Trump’s
upcoming meeting on Tuesday with congressional leaders from both
parties, including Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, is meant to avoid a
December 8th government shutdown.
Donald Trump
is unique among modern Presidents in that he has no significant
legislative accomplishments to show for ten months after taking office.
Year one is when Presidents usually make their mark, especially if they
came into office with unified control of the government, as Trump and
his party did. Presidents in the first year of their first term are
often at the peak of their popularity, have the biggest margins in
Congress, and are free from the scandals and intense partisanship that
start to gather around them later and make governing ever more
difficult. By the second year, a President’s legislative agenda becomes
complicated by the hesitancy of members of Congress to take risky votes
as midterm elections approach, particularly if a President is unpopular.
The math is stark: on average, modern Presidents have historically lost
thirty House seats and four Senate seats in their first midterm
elections.
Trump is governing well below the
optimal levels of recent successful first-year Presidents. In 1981,
Ronald Reagan’s first year in office, Reagan was so personally popular
that he was able to convince a Democratic-controlled Congress to pass a
major tax cut. In 1993, Bill Clinton used a Democratic Congress to pass a
major economic plan, the Family and Medical Leave Act, gun legislation,
and NAFTA, though his
signature health-care bill eventually failed. (The political cost was
high: in midterm elections the following year, Clinton lost his
Democratic Congress for the rest of his Presidency and was later
engulfed in scandals that slowed his agenda.) In 2001, George W. Bush,
who also started with a Congress controlled by his own party, passed a
major tax cut and a significant rewrite of federal education policy, two
pieces of legislation that came with significant support from
Democrats. Barack Obama came into office, in 2009, with large Democratic
majorities, high approval ratings, and a massive economic crisis, all
of which he leveraged to pass the most ambitious first-year agenda of
any President since Lyndon Johnson, including an enormous
economic-stimulus package and major reforms of the financial regulatory
system and health care. (The final version of Obamacare, after some
drama, was actually signed into law in March of his second year.)
Trump’s
first year has been different. He has a record low approval rating. He
is mired in scandal. And he, so far, has no major legislative
accomplishments. He looks like a President in his eighth year rather
than one in his first. All of this makes December crucial for the White
House.
From now until the New Year, Congress
will be jammed with legislative activity that may make or break Trump’s
first year in office. Most of the attention has focussed on Trump’s
tax-cut legislation, which is deeply unpopular according to
public-opinion polls but which Republicans believe is essential to pass
in order for them to have something to show for the year. But there are
many other politically consequential bills that must be passed in the
weeks ahead. On December 8th, the money to fund the federal government
runs out. Staff members for the four top Democratic and Republican
leaders have been meeting with the White House for weeks to negotiate a
deal. On Tuesday, these leaders—Paul Ryan, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch
McConnell, and Chuck Schumer—will meet with Trump at the White House
about the issue.
Schumer and Pelosi have been
maneuvering for this moment all year, and they have significant
leverage. The Republican Party, despite unified control of Congress,
does not have the votes to pass bills to fund the government in either
the House, where many conservatives refuse to support annual
appropriations bills, or the Senate, where they need sixty votes but
have only fifty-two Republicans. For several years, a coalition of
mostly Republican defense hawks, who want higher levels of Pentagon
spending, and Democrats, who want higher levels of discretionary
spending, have joined forces to provide the votes for the annual
appropriations bills. Pelosi and Schumer will not deliver those
Democratic votes without extracting a price from Trump and Republicans.
There
are three major pieces of legislation that Democrats want: a bipartisan
fix for Obamacare, a legislative fix for the Obama-era DACA program that Trump recently ended, and the extension of a popular health-care program for children—SCHIP—that recently expired.
Some liberal Democratic senators have said that they won’t vote to fund the government unless the DACA
fix is included, though that is not yet a Party-wide position. As for
the Obamacare fix, which is known as Alexander-Murray, after the two
senators who negotiated it, the current version of the G.O.P. tax-cut
bill includes a repeal of Obamacare’s individual mandate, which would
hobble Obamacare rather than fix it. The politics for Trump are tricky.
Senator Susan Collins, of Maine, a shaky vote on the tax bill, has
hinted that she wants the bipartisan health-care legislation passed as
the price for her vote on any tax bill that repeals the mandate. Schumer
has said that passing a mandate repeal would blow up the
Alexander-Murray Obamacare fix. In other words, Schumer is not going to
help pass the health-care fix as a way to grease the skids for McConnell
to secure Collins’s vote on tax cuts. Trump is likely going to have to
give ground on one or more of these Democratic priorities.
“Any
Republican senator who thinks they can pass the individual mandate
[repeal] and then turn around and get Murray-Alexander passed is dead wrong,” Schumer said on November 15th, after McConnell added the Obamacare-mandate repeal to the Republican tax bill.
The
last time Trump cut a deal with Schumer and Pelosi was in May, when the
leftover spending bills from the previous year were negotiated and
passed to keep the government operating through the end of the fiscal
year. In fact, this was arguably the most significant piece of
legislation of Trump’s first year, and it was widely considered to be an
enormous success for the Democrats because it included high levels of
discretionary spending opposed by Trump and no funding for the border
wall that he requested. Trump was so angry about the coverage that he
tweeted that perhaps there needed to be a government shutdown the next
time the two sides entered spending negotiations. “The reason for the
plan negotiated between the Republicans and Democrats is that we need 60
votes in the Senate which are not there!” Trump said in a series of
tweets. “We either elect more Republican Senators in 2018 or change the
rules now to 51%. Our country needs a good ‘shutdown’ .”
Tuesday’s
meeting at the White House between Trump and congressional leaders from
both parties is meant to avoid a December 8th government shutdown. How
much Republicans are willing to give Democrats may depend on the status
of the G.O.P. tax bill. There are at least half a dozen G.O.P. senators
with serious policy concerns regarding the tax proposal. And there are
three Republican senators—John McCain and Jeff Flake, of Arizona, and
Bob Corker, of Tennessee—who dislike Trump so much that they may be
looking for reasons to oppose any legislation that empowers his
Presidency. Republicans already have a ready-made conservative reason:
the proposed tax changes will increase the deficit by $1.5 trillion.
If
the tax bill is cruising through the Senate—McConnell wants a vote next
week—there may be less incentive for Republicans to risk a shutdown.
But if it dies next week, or is delayed, Trump will be under intense
pressure to avoid ending the year with no major legislative
accomplishments—and the chaos of a government shutdown. In order to keep
the government running, Trump would have to strike another deal with
Pelosi and Schumer and sign a bipartisan spending deal that includes
major Democratic priorities.
As a result, Trump
would end his first year in office with no Republican legislative
accomplishments and two deals with Pelosi and Schumer that boost the
Democratic agenda. If that seems likely to happen, it would enrage
conservatives and the Republican base. For Trump, December could be the
month that makes or breaks his first year in office.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment