PHILADELPHIA — Congressional Republicans know they have an opportunity to move the GOP agenda in a way the party has not seen in the modern era, and they are willing to put internal squabbles aside to achieve it.
“It’s a moment in time — a moment in history,” said New York’s Chris Collins during the GOP retreat here this week.
“We’ve got folks who want to go 60 miles an hour, folks that want to go 80 miles an hour, and some of these folks now want to go 100 miles an hour,” he said. “That’s our differences. But we’re all driving down the same road.”
Collins said that when President Obama was in the White House, Republicans turned on each other out of frustration. But now that there’s a Republican sitting at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue ready to sign whatever bills they pass, they will put those differences aside.
“These members who were acting up I think will be giving Donald J. Trump the president a lot of latitude because we’re going in the same direction,” he said.
In the last few Congresses, fiscal hawks and libertarian-leaning members like those who make up the House Freedom Caucus caused headaches for then-Speaker John Boehner. They balked at government-funding levels leadership agreed to with Obama; they shut down the government; they let the nation default on its debt for the first in its history. And they chased the Ohioan not just from the speakership but also into retirement.
Before Trump’s surprise Election Day victory, they were saber rattling at his successor, Wisconsin’s Paul Ryan, whom rank-and-file begged to take the speakership because no other consensus candidate existed.
But now there is no such talk from Freedom Caucus’ new chairman, North Carolina’s Mark Meadows.
“The Freedom Caucus stands ready to work hand-in-glove with this new administration to make sure he has the tools necessary to fulfill the promises that he made on the campaign trail [that] all of us made…and I think that he is going to find a ready, willing and able partner” in the 40-some-member caucus, Meadows said.
Republicans believe voters’ gave Trump a mandate and agree they will do everything to help him fulfill it.
“Our job right now is to try to follow through” on the campaign’s promises, said Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois.
Leadership has also pledged to incorporate Trump’s agenda into their long wish list. “We are on the same page as the administration,” Ryan said.
“For myself, I intend to stick to the plan and make as much progress as we can,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky.
“All of us understand there’s only one reason we have this opportunity — it’s President Trump,” Collins said.
That reality, however, will test some members’ resolve to stick to their principles. Trump is talking about massive spending projects that normally would be anathema to the Freedom Caucus and deficit hawks.
Asked to square their mantra of no new expenditures without corresponding budget cuts with Trump’s desire to construct a wall along the U.S.-Mexican border that would cost as much as $15 billion, and roll out a $1 trillion infrastructure initiative, lawmakers claim there is no conflict.
“We’re not going to drive a hole in the deficit,” said Collins, one of Trump’s top lieutenants on Capitol Hill.
“It is our belief that we can offset it and yet at the same time I’ll stay true to my commitment that we’re going to give the president the tools necessary, whether it is a non-offset spending on a short-term basis that we find the offsets at a later date, but I think we can find them now,” Meadows said of a supplemental spending bill now under discussion to pay for the wall.
Just a few months ago, his membership balked at an additional spending spending bill to help Flint, Mich., recover from its municipal water crisis as well as funding to combat the Zika virus.
“I think Speaker Ryan talked about the fact that we are fiscal conservatives so we will find a responsible way to fund that. But in doing that, we’re committed to making sure that supplemental gets passed,” Meadows said. “I think it will find great conservative support.”
Meadows said he has already directed his staff to find savings from elsewhere in the budget.
He ordered them to find “reasonable” offsets, he said. “We have a $1 trillion budget. I would hope that we could find $15 billion over 10 years” in it.
The newfound GOP unity, meanwhile, has Democrats scratching their heads as they watch Republicans abandon their past efforts to reduce spending, and chase huge new infrastructure plans.
“The same Republicans who howled ‘fiscal responsibility’ when it comes to investments to help working families are apparently willing to light billions of taxpayer dollars on fire and add to the federal deficit in order to build Trump’s useless border wall,” charged Drew Hammill, spokesman for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. “The wall is a multi-billion dollar boondoggle in the making, and Republicans should be embarrassed about their brazen hypocrisy in enabling it.”
