Nancy already wrote about the president’s plan to advance his tax reform effort by inviting Democratic Sens. Joe Donnelly of Indiana, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota to eat dinner tonight at the White House. I want to focus on a different angle on the same story. After spending much of August writing in frustration about the budget reconciliation process for tax reform because the mainstream media was not reporting that it requires the Republicans to pass a new budget, it’s comforting to see that they have all now caught on:
Under Washington’s complicated ways, passing a congressional budget blueprint is the only way to set in motion a special process for rewriting the tax code. If Congress can pass a budget, Republicans controlling the Senate don’t need to worry about a Democratic filibuster blocking any tax bill.
House action has been held up by a battle between moderates and conservatives over whether to pair spending cuts with the filibuster-proof tax measure. Senate action has been on hold while the House struggles.
One interesting thing here is how the process is being impacted by Tennessee politics and potential retirements by key players. The House Budget Committee chairwoman, Rep. Diane Black (TN-06), is intent on running for governor of the Volunteer State. But a rule adopted by House Republicans in 2014 says that she must give up her gavel if she is seeking another office. Asked about this at the Tennessee State Fair yesterday, she said she wasn’t sure if she would serve out her entire term but was intent on at least seeing through the effort to pass a budget.
“I’m still doing what I promised I would do and that’s to try to get the budget across the line,” Black said. “It’s out of my committee, but I feel obligated to continue to work to get that done and we’re working on that right now.”
I imagine that she’ll start getting more and more antsy as the process drags on and begins to have an impact on her effort to win the GOP nomination for governor. Simple delay in getting something passed could cause her problems, but a failure to pass any budget at all would not look good on her résumé.
Meanwhile, over in the Senate, the junior senator from Tennessee, Bob Corker, is seriously contemplating retirement. But he’s also creating a problem because he’s not a proponent of supply-side Voodoo Economics:
On the budget panel, Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., is hoping to limit the deficit cost of the tax effort, while [Sen. Pat] Toomey [of Pennsylvania] is on the other end of the spectrum favoring more robust deficit-financed tax cuts. GOP leaders have asked them to try to craft an agreement among the 12 budget panel Republicans. Any Republican defection on the budget plan would deadlock the narrowly divided committee.
“I’m a fiscal hawk, OK? I believe in pro-growth tax reform and I believe that’s a mechanism toward lowering deficits,” Corker said Monday. “But I’m also someone who wants to be realistic about all of this, and not let this just be party time that takes us no place but massive deficits down the road.”
Corker is more known for his role as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee than his work on the budget, and he recently created a problem for himself when he said that President Trump “has not yet been able to demonstrate the stability nor some of the competence that he needs to demonstrate in order to be successful…He has not demonstrated that he understands what has made this nation great and what it is today.”
The sharp rebuke in August set off a torrent of criticism from the White House, with press secretary Sarah Sanders calling it a “ridiculous and outrageous claim” at the time and Trump tweeting about the episode.
“Strange statement by Bob Corker considering that he is constantly asking me whether or not he should run again in ’18,” Trump tweeted. “Tennessee not happy!”
If Corker makes the decision to retire, he may feel freer to buck the president and his own leadership in the Senate as they try to ram home some kind of tax bill. If he wants to seek reelection, he may be more concerned about repairing his strained relationship with the White House.
There are a lot of complications that go unstated in the reports I cited above. The budget reconciliation process is supposed to be budget neutral and if it isn’t, then the provisions need to sunset after ten years, just as in the case of President George W. Bush’s tax cuts. In both the House and the Senate, there is division among Republicans about whether the loss of revenue that comes with the tax cuts they’re envisioning should be matched with lower spending. Some are willing to let the tax cuts expire, while others want to use magic dynamic scoring to argue that there will be no loss in revenue because of pixie-generated economic growth. Then there are people like Bob Corker who want to ruin the fun by injecting too much reality into the debate.
For now, the ball is in the House’s court. The budget has come out of Diane Black’s committee. The leadership needs to see if they can pass it. And, of course, eventually the House and Senate will have to come together and both pass the budget. Success in just one chamber of Congress won’t be sufficient:
Even in the best of times, budget resolutions are hard to pass, because they commit Congress to an overall vision. And this is not the best of times. The last few months have revealed vast gaps between the more centrist Republicans and their hardcore right-wing colleagues in the House Freedom Caucus and the Republican Study Committee. The latter groups have enough votes to scuttle any bill passed purely by GOP majorities. And the only reason the 2017 budget resolution passed is because “there was no pretense that it was a real budget,” as [Stan] Collander put it. It only existed to make ObamaCare repeal possible, and everyone in the GOP knew it.
But the failure to kill ObamaCare soured hardline conservatives against using the resolution purely for procedural purposes: “The House Freedom Caucus let it be known last January that its members wouldn’t vote for another nondescript budget resolution just to put reconciliation instructions in place,” Collander explained. As a result, any budget resolution that can pass the House likely can’t pass the more moderate Senate, and vice versa — the TrumpCare dilemma reborn in another form.
The stakes are pretty high. The following might be a little dramatic, but it’s not too far off the mark:
All these pressures put the GOP at profound risk of fracturing completely. In which case, both Republican moderates and President Trump might negotiate with Democrats. Should that happen, it would utterly undo the Republicans’ identity as a party, the coherence of their message, and any claim they may have left to their voters’ loyalty.
So the use of reconciliation to pass tax reform looks less like a power play by a dominant and confident party, and more like a desperate attempt by the Republican leadership to fence in its own members: to force them to work with one another, lest they tear themselves apart. But the most remarkable and pathetic aspect of this whole drama is that the fence likely won’t hold.
So say goodbye to the Republican Party as we know it. And say goodbye to tax reform.
Even if the process doesn’t chew up the entire Republican Party, it has the potential to have a huge impact on the future politics of Tennessee.
A little tangential, but what’s your take on this?
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/mcconnell-debt-ceiling-deal-democrats-not-quite-as-good
Maybe this is just McConnell trying not to sound like such a loser. It seems to me pushing the debt ceiling fight into election season hurts the GOP, but is also dangerous for the country. If the GOP behaves responsibly, they will do it in the middle of primaries? If they manage to delay past the primaries, then they have to fight an election while this is going on?
They think this is a help to them?
Two things.
It’s obviously self-serving. He’s trying to make himself look better.
But, it also shows how hollow the claim is that the three-month deal was such a big deal.
And your points are unassailable. Anything less than a deal that pushed it passed the midterms (which was their beginning bargaining position, never their bottom line) would create problems for them.
McConnell and Ryan got everything they could realistically hope for in the deal. And they got to blame the president for making it.
Except that Trump blamed them right back, and his megaphone with the party base is 1000 times louder than theirs. All he has to do is shake his head and complain about “low energy McConell” and “weak Paul Ryan” and the entire base erupts in cheers. They HATE whoever he points his finger at to hatethough if he thinks it will deflect criticism .
Trump is their “God Emperor”. If he tells them that he had to accept the Dream Act because the loser GOP leaders in the Congress left him with no choice, they will believe him.
So, it’s petulant and futile for McConnell or Ryan to blame Trump. Democrats and independents don’t care and the GOP base isn’t listening. And their non-listening skills are pretty thoroughly developed by this point.
If Trump really wanted to get rid of them he could demand their resignation, and get it, but of course that would only make things more difficult for him. He won’t hesitate to throw them under the bus next year either if he feels they have failed him, or just to deflect criticism from himself.
Meanwhile they are helpless before the infant tyrant. True, they passed all the blame onto Trump for “caving” but nobody is really buying it.
I’ve read some right-wing blogs to see what their reaction was, and it was entirely predictable. They blamed Congress and McConnell and Ryan for failing Trump. Note the word “failure”. Conservatism can never fail, it can only be failed by weak or corrupt elites who for mysterious reasons go to Washington and stop believing they can just default on the national debt and that it will all be blamed on liberals and Democrats, and there won’t be any significant adverse economic effects. Because of course not!
So, Ryan and McConnell cannot just tell the imbecile base how things really work. That only paints them as RINOS who are insufficiently dedicated.
Trump has their loyalty, so he can bait and beat Ryan and McConnell with impunity and they have to grin and bear it, since he is a lot more popular with their voters than they are. They cannot survive a conflict with Trump. As Jeff Flake is learning. He made the wrong call last year in opposing Trump and now Trump is taking him out in vengeance.
What you’re missing is that Ryan doesn’t really give a shit about the base. His object is to avoid getting Boehnered by his own caucus.
Donnelly, Heitkamp, and Manchin as dinner companions sounds like Trump is fishing for Democratic capitulation.
“Tax reform” is a euphemism. Nothing is being reformed. It is more of the same voodoo economics that amounts to welfare for millionaires. A direct transfer from the “funds” accounted for by the national debt to the pockets of people at a regressive discount rate on taxes. Even if intermediated by corporations, the effect is the same: income transfer upward for nothing in return.
And a percentage of those transfers will be recycled back through lobbyists to politicians who voted for it as “campaign contributions” and direct grants of funds.
Nothing at all will be reformed.
Trump is not persuading Donnelly, Heitkamp, and Manchin, he is proffering a way to get in on the recycling deal. Before they get all mavericky, the should consider the fate of those who made deals with Trump.
The Tennessee politicians candor about their career-building marks a direct change in voter sensitivities about politicians who look after their own careers instead of the economic prospects of their constituents. It depends on too many voters being too interested in the inside “game’ instead of the actual contents of governance. Of being “in the know” about how politics works instead of holding politicians accountable for what they have and haven’t done about policy that affects their, the constituents’, lives.
I hope that your expectations of political thrashing about in Tennessee, currently a relatively stable state politically, come to pass. Certainly there are significant differences between Lamar Alexander, once a “moderate” candidate for President and Freedom Caucus member and abortion promoter (when it’s his kid) Scott Desjarlais.
The GOP has had this persistent divide between the paranoid, radical reactionaries who pretend to be economic libertarians and the country club, “white shoe” Republicans who pretend to be fiscal conservatives but otherwise establishment. Reagan managed to straddle this divide while curating Nixon’s Southern Strategy but, starting, with Gingrich, the crazies have increasingly deepened and widened that divide.
You could say that the Democrats had a similar split up until the 1970s but I would argue that this division was really focused on race and the right-to-work whereas the GOP split is much more ideologically rooted and deeper.
It certainly seems that the GOP Congress has become paralyzed by intransigent extremism and unreal expectations. If this persists, it’s hard to imagine it won’t lead to the creation of two new parties. However, if voting patterns don’t actually change, this may not immediately advantage Democrats; it could just mean a kind of coalition of two right-wing parties. But his will be an unstable situation since nothing will still get done. We are in a new political territory these days.
When a party decides that ‘compromise’ is an evil to be avoided in a democratic system of government, they SHOULD fail utterly as a party to power and their supporters should slink off in shame.
For gods sake this is the very essence of democratic governance. To disavow that is to demand a dictatorship.
If a significant chunk of the country believes this, there are bloody, bloody years ahead.
Its the Picket’s Charge of Racism in America, so of course they are conflicted. Some Republicans actually want to run the government along conservative principles – however those are defined. Others are too dumb to pour warm pee out of their own boots, but can yell a lot and waive their Confederate flags.
If you are a neo-Confederate, Dictatorship seems comforting. After all, their ancestors let Jeff Davis impose an effective military dictatorship, and loved it, right up till the time the South started losing the Civil War badly. Then the wheels fell off their little authoritarian bus.
But, they always stand ready to line up and salute and give up their rights, except the 2nd amendment, as long as their leaders can promise them victory over their hated opponents – liberals, “coastal elites”, the “deep state”, blacks, brown people in general, uppity women, gays, immigrants, the handicapped, the disabled, the poor, etc.
But, there are some people who vote Republican who sense that they will lose a Civil War if they start one. And these Republicans are trying to find a way to move to the center so that their party can have a future in a democracy in which the majority is non-white. And that means NOT alienating the majority in this country,a concept that eludes their mouth breathing cousins of the right. Hence the split.
Which can only get worse as the pressure mounts on Republicans to actually govern effectively, now that they have political power.
Lulz.