If Hillary Clinton is elected president, congressional Democrats are likely to push her to move to the left and embrace much of the agenda of Bernie Sanders, her opponent for the presidential nomination. If Donald Trump wins, Republicans in Congress intend to be a check on him, pressing him to avoid impulsive decisions and go along with conservative policies.
Democrats may have an easier time. In her campaign for the nomination, Clinton proved to be malleable. She drifted toward the positions of Sanders, often without supporting them fully. He endorsed a $15 an hour minimum wage. She called for $12.50, but said as president she would sign a bill raising minimum pay to $15.
On domestic policy, Clinton will have limited flexibility. She struggled to win the nomination but lost the battle over ideology to Sanders, a socialist. Now Sanders will be a formidable figure in the Senate, where the most influential Democrat ideologically is Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. She is Sanders-like in many ways, as is the Democratic party after its lurch to the left.
Clinton is a natural follower. Her only moment of leadership as secretary of state was in the disastrous attack on Libya. A comment by the French revolutionary Alexandre Ledru-Rollin in 1848, recalled by historian Niall Ferguson in the Spectator, applies to Clinton: “There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.”
Trump is a harder case. Newt Gingrich, a friend and ally of Trump, says it turns out a candidate like Trump from outside normal politics really is an outsider. The Wall Street Journal‘s Daniel Henninger calls him “the outlier of all time.” They’re both right.
Thus it has come as a pleasant surprise to House and Senate Republicans how accommodating Trump aides have been in talks about the agenda for them and Trump. The Trump folks don’t pretend that he has fashioned an agenda of his own. “Aside from border security and trade, he’s largely a blank slate,” a congressional official said.
This has become clear to those in Washington who have met with Trump in recent weeks. “He hasn’t spent much time in and around government,” a GOP adviser explains.
Trump’s representatives refer to his “principles” as their policy guide. Republican officials call it “a macro” view of policies. And it appears to have created a huge opportunity for House speaker Paul Ryan and Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell to shape the policies of a Trump administration—most of them, but not all.
Ryan has already begun. Months ago, he assigned House members to create a GOP plan on six issues, well before Trump became the presumptive presidential nominee. Last week, the antipoverty and national security blueprints were released to generally positive reviews. The other four planks—regulations, the Constitution, health care, and taxes—will be made public in the next few weeks.
“The issues included represent the areas of common ground the speaker has with Donald Trump, and he is confident that the plans House Republicans would pass in 2017 would be signed into law with a Trump White House,” according to the speaker’s office. Awkward wording, but at least there’s an agreement.
The national security part of the plan “reads like an attempt to soften the sharp edges of some of Donald Trump’s more controversial proposals,” wrote Karoun Demirjian of the Washington Post. Indeed, the attempt succeeded.
Where Trump favors a wall along the southwestern border, the Ryan proposal called for more fencing. On NATO, which Trump claims is obsolete, Ryan wants to modernize the alliance. Still, three issues on which he and Trump disagree were left out of the plan, dubbed “A Better Way”—trade, immigrants, and entitlement reform. Also, uniting on a tax plan may be difficult.
Ryan is a strong supporter of the sweeping tax reform of 1986. Trump hates it. In his 1997 book, Trump: The Art of the Comeback, he makes the dubious claim that “it ended up being a disaster for both real estate and banking and caused the depression of 1990-1993.” He also complained, oddly, about the reduction in the “upper income tax rate . . . from 51 percent to 32 percent.” That, he wrote, meant developers wouldn’t invest in risky housing projects. “If the investor is taxed only at 32 percent, why bother with the risk?”
For Republicans upset about Trump’s outbursts, there’s little hope he will calm down entirely. He claims he won’t change. On foreign affairs, another worry among Republicans who find him difficult to support, adviser Walid Phares told the Wall Street Journal that Trump will seek “consensus” on many international issues and modify some of his controversial ideas. We’ll see.
And on Capitol Hill, the reassuring words of GOP grandee James Baker circulated among Republicans. “I won’t get my panties in a wedge because of what I am hearing from the political candidates,” Baker told the Financial Times. “What they say in the campaign and what they do once they are in the White House are not the same thing. . . . Presidents can do a lot but they can only do so much through the system of checks and balances.
“We are a country of laws, limited by bureaucracy and the power structure in Washington,” Baker said. “Presidents are not unilateral rulers. If they did not know that, they will find out soon enough.” Trump’s name wasn’t mentioned, but we know who Baker had in mind.
Fred Barnes is an executive editor at The Weekly Standard.
