| Get Jonathan Bernstein's newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Health-care policy reporter Jonathan Cohn has a Thursday Huffpost column about the chances of Congress passing legislation this year to control prescription drug prices. He concludes that it's possible, but difficult. What's really interesting is his analysis of one of the big reasons it might happen: Because the House of Representatives passed a prescription drug bill in 2019, and Democrats will have learned from that process. Here's Cohn: Legislation of any kind requires translating concepts into legislative language, building alliances with interest groups and getting official projections from the Congressional Budget Office. It also requires negotiations among legislative factions ― which, in the case of H.R. 3, led to some very public disputes between House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and members like Representative Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), a leader of the party's progressive wing. However unpleasant those conversations may have been, they produced a rough consensus on what each wing of the party can support. That will make it easier to get legislation through the House again and it should help in the Senate as well, where the distribution of votes may be different but the position of each faction is roughly the same.
And here's Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell this week on Republican priorities while Democrat Joe Biden is president: One hundred percent of my focus is on stopping this new administration … We are confronted with severe challenges from the new administration and a narrow majority in the House and a 50-50 Senate to turn America into a socialist country, and that's 100% of my focus.
Look: Of course the opposition party is going to oppose. Not only is there nothing wrong with that; it's healthy. But if that's the entire focus of the opposition party, as it was throughout Barack Obama's presidency and appears to be so far during Joe Biden's presidency? That means that Republicans are skipping the hard work that, as Cohn describes, Democrats engaged in while Donald Trump was president. It's obvious that Democrats, who after all impeached Trump twice, did plenty of opposing during his four years in office, as they did during George W. Bush's presidency. It's just that they did a lot more than that, especially when they had a majority in at least one chamber of Congress, Democrats used the opportunity to get to work on legislating. Some of that was more for show than anything else and therefore they were able to duck some of the hardest questions, but even then there's a big difference between just criticizing the president and putting something into bill form, moving it through committee and then passing it on the House floor. Opposing everything is easy; it doesn't require any compromise within the party caucus, let alone the possibility of compromise with the other party. Putting ideas out in public gives the incumbent party something to criticize, and it diverts attention from pressing the case against the president. And there's a huge risk involved to the out-party in attempting to legislate. Some in the party may become so attached to their ideas that they'll be open to striking a deal with the president's party. That's anathema to McConnell, who has been governed by the idea that 100% opposition will blunt the popularity of the president's program by making it "controversial" and the expectation that the president will take the blame for stalemate and gridlock. It's not really clear that McConnell is correct about any of this. After all, Obama and President Bill Clinton were re-elected after four years of rejectionism. In both cases, Republicans made big gains in the first midterms of the presidency, but that may have had little to do with anything Republicans did. What is clear is that the strategy left Republicans with hardly any positive agenda during their two years of unified government in 2017-2018. Most famously, the decision to punt on an alternative to the Affordable Care Act during the six years that Republicans had a House majority and Obama in the White House contributed to their failure to enact a law once they had the opportunity. But it goes well beyond that. Look at what House Democrats did in 2006-2007 and 2019-2020, and then the full, active policy agenda evident at the beginning of the Obama and Biden presidencies — and then compare that to the almost empty agenda for Republicans in 2017. As Cohn says, it says a lot about the two parties: "Democrats are good at this work. Republicans are not. It's a reflection of who they are, what they are trying to accomplish." And you don't have to listen to Cohn; just hear what McConnell says. 1. Nate Persily at the Monkey Cage on Facebook's Trump decision. 2. Dan Drezner on getting the hesitant vaccinated. 3. Jane Mayer on Lee Atwater. 4. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Justin Fox on housing markets after the pandemic. 5. And Adam Serwer on Liz Cheney, then and now. My sense of things: Allies of democracy should accept as much help as they can get from whoever supplies it — but yes, it's probably true that if Cheney really wants to be a serious champion of the rule of law she has some significant and serious work to do. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You'll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close. | 
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