From the ever-popular Taylor inbox:
I find it amusing that Ramesh justifies Republican support for the drug bill on the grounds of inevitability. One problem with this argument is that Republicans did essentially nothing to enact a responsible drug bill. I remember clearly that Bush put out the word that he would sign ANY BILL sent to him. This was so irresponsible that it tricked me into thinking that Rove had figured nothing would ever actually pass Congress and so Bush could get credit for being for something popular while secretly being responsible. Needless to say, I was terribly wrong.
The fact that Bush was looking to pass a prescription drug bill to win political capital – rather than to cut his losses – was well understood at the time. And it didn’t work. As Jim DeMint noted in The Wall Street Journal the other day, “Medicare prescription drugs didn’t win us a ‘permanent majority,’ but it cost us our credibility on entitlement reform.”
That it did.