Shocked by Donald Trump’s election, Democrats adopted a strategy of resistance that’s simple and blunt: Anything Trump is for, they’re against. It’s turned out to be one of the least successful strategies a political party has ever pursued. Yet Democrats have stuck to it.
At least resistance does have one benefit. It assures Democrats they’re operating on higher moral ground than Republicans. This may explain why their commitment to resist Trump didn’t flag in 2017. They didn’t bother with offering an alternative tax bill. Their job is to resist.
The result has been a string of failures. And passage of Trump’s tax reform bill in the House and Senate last week is the worst. Every Democrat opposed it. The bill is filled with provisions Democrats hate and others long sought by Republicans. For Democrats, it was a loser across the board.
But it didn’t have to be that way. Had Democrats negotiated with Republicans, they might have saved the provision they most wanted to preserve—the full deductibility of state and local taxes. It’s a crucial break in rich, high-tax states like New York, New Jersey, and California.
President Reagan tried to kill deductibility in the tax reform legislation of 1986. But that was a bipartisan effort, and Democrats insisted on keeping it. Now they’re on the outside looking in.
Were they willing to compromise, they could have agreed to a deeper cut in the corporate rate than the original drafters of the Trump bill ever expected—and might have saved full deductibility. The Wall Street Journal suggested another deal. Democrats could have offered to eliminate the business tax entirely in exchange for a carbon tax. Republicans might have taken that deal.
In the end, the corporate rate wound up at 21 percent, down from 35 percent. And writing off state and local taxes was capped at $10,000, a change likely to be especially costly to wealthy Democratic donors in high-tax states. Indeed, it was rich donors whose interests Democrats especially sought to protect. They’d have been outraged if Republicans did the same for GOP donors.
To make matters worse for Democrats, Republicans recovered, at least partially, from their embarrassing failure to repeal Obamacare. The tax bill wipes out the individual mandate requiring everyone to buy health insurance or pay a fine. The bill also opens Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil drilling. Democrats had fought against that for decades.
Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) has a sensible theory about why Democrats thought they could defeat the tax bill. They sidetracked the repeal of Obamacare by intimidating GOP senators. They staged protests, harassed them at town-hall meetings, and held rallies denouncing them.
Based on that experience, Roskam says, Democrats figured they could use the same tactics to stop tax reform, only with more intensity and stronger language. They called it a “tax scam,” which it isn’t. “It does violence to the vision of our Founders,” House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi said. It doesn’t do that either. It’s “immoral,” according to New York Democrats. Hardly.
The wild charges tended to unite Republicans. “There was near-unanimity on the Republican side in terms of the outside groups,” Roskam says. That wasn’t true on repealing Obamacare.
Roskam, who chairs the Ways and Means subcommittee on tax policy, had his own experience with Democrats. They offered a dozen or so “gotcha” amendments, nothing more, he says. Ways and Means chairman Kevin Brady devoted four days to amendments when the full committee met. Democrats ran out of them quickly.
Economist Steve Moore says Democrats are “trapped.” They’ve declared the Trump bill will cause the taxes of middle-class Americans to increase, not fall as the president claims. We’ll soon know who’s right. The president has ordered that the rates in the new bill will apply to withholding from paychecks starting in February.
Odds are, the resistance will lose again. With the doubling of the standard deduction from $12,000 to $24,000 for joint filers and the doubling of the tax credit for each child from $1,000 to $2,000, things look good for the middle class. Come February, a lot of paychecks will grow.
The resistance hasn’t done much better in opposing confirmation of Trump’s nominees to U.S. courts of appeals, one level below the Supreme Court. Senate Republicans are bent on creating a judicial revolution by confirming conservative judges. It’s one of their most significant efforts. In 2017, they confirmed 12 appeals judges. The resistance has been feeble.
There’s little drama at the Judiciary Committee at hearings for nominees. Democrats have been unprepared to question nominees in a rigorous manner. They are more interested in resurrecting the ancient practice of blue slips, a courtesy to senators from a nominee’s home state. If one or both don’t return their “slips,” that dooms the nominee. In other words, a single senator decides.
No more. Judiciary chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) has decided senators shouldn’t use blue slips to block a nominee purely for political or ideological reasons. If they do, he won’t honor them. And when Senator Al Franken (D-Minn.) tried doing just that, Grassley didn’t go along. Despite the resistance, the judicial revolution rolls along.
Nor have the resisters succeeded in slowing the pace of deregulation that Trump has insisted on. Congressional Republicans have helped by sending 14 bills to him to erase regulations issued late in President Obama’s second term.
One more thing. The resistance hasn’t been fighting a mighty foe. Trump is unpopular. Congressional Republicans trail Democrats in double digits in polls of voters’ preference for the coming midterm election. The media dislike both the president and his party, and say so.
Still, we’ve learned a bit from the resistance. Their policy views haven’t changed much. “Democrats are for jobs, but they’re against business,” Moore says. “They’re no longer a growth party, they’re a redistribution party.”
Fred Barnes is an executive editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
