President Trump was enjoying a steak dinner at the White House last week with top Republican senators when the news came. Healthcare reform had also been on the menu, but the meal was rudely interrupted as two more GOP senators came out against their party’s plan to repeal and replace parts of Obamacare.
“It’s unfortunate,” Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., told reporters at the time. “I still think it will happen — just not this week or this month.” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell was not as upbeat. “Regretfully, it is now apparent that the effort to repeal and immediately replace the failure of Obamacare will not be successful,” the Kentucky Republican said.
That turned out to be a somewhat premature assessment, as healthcare talks resumed in the following days. But it’s still the case that six months into the Trump administration, with Republican control of the House and Senate as well as the White House, no major legislation has passed.
Republicans were reduced to contemplating symbolic “messaging” bills on legislation they had promised to pass if given the majorities to do so. “Think of it as a separating of the wheat from the chaff exercise,” a GOP congressional aide said of one high-profile proposal under consideration at the time.
That’s not the way the White House sees it, naturally. “We’ve signed more bills — and I’m talking about through the legislature — than any president ever,” Trump said this month, before adding a reference to media fact-checkers. “I better say ‘think,’ otherwise they’ll give you a Pinocchio. And I don’t like those — I don’t like Pinocchios.”
McConnell’s summary of the Republican-dominated federal government more accurately describes how modest it has been. “Well, we have a new Supreme Court justice,” he told reporters. “We have 14 repeals of regulations. And we’re only six months into it. Last time I looked, Congress goes on for two years.”
This sounds remarkably similar to the last period of unified Republican control of Washington, 2005 to 2007, the period between President George W. Bush’s re-election and Nancy Pelosi becoming the speaker of the House. “The people made it clear what they wanted,” Bush vowed. “I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and I intend to spend it.”
Republicans got two conservative members of the Supreme Court: Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito. But the political capital spent on an abortive effort to reform Social Security yielded no returns. The Bush administration’s plan was never even voted on by Congress, much like Bill and Hillary Clinton’s healthcare plan over a decade earlier. There was little else in terms of legislation to show for the short-lived period of Republican dominance.
Ironically, some even cited the Bush 43 experience as a reason to try the Trump experiment. A Republican lawyer told the Wall Street Journal, “The party is also paying a price for failing to deliver coherent governance when they held the presidency and both houses of Congress after George W. Bush’s first election. … Perhaps Donald Trump will be able to herd these cats.”
Centrists under siege
Perhaps not, according to some Washington insiders. “We are trying too hard to govern for just 35 to 40 percent of the country, and it just isn’t working,” said a Republican strategist who advises mainly centrist candidates. “You can’t win with just 35 to 40 percent of the vote.”
It’s not just a Republican problem, however. In 2008, President Barack Obama won the biggest share of the popular vote of any presidential candidate in 20 years. Democrats won three-fifths majorities in both houses of Congress, with the Republican Senate minority eventually too small to even filibuster bills.
You would think that would have unleashed a flurry of new legislation, like the New Deal or Great Society eras when Democrats dominated in the past. Obamacare was certainly a major legislative achievement, and a more enduring one than some Republicans anticipated. New laws dealt with the aftermath of the 2007-08 financial crisis, with Dodd-Frank being the most important.
Not much else similarly consequential happened. Those huge Democratic majorities didn’t pass anything on climate change or immigration reform, even though cap-and-trade made it through the House, and a bipartisan Senate majority for immigration liberalization had been apparent even when Republicans were still in control.
Democrats lost the House in 2010. After that, Obama’s domestic legacy was largely confined to surviving legislative brinksmanship with solutions neither side really liked, such as the sequester. There was also Obama’s “pen and phone” executive orders strategy, which has proved much less durable in the courts and since Trump replaced him as president.
What happened?
Even when important legislation does pass, if it lacks bipartisan buy-in it fails to achieve legitimacy on the other side. Republicans are still trying to repeal Obamacare, which passed without a single GOP vote, seven years later. The Bush tax cuts were re-litigated for a decade, partly because they were set to expire due to the reconciliation process used to avoid filibusters (sound familiar?) but also because of a long-term Democratic repeal effort.
Republican presidents come in and issue executive orders such as the Mexico City policy banning federal funds to organizations that perform or promote abortions overseas. Democratic presidents come in and rescind them. The same can be said for liberal executive orders signed by Democratic presidents and reversed by their Republican successors.
“There’s a reason that major social legislation usually passes with votes from both parties,” argued the American Enterprise Institute’s James Capretta. “It’s because laws that are entirely partisan engender political resentment, which leads to instability.”
Bipartisanship, Capretta added, “will inevitably be less satisfying to some than writing a bill entirely on their own because of the compromises that will be necessary, but this kind of legislation would be far more likely to pass, and also survive when political control inevitably changes again.”
Washington has developed a governing problem, and nobody is quite sure what to do about it. “We have to do what we came here to do,” complained a Republican Hill staffer. “But no matter how many votes we get, it never seems to be enough.”
Regardless of what happens with healthcare, many Republicans hope the next agenda item will be reforming the tax code for the first time in over 30 years.
It’s easy to overstate Beltway clichés about Ronald Reagan palling around with Tip O’Neill in a lost golden era of bipartisanship. But the 1986 tax reform bill that cut the number of tax brackets to only two and dropped the top marginal income tax rate to 28 percent (lower than some Republicans call for now) was passed with a Democratic majority in the House. Reagan worked not only with conservative boll weevils from the South but liberal committee chairmen such as Dan Rostenkowski. A Republican centrist, then-Senate Finance Committee Chairman Bob Packwood, played a key role.
Given what Republicans have already gone through by themselves on Obamacare, and fear they may go through next trying to replicate their predecessors’ handiwork on tax reform, it is hard to imagine anything like that happening today.
Whatever is happening, it is clear that voters don’t like it. Congress’ approval ratings have been underwater since early 2004, according to Gallup’s historic data. The first few months of the Obama administration was the only time Congress consistently broke 30 percent in job approval in the last 10 years. The rating dipped as low as 9 percent in November 2013, not long after a government shutdown. An NBC News/Survey Monkey poll taken last year showed 55 percent of voters blamed both parties equally for the gridlock.
Bum’s rush
The voters’ options are limited to throwing the bums out, which they have been doing with increasing frequency. They kicked the Republicans out of the White House in 1992 only to give them their first House majority since 1955 just two years later. Bush’s re-election spurred talk of permanent Republican majorities, and permanent Democratic majorities throughout Obama’s two terms in office.
Democrats won both houses of Congress in convincing fashion in 2006. They lost the House in 2010 and then finally the Senate in 2014, in two consecutive Tea Party wave elections. Washington has alternated between Republican and Democratic presidents every four to eight years since 1993.
As the electorate lurches back and forth from left to right, centrists in both parties have taken a beating. The most conservative surviving Democrats from the South were mostly replaced by Republicans in the 1994 elections. New England moderate Republicans were all but wiped out in 2006 and 2008. Next year will likely see a wipeout of the Republicans with the largest number of Hillary Clinton voters in their districts.
In 2008, 54 House Democrats belonged to the centrist Blue Dogs. They were hit hard in 2010 and 2014, even in cases where they personally held out against Obamacare. Just 18 of the Democrats’ 194 House seats are now held by Blue Dogs.
Some argue that curbing gerrymandered congressional districts would help increase the number of lawmakers inclined to bipartisan compromise. Rep. Don Beyer, D-Va., has also introduced a bill that would allow many members of Congress to be elected through ranked-choice voting, with larger states producing multiple winners per district. This would presumably give more influence to Democrats in red states and Republicans in blue states.
And while Trump surfed a populist wave into office, the warning signs predated his run. In 1992, Ross Perot won nearly a fifth of the popular vote running as an Independent on many of the same themes Trump rode to the White House. That same year, Pat Buchanan and Jerry Brown did the same in the Republican and Democratic primaries, respectively. “Trump ran as a third party candidate inside our own party,” said a national GOP operative.
That’s consistent with what some Trump supporters told the media last year. “I want to see Trump go up there and do damage to the Republican Party,” one supporter told the New York Times. Another said “we’re going to use Donald Trump to either take over the GOP or blow it up.”
It’s enough to make some political observers want to throw the bums back in. “Parties, machines, and hacks may not have been pretty, but at their best they did their job so well that the country forgot why it needed them,” said Jonathan Rauch, a Brookings Institution fellow and longtime political columnist. Rauch frequently notes that since 1987, Trump has been registered as a Republican, an Independent, a Democrat, a Republican yet again, then an Independent for a second time before finally returning to the Republican fold.
Accordingly, many good government reforms pushed by the Left and Right have made politics more of an individual sport and made governing harder. Banning earmarks gave party leaders fewer tools for getting members to vote for bills; getting rid of soft money contributions loosened the ties between wealthy donors and party institutions; moving toward primaries empowered a small number of activists and extremists to control their parties’ nomination process for elected office.
Yet, Dan Holler, a vice president at Heritage Action, says centrists are at the heart of the problem. His type of conservative group has become influential in the Republican Party’s nominating processes. “The American public is becoming more divided, and they have different ideas, sometimes substantially different ideas, of what is best for our country,” he said.
“The reason Republicans have so far failed on Obamacare is because of centrist dealmakers who didn’t actually believe the things they were saying for the past seven years,” Holler added. “That is the bigger threat to our system of government than people having strong opinions.”
Indeed, it is worth noting that centrists in both parties disproportionately backed the Iraq war and government bailouts, each of which not only proved broadly unpopular but spawned strong political reactions on the Left and Right. Bipartisanship hasn’t always produced good policy.
All it takes is a breakthrough on healthcare, tax reform, infrastructure or some major issue not yet on the national radar screen to make a lot of this talk go away. New York was dubbed “the ungovernable city” before Rudy Giuliani, the presidency seen as too big a job under Jimmy Carter before Ronald Reagan. Right now, however, Washington is a long way from looking like some kind of shining city on a hill.
