By Ramesh Ponnuru
Tuesday, July 18, 2017
Note: This piece
originally appeared in the July 31, 2017 issue of National Review.
Republicans don’t have many legislative wins to show for
their control of the House, Senate, and White House. They have, it is true,
confirmed Justice Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court. His confirmation, along
with the thought of how Hillary Clinton would have used executive power, is
enough to make a lot of conservatives happy about voting for President Trump
last fall.
But Republicans hoped to have enacted major conservative
changes in government policy by now. Congressional Republicans have complained
over the years that their grassroots supporters have exaggerated expectations
of what they can achieve. This time, though, the congressmen themselves have
been disappointed. After the election, they too believed that Congress would
quickly repeal Obamacare and then move ahead on tax reform.
That didn’t happen. Action on health care has been
repeatedly delayed, and the current betting in Washington, D.C., is that no
major change to Obamacare will pass. Congress has barely begun to take up
taxes. Legislation on infrastructure, which the president has consistently
described as a priority, does not exist.
Republicans have been productive, at least, in coming up
with competing explanations for their failure to change the laws. Many
Republicans, especially those outside the capital and those who strongly
support Trump, blame the congressional party for being weak and disloyal to the
president. (A smaller number of strong Trump supporters insist that a few
deregulatory moves by Congress, the Gorsuch confirmation, and Trump’s executive
actions, especially his planned withdrawal from the Paris climate-change
accord, mean that everything is going well.) Often this criticism is couched as
a defense of the president: If he’s not signing laws, it’s the fault of
Congress for not sending them for his signature.
Those Republicans who are more sympathetic to Speaker of
the House Paul Ryan than to Trump — most Republicans in D.C., in other words —
tend to blame Trump. In particular, they blame his tweets. When one of them
becomes a big news story, it drowns out any other Republican message. Many
Republicans in Congress complain that this White House is better at providing
drama than direction.
Speaker Ryan has not himself pointed a finger at Trump:
not in public, and not, to my knowledge, in private, either. He has noted that
congressional Republicans spent ten years in opposition, first to Harry Reid
and Nancy Pelosi in the last two years of the George W. Bush presidency, then
to President Obama. Many members of his conference therefore have no experience
of passing federal laws. The party’s stumbles, he suggests, are part of its
transition to being a governing party.
Yet Ryan’s own ambitious schedule for 2017 underestimated
the difficulties. Congressional Republicans aren’t just out of practice at
governing: They face a fundamentally new situation. From 2001 to 2007, they
were very largely pursuing the agenda set by a Republican White House. The last
time they were setting an agenda themselves, as they are now doing by necessity,
was during the Clinton administration. They have not set an agenda that they
had a responsibility to turn into law with the assistance of a Republican
president since before the Great Depression.
At one tricky moment in the House’s consideration of health
care, Trump tweeted a few attacks on members of the House Freedom Caucus. The
controversy that ensued might obscure the fact that he has generally taken a
very hands-off approach to the Congress. He has said that congressional
Republicans, not he, decided to tackle health care first. Ryan has pushed for
tax reform to include a “border-adjusted tax” to offset some of the revenue
losses other portions of the reform will cause. Trump’s aides have not taken a
unified line on the matter, pro or con.
Trump’s management style, unusual in a president, does
not require public unity from his subordinates. Budget director Mick Mulvaney
and Treasury secretary Steve Mnuchin have taken opposing views in interviews
about how much revenue a reformed tax code should raise. Mulvaney has also said
that the administration’s budget does not reflect its policy proposals — which
left some observers a bit flummoxed, since putting its proposals into budgetary
form has historically been considered the point of the document.
The president does not engage or seem familiar with the
details of policy, either. Many jobs in his administration remain unfilled, in
many cases with no nominees yet submitted. For these and other reasons, his
administration has provided his congressional allies with much less guidance
than is typical.
Usually, a presidential candidate runs on a fairly
detailed list of proposals and communicates to his party, the public, and
relevant interest groups that he intends to achieve something close to its top
items. That list reflects, adjusts, and solidifies the party’s existing
consensus. When the candidate comes from the party that controls Congress but
not the White House, the list includes many of the priorities that the
incumbent president beat back. If the candidate wins, his party defers to his
list.
In the run-up to 2016, congressional Republicans decided
to rely even more than before on their presidential nominee’s policy
preferences. Senate Republicans made a conscious decision not to put forward a
comprehensive agenda, so as to leave the nominee free to develop his own plans.
Ryan tried to supply some content, devising a list of policies that he called
“A Better Way.” But the lack of Senate buy-in, and the expectation that the
presidential nominee would have a more authoritative platform, limited the
seriousness with which House Republicans took it.
When Trump won, though, congressional Republicans could
not defer to his proposals, even if they had been inclined to do so for a man
many of them regarded as an interloper, because his campaign was so light on
policy. His health plan consisted of a few pages of boilerplate, much of it
dated. (The plan endorsed health savings accounts, for example, without taking
any notice of the fact that President Bush had already gotten them enacted.)
His own administration has not drawn on those pages. He ran on one tax plan
during the primaries and another during the general election; reportedly
instructed his White House staff to come up with a new plan that mimicked a New York Times op-ed he had read; and
then oversaw the release of a “plan” that could fit on a 3×5 card.
During the last few decades our political system has come
to rely ever more heavily on strong presidential leadership, and a shift away
from this model of an overbearing executive may be salutary. It has, however,
also been abrupt. Congressional Republicans have been left scrambling to figure
out their own role.
Perhaps they’re blaming his tweets for their travails as
a form of displaced anger over their new obligations. The proposition that the
tweets are undermining congressional work does not really hold up. Nobody in
Congress is going to vote against a tax bill because of something Trump tweeted
about Mika Brzezinski. And it’s not as though the president would make a
compelling case for Republican health-care legislation — whether to the public
or to holdout senators — if only he could keep himself from using social media
to boast and settle scores.
Whether anyone could make a compelling case for that
legislation is a contested question. The health-care bill is hated by many and
loved by almost no one, in part because it does not reflect any coherent
understanding of what our health policy should be. That may be the kind of
legislation one should expect when neither the Congress nor the president has
thought through a policy agenda. The health debate has shown that moderate
Republicans, especially, never worked out the implications of the party’s loud
opposition to Obamacare, which they joined with gusto. If they had, they might
have realized that it was impossible to repeal Obamacare while also refusing to
modify in any way its protections for people with preexisting conditions.
The same lack of forethought is already undermining tax
reform. Republicans think they have a clear idea of tax reform because they
share certain goals, such as lower tax rates and better treatment of
investment. But those goals can be pursued in many different ways. How large
should tax cuts be? Is it more important to cut corporate or individual tax
rates? Or would the economy be better served by changing the definition of the
corporate tax base? Should concerns about the trade deficit affect our tax
policy? How should Trump’s promises about child care be integrated with tax
reform, if they should be at all?
Passing tax legislation will not require starting out
with a consensus on all these questions, let alone on the more detailed ones
that have to be answered after them. But Republican lawmakers are quite far
away from a consensus on them, and the vast majority of individual congressmen
do not yet have a strong sense of their own answers.
It is a mistake, then, to ask why Trump, Ryan, and the
rest are not making more rapid progress on the Republican agenda. That question
assumes that Republicans have a clear sense of what they want and are
confronting an obstacle to the realization of their desires: that they’re not
getting their way because [blank], which could be filled in with “Trump is
being a maniac on Twitter” or “Ryan is a weakling.” But the problem is more
basic. The main reason they’re not doing much is that they haven’t figured out
what they want to do.
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