medicare, and reclaim the American idea. We had been sparring, civilly but seriously, with the president about many of the challenges addressed in the Roadmap, so when the president singled me out, I expected to be barraged with criticism. Instead, I was showered with compliments. President Obama called my Roadmap a serious proposal. He called me a pretty sincere guy. He even said I have a beautiful family. It seemed too good to last. It was. It took less than seventy-two hours for the presidents budget director, Peter Orszag, to attack my plan as a risky scheme. Democrats circulated a so-called fact sheet peppered liberally with fighting words like privatize and tired hits against President Bush. They charged that my plan was a tax cut for the rich, which would expose seniors to greater risks and/or lower-quality coverage. And then, just to be sure they got their point across, Democratic House members held a conference call with the media to hyperventilate that Roadmap supporters are frozen in the ice of their own indifference. Im not making this up. There is something about the alternative vision I put

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Health- Care Re form and the New Way in Washing ton

forth that must have really gotten under their skin. In fact, my plan was the polar opposite of what the Democrats were charging it was, and I think they knew that. Far from gutting entitlement programs for retirees and the needy, my plan would save these programs from looming bankruptcy. But too often in Washington you can judge the veracity of a political argument by its decibel level: the less substantive the talking points, the louder they are shouted. And Democrats were screaming at the top of their lungs.

As I look back on it, the coordinated effort to change the subject from their budget-busting policies and to demagogue an alternative that actually tackles the fiscal crisis theyre accelerating makes sense. It fits the pattern of the way public policyparticularly health-care reformhas been debated in Washington over the past eighteen months. All of us learned in grade school (and from watching Schoolhouse Rock!) the way a bill becomes a law. It starts with an open debate. There is opportunity for bipartisan input. Then there is an up or down vote in both houses the House and the Senateon the merits of the bill. Then, if the House and Senate bills are not absolutely identical, there is a conference with members from both houses to

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