President Trump can claim, with some merit, that the 2018 midterm elections went well for his party. Especially if the results hold in Florida, Republicans did well, considering the hurricane-force winds blowing in their faces. But either way, Trump has still lost his House majority. That’s not a small thing.
Trump will now be subjected to constant investigation unless and until he gets it back. His agenda, to the extent that it is a Republican agenda, will also be cut off in the House.
So how should Trump react to this? We have a suggestion: Avoid taking the sharp, partisan tack that former President Barack Obama took when his party lost the House of Representatives, after the “shellacking” that Democrats got in 2010.
Trump must continue to do his job as an executive. He will keep appointing judges and perhaps justices. He will be responsible for rule-making and regulation. But what he must avoid now is the sort of phone-and-pen presidency that caused Obama’s legacy to be as short and as bitter as it was. He must work with Democrats wherever he can find common ground, without sacrificing his principles.
After he lost Congress, Obama essentially refused to work with Republicans on anything. Instead of compromising and looking for what priorities he might share with congressional Republicans, Obama began immediately to campaign against them.
His “We Can’t Wait” slogan was aimed at the heart of the U.S. Constitution. He tried to persuade Americans that his personal political agenda was too important to abide by the lawful constitutional process or suffer rejection at the hands of the people’s duly elected representatives.
This was Obama’s rationale for doing through the bureaucracy whatever he no longer could do through legislation. And yes, for a few glorious years or months, he succeeded. The Supreme Court had to check Obama’s ambitions again and again, and Obama suffered an astounding 44 unanimous losses at the Supreme Court, significantly more than presisdents George W. Bush’s 30 and Bill Clinton’s 31 such losses.
That’s right — in many cases, Obama’s own Supreme Court appointees joined their other seven colleagues in ruling against Obama, so weak were the arguments for his administration’s position and so ambitious were his attempts to grab extra power that the executive does not deserve.
Despite the setbacks of the checks and balances in the Constitution, Obama still succeeded in heaping many new and costly regulations on American businesses and consumers, such as the Clean Power Plan, the overtime rule, and an abundance of other rules designed to harass landowners, gun-owners, and anti-abortion Christians. And guess what’s happened to those rules now? What one president does on his own, the next can undo on his own.
A large number of late Obama administration rules were repealed by Congress immediately after Trump’s election, under the Congressional Review Act. And the way CRA works, not only were they repealed, but no future president can enact similar rules until new legislation is passed authorizing them. As for the rest of Obama’s rules — related to green electricity, Obamacare, fuel standards, and the like — Trump has simply been undoing them through the regulatory process. The result is that there is almost nothing left of Obama’s presidency, save for the judges he appointed and the remnants of his partisan healthcare law.
Even as he shreds the last remnants of the Obama era, Trump must appreciate the need to avoid making his presidency as temporary as his predecessor’s. Trump has already had the opportunity to reform the tax code and make permanent regulatory changes. Now what he must do is work together with Democrats on his other priorities — specifically on infrastructure and serious criminal justice reform. There might be still other areas where Trump and soon-to-be-Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., can agree, such as a trade deal with the United Kingdom and China and other countries in Asia and the Pacific.
Obama tried to govern unilaterally for most of his presidency, and as a result, he has almost no legacy left, except for a massive weakening of the Democratic Party from which it still hasn’t recovered.
Trump should take the opposite course. He should find ways to work constructively with the opposition. He need not sacrifice his ideals or act inconsistently with his administration’s priorities, but he can make deals and compromise for the greater good.
