These are critical days for Washington Republicans. If they hope to make any legislative progress – let alone enact their top priorities – they need to move forward. And soon.
For a moment last week, following President Trump’s address to Congress, the odds of progress looked good. By the weekend, when Trump tweeted a conspiracy theory about Barack Obama wiretapping his New York condo as if it was fact, that changed.
Trump’s behavior has a huge effect on the GOP legislative agenda. It’s proving tough to wrangle various Republican factions together, and only the President would seem to have a chance of corralling them. To follow him, they need to believe both that Trump is reliable and trustworthy; and that his popularity won’t plummet heading into the 2018 elections.
The stakes are high. After six weeks, the GOP has yet to even introduce bills on health care, tax reform, and infrastructure investment. For the first two, they wish to use the reconciliation process, which requires a simple majority vote in the Senate – but rules allow for only one reconciliation bill per budget resolution. Their plan: do ObamaCare repeal-and-replace under the current FY’17 budget, then quickly pass FY’18's budget resolution, followed by a reconciliation tax reform bill.
The longer it takes to get the health care piece finished, the longer Congress must delay the next budget. This creates problems of its own and does nothing to push forward the Republicans’ much anticipated tax reform.
Ryan To The Rescue?
Sensing that clock ticking, House Speaker Paul Ryan will reportedly introduce a health care bill this week.
Meanwhile, the White House wants to just as quickly put forward its transportation infrastructure bill. Trump has jump-started that process, while Congressional GOP leaders, uninterested in adding to their members’ deficit worries, are trying to quietly stall.
Through it all, it became increasingly certain that Congressional Democrats would be standing by, irrelevant, letting Republicans get in their own way.
And that they have. This past week saw Republican-on-Republican infighting of epic proportions.
Senator Rand Paul roamed the hallways, media in tow, mocking House leaders for hiding their health care bill. Other GOP lawmakers declared portions of Trump’s budget plan dead on arrival. And then there were those Republicans who called for Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself from investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 elections.
And that was all before Trump’s “Obama-bugged-my-phone” tweet storm.
Trump’s Big Speech
Some media commentators did go a bit overboard in praising Trumps first speech to a joint session of Congress, but the steadily delivered speech really did have a measurable effect on Capitol Hill. It gave Republicans confidence, essentially for the first time, that Trump was capable of acting as an effective spokesperson for the party’s agenda.
It’s true that Trump failed to clarify his preferences for overcoming remaining differences among GOP versions of legislation. But Trump’s congressional address did make clear – despite essentially bogus rhetorical calls for bipartisan unity – that he was committed to pushing forward without Democrats’ votes. That helped assuage concerns of conservative members, despite their worries about Trump’s big-spending agenda.
Just 24 hours later, things began to unravel on the news that Sessions’ had met with the Russian ambassador. The effect was jarring. Clearly the Russian-connection story was not going to fade away. And anxiety increased that there may be more revelations to come.
As news coverage grew worse, the fragile sense of Republican unity grew even more delicate.
And then the tweet storm hit.
GOP Consternation
It’s difficult to convey just how erratic Trump’s weekend behavior was perceived within the staid inner circles of Republican Washington. It’s not just that nobody thinks the Obama wiretapping allegations are true. The episode demonstrated that senior White House staff are gullibly circulating baseless right-wing media rants; that Trump has no sense of the appropriate boundaries of Presidential behavior; that Trump’s craziest tweeting serves no strategic purpose; and that Trump has no one to check his most questionable impulses.
This left ardent but traditional Republicans facing a dilemma: To what degree do they entrust their political futures to the White House?
At the moment, a definitive answer is lacking. But a hint of what might be to come can be found in the seeming willingness of the House to pass a health care bill that their Senate counterparts will most likely reject. Senator Paul’s shenanigans aimed at making the House GOP look like bad guys is exhibit A.
So here is where things stand: While Trump blames Obama for something nobody believes Obama did, House and Senate Republicans will blame each other for a stalled legislative agenda.
