Sen. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, said in an interview Tuesday that the productivity of the next Congress hinges on whether likely incoming Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., will focus on investigating and fighting President Trump or trying to bring moderates together to strike deals.
The senator’s assessment came as Pelosi, currently the House minority leader, sparred with Trump — on television — over government funding that must be approved by Dec. 21 to avoid a partial shutdown. Trump wants $5 billion for construction of a wall along the southern border. Democrats, whose votes are needed in the Senate, are opposed.
Portman, often at the center of bipartisan deals, immediately reached out to Ways and Means Committee Chairman Rep. Richard Neal, D-Mass., after midterm elections to review legislation Portman believes could achieve bipartisan support over the next two years. While Democrats seized the House from the GOP, Republicans expanded their Senate majority by two seats.
But Portman, 62, though optimistic about what can be accomplished in divided government, conceded that most legislation in a divided Congress would live and die with Trump and Pelosi, their ability to negotiate, and particularly, the approach taken by Congress’ top Democrat.
Portman’s comments were part of a wide-ranging discussion with “Behind Closed Doors,” a Washington Examiner podcast to air later this month.
“If she wants to spend two years in investigations and possibly an impeachment proceeding, that’s going to make it very, very difficult to get anything done, other than what we absolutely have to get done like the debt limit and passing a budget,” Portman said.
“But if she decides, which I think would be much wiser for her, that this is about actually doing what the American people are looking for, which in fact will be better for her electorally in 2020,” Portman continued, “then I think she will have to figure out, how do you come up with this way, not just to give both sides something, but to figure out how to get some of these folks who are in the middle to come together.”
In an Oval Office meeting with Trump and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., Pelosi told the president that the Democrats would hold firm to their $1.3 billion offer for border security funding — a figure that falls short of the administration’s request and comes with strings limiting what can be spent to build the wall.
The president chose to televise the meeting, laying bare the challenges to bipartisanship in the next Congress and the acrimony that could come to characterize the Trump-Pelosi relationship.
Portman nearly six years ago was a key negotiator of a bipartisan deal to overhaul the federal immigration system in a Senate then in Democratic hands, only to see the legislation die in the GOP-led House because Republicans were split on what remains an explosive issue. A major factor in the stalemate back then was the resistance to compromise with President Barack Obama.
Portman, in his second Senate term, recognizes that even when Pelosi’s instinct might be to cut deals, a rambunctious cadre of freshman liberals backed by a progressive base diametrically opposed to compromising with Trump might make doing so politically difficult.
“You’re going to have to have some Republicans on a Democrat approach, and some Democrats on a Republican approach, because here in the Senate we need 60 votes,” Portman said. “There, she’s got a plurality but not a majority of Democrats who are not willing to do this kind of hard work, because she’s got another group that’s going to say no to everything, I think, in terms of working with Donald Trump.
“Some of them were just elected; some of them were elected on a platform that was very focused on, not just a new way of doing things, but opposition to anything the Trump administration wants to do,” Portman added, describing a scenario not unlike that which characterized the ambitious conservative Republicans elected to take over the House in 2010.
