This piece in The Hill does a good job of describing how difficult it will be for Paul Ryan’s House of Representatives to achieve all their legislative goals this year. It doesn’t mention the effort to confirm a new Supreme Court Justice because that’s the Senate’s job, but ultimately nothing becomes a law unless both the House and Senate vote on it. So, in reality, the battle over Merrick Garland’s stolen seat on the Supreme Court will add to the backlog on the must-do list.
Doing the committee work and scheduling all the votes present daunting challenges. But there are two other major hurdles. One is a lack of cohesiveness within the Republican caucus. Consider that when Speaker Ryan gave President Trump a roadmap of his legislative schedule, he omitted any reference to a bill on infrastructure. Trump noticed this and ordered Ryan to include it.
But the House Republicans are never united about spending money on infrastructure, can’t agree on how to pay for it, and have a large rump that is ideologically opposed to adding to the deficit.
It appears like everything the leadership and the administration wants to do will run afoul of that ideology. They’ll have to pay for construction of a border wall (at least, initially), and their tax reforms will dramatically lower revenue. Trump wants to ramp up defense spending considerably, and it will be hard to avoid losing money when they screw around with the Affordable Care Act.
Before they even get to that, they need to jack up spending to keep the government operating past April 28th, and then they’ll have to raise the debt ceiling shortly thereafter. We’ve seen how difficult it is to get the Republicans to keep the government open and to raise the debt ceiling without relying on Democratic votes. Will enough of them swallow their pride and capitulate on these issues now that the leaders won’t have to go begging for Pelosi’s support?
There are some other items that the House must do, like reauthorizing the FAA before September is over, and then they have a goal of passing all the appropriations bills by that point, too. Another time sink is the need to do two budgets in one year, which is necessitated by their strategy of using two budget reconciliation bills to achieve the repeal of Obamacare without needing 60 votes in the Senate.
In the Senate, it’s not just a Supreme Court battle that will divert their attention. The administration is behind schedule in nominating people to serve at the Assistant and Deputy levels in every department of government. Unless the Democrats allow most of these folks to get confirmed with a voice vote, debating their qualifications will chew up a lot of the legislative clock. And don’t forget that there are district and appeals court judges that the Republicans are keen to confirm.
There isn’t any time to deal with things that might crop up or to address things, like the opioid epidemic, that are pressing on the voters’ minds. We’ve been focused on Trump’s early executive orders, and his Muslim Ban has been failing in court. There doesn’t look to be any space in the schedule to actually legislate on new immigration policies.
One member of the House made a good observation:
“Think about it. We have two appropriations [processes] to do before Sept. 30, plus tax reform, the wall, infrastructure,” the GOP lawmaker said. “Any two would be Herculean.”
“My idea that I’ve shared with a few people is we’ve got to prioritize these things,” he went on. “If you only get seven big things half-way down the road, that’s nothing … so you’ve got to prioritize.”
It’s not clear what would get prioritized out, however.
Ironically, their absolute cluelessness about how to repeal and replace Obamacare may be their biggest problem.
The House Freedom Caucus and their conservative allies are growing increasingly frustrated at the slow pace of repeal. And they say the entire 2017 agenda will remain stalled until ObamaCare is officially scrapped.
“It is an incredibly ambitious agenda, and it will be impossible to deliver on those promises until Obamacare repeal is signed into law,” said Dan Holler, a spokesman for the outside conservative group Heritage Action. “Repeal is understandably the first order of business, but the lack of legislative activity on repeal pushes back every other priority that members may have.
“They need to move on Obamacare repeal. Now.”
But just saying that they need to do it doesn’t magically give them solutions for how to do it. They seem to have come to the realization that they can’t repeal it without replacing it, and that means that repeal cannot be done ‘now.’
Some of this might have been easier to accomplish if the administration had reached out to at least some Democrats. But it’s hard to imagine how the Trump administration and the congressional Republicans could have done more to assure that almost no Democrats will work with them.
Particularly on tax reform, infrastructure and immigration, the Democrats could have been enticed into cooperation if meaningful concessions were offered and if the Democratic base hadn’t been completely alienated.
Instead, the Republicans will have to go it completely alone. They may change the rules of the Senate less because the Democrats are obstructing and more because they need to make the change to buy back some time.
They’ll make progress in destroying this country and hurting our most vulnerable people at every turn, but on the legislative front they are in deep trouble.
So, that’s my dose of optimism to counter some the pessimism I’ve been laying on you of late.