Over the last four years, there has been little, if any, policy debates in America. The Republican Party has made clear that all they stand for is loyalty to President Trump. I wish I was being hyperbolic, but I am not. In 2020, the Republican Party made the historic decision not to write a convention platform and instead assert their blind loyalty to President Trump.
In light of the recent defeat of President Trump, hopefully Republicans will once again become a party of ideas and innovation. A plethora of ideas and debates is what made America the greatest democracy in the world and what will restore America to its place as a shining city upon a hill.
Instead of fighting over whether people should wear masks to prevent the spread of the coronavirus, let's talk how we can continue to improve the U.S. healthcare system. The Republican Party of yesteryear had some good ideas about how to make healthcare more affordable. Going back to the 1990s, Republicans advocated for medical malpractice reform to rein in frivolous lawsuits and bring down healthcare costs.
In addition, its it worth remembering that Obamacare did not just materialize out of nowhere. President Obama’s signature legislation is almost an exact copy of Romneycare. When now Senator Romney (R-UT) was Governor of Massachusetts he passed Romneycare to provide healthcare to everyone in his state. Romneycare mandated that everyone in Massachusetts buy health coverage or be subject to a fine, set up health exchanges to sell insurance and provided subsidies to those who could not afford healthcare.
Like healthcare, there was a time not long ago when Republicans and Democrats alike believed that something must be done to tackle the climate crisis. In 1970, President Nixon issued Reorganization Plan 3 which created the Environmental Protection Agency as a structure to, “make a coordinated attack on the pollutants which debase the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the land that grows our food.”
Furthermore, it was Republicans who introduced the idea of cap-and-trade as a market-based approach to environmental regulation. In the 1980s, President Reagan conceived the first cap-and-trade program to phase out leaded gasoline and in 1989, President George H. W. Bush proposed a cap-and-trade program to cut sulfur dioxide emissions from coal-fired power plants.
However, during the George W. Bush administration and continuing through the Trump Administration, the Republican Party decided they no longer cared about the environment. Under President Bush, the U.S. increased domestic oil drilling and allowed companies to write off exploration costs. With President Trump, the GOP fully embraced a climate change denier who referred to climate change as hoax and a concept created by the Chinese to hurt America.
For years, the Democratic Party has made clear that climate change is a global emergency and America has no time to waste in tackling this pressing issue. With the defeat of President Trump, Republicans should embrace reality again and work with Democrats to come up with the best bipartisan solutions to tackle the climate crisis.
No political party has a monopoly on good ideas. While many of us will feel more aligned with one camp or another, many of the best solutions to the problems we face come from collaboration and listening to one another. Hopefully, under the leadership of President Biden, America’s legislators will once again embrace ideas, debate and bipartisanship.
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