Commonalities Surrounding Repeal Drives: Prohibition, Right-to-Work, and the Affordable Care Act

Three measures enacted by Congress since 1900 have drawn especially prominent repeal drives—Prohibition, Section 14b of the Taft-Hartley Act, and the Affordable Care Act. What can be learned from an investigation of the commonalities surrounding these drives—their causes, contexts, and effects? I look into the topics of political geography, Congress’s deliberative content and style, the U.S. system of vertical federalism, the U.S. system of elections, the role of crises, and the consequences of conflict. One line of takeaway is the following. In each of these three policy enterprises—Prohibition, 14b, and the ACA—we see a kind of conflict in which extreme intensity has joined with striking geographic differentiation in views. As a practical matter, the policymaking process in these cases has enrolled a multiplicity of actors, including emphatically the states as well as the public, and it has extended across time. All this activity has arguably constituted the policymaking process. In these instances, this is the way the country has been making its decisions—jaggedly and extendedly. A congressional statute can be just a first draft. For their part, the three repeal drives have served as components of policymaking, not responses to it. Thus also with “backlash.”