The House That Trump Broke— Nothing Matters Anymore But The Photo Op

From Freedom Caucus to Bootlickers Anonymous: They Knew It Was Garbage. They Passed It Anyway

On Thursday after the House passed the Big Ugly Bill, Señor TACO spoke to the press before his quickie Iowa pop-in. “I think I have more power now. I do,” he said. “So we’re signing at about five o’clock, and at about 5 o’clock, we’re going to have B-2s and F-22s and F-35s flying right over the White House. And the Speaker and I and John Thune, we are all there together with most— I think most— Republican senators and congressmen and women, and it’s going to be a great day. So we’ll be signing with those beautiful planes flying right over our heads, all right?”

Of Jake Sherman, John Bresnahan and Andrew Desiderio’s long list of takeaways from the passage of the bill, there were two that stood out. First was the potential demise of what Trump calls “the grandstanders,” the laughably toothless House Freedom Caucus, which “may have to change its name to ‘The Freedom to Vote However Trump Says Caucus’ after what happened this week. The Freedom Caucus was always going to have a difficult time in a Trump-run Washington. You can’t simultaneously pledge loyalty to Trump and then vote against a vengeful president’s agenda. The HFC talked tough but caved repeatedly throughout this process. This latest episode was perhaps the most embarrassing. A number of HFC members said they were going to vote no, issued a three-page document outlining huge problems with the Senate GOP bill, and then they all voted yes, getting nothing substantive in return.”

Biggest laughing stocks among the HFC members, aside from feckless chairman Andy Harris (MD), were Chip Roy (TX), Keith Self (TX), Ralph Norman (SC), Andy Biggs (AZ), Josh Brecheen (OK), Eric Burlison (MO), Michael Cloud (TX), Andrew Clyde (GA), Andy Ogles (TN) and poor Scott Perry (PA), who plotted to absent himself from Congress to make the bill harder to pass, jumped in his car and drove home to Dillsburg in northern York County, Pennsylvania, only to be ordered to turn around and drive back and vote for the bill. His excuse was that he drove home for a change of clothes. He was the inspiration for Derrick Van Orden’s defense of other House Republicans claiming “we’re not a bunch of little bitches.”

Rand Paul, Henry Clay, Thomas Massie

Related is that “nobody cares about the national debt anymore [except conservative Democrats]. After years of voting against debt-limit increases— and bragging about it— nearly every Republican has now voted for a $5 trillion debt-limit increase. This is a radical change in GOP orthodoxy, and all because Trump didn’t want to have to cut a deal with Democrats. Only Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) refused to go along, and Trump lashed out at them repeatedly. Republicans attacked CBO’s estimate that the GOP reconciliation package would add $3.4 trillion to the national debt by 2034, but that’s actually at the low end of estimates. The libertarian Cato Institute projects the total will be more than $6 trillion.”

Georgia conservative Brendan Buck, a communications aide first to Tom Price, then to Speaker John Boehner and then Speaker Paul Ryan is often used as “the sane conservative voice” in CNN and MSNBC segments. Today the NY Times ran a guest essay by him, Is This Really How We’re Legislating Now?, explaining how MAGA Mike and John Thune “ably made whatever deals and promises were necessary to get the bill through their chambers, and Republicans are celebrating it as a major victory. But the wobbly passage of the fiscal package says more about the frivolity of the game Congress now plays than it does about how well GOP congressional leaders played it. Few seem happy with the actual product. Republicans and Democrats alike have found plenty to criticize about the substance of the bill: the cost, the cuts, the gimmicks. Just as concerning, though, is the way it came together— and what that says about America’s once admired legislative body.”

The process was marred by dynamics that have increasingly undermined Congress’s status as a dominant and deliberative institution: The bill lacked a clear and inspired purpose; it supplanted the expertise of congressional committees for the whims of holdouts and the president; and it relied on the make-or-break reconciliation mechanism that limits the ability to write sound policy.

Congress is no longer in the business of thoughtful legislating. Its role has been reduced to putting political points on the board for the president.

…Too many [Members of Congress] see their jobs as playing characters in the Trump melodrama rather than serving as policymakers in a separate and equal legislative branch.

The downsides of this dynamic should now be clear.

Congress, particularly the House, is a body built around committees, which have jurisdiction over various areas of policy. This is where expertise is supposed to be housed. Historically, members of these committees have jealously defended their policy terrain, and they have been given deference to do their jobs.

However, this critical architecture has been collapsing in recent years. In this instance, Johnson allowed rank-and-file members to end-run the committees of jurisdiction. After the committee process, the bill was workshopped through a series of hasty negotiations with holdout members such as with the changes to the state and local tax deductions. Medicaid policy, affecting tens of millions of Americans, appears to have been made on the fly.

In the Senate, the bill didn’t even go through a full, open committee process, and policy was still being written last weekend as senators began voting to proceed.

With committees relegated, there was no ownership of the product— and certainly little pride in it. With Medicaid, changes on the table ranged from adding work requirements for those receiving benefits to a wholesale restructuring of how the federal government funds the program. Until late in the process, many members didn’t know what was in or out, and certainly not how to sell it.

…The legislative stew that resulted is not fine-tuned policy, nor does it offer a cohesive purpose. It’s just good enough for a Congress that doesn’t particularly care about being any better than “good enough.”

The bill does not improve America’s tax code. An extension of the 2017 tax law— which significantly simplified the tax code and which I helped pass as well as later working with groups that wanted it extended— ended up littered with new carve-outs and gimmicks, like no taxes on tips or overtime.

It does not strengthen our health care system. While the bill makes significant policy changes, and millions of Americans will feel the impact of Medicaid cuts, the motivation behind the bill’s health care reforms was budget savings— not better health care service or outcomes.

It will not better the nation’s fiscal trajectory. Despite the Medicaid cuts, no serious effort was made to cover the costs of the tax cuts and new spending.

There wasn’t even anything particularly MAGA about the bill.

None of that mattered. Leaders bet that members would not deny President Trump his bill signing, and they were right. Before final passage, there were gaping pockets of opposition from every corner of the House conference, almost all waved off by the simple argument that Republicans could not let down Trump.

In the opening of his 2006 book, The House, the historian Robert Remini wrote: “The United States House of Representatives is regarded by many as the finest deliberative body in human history. A grand conceit, to be sure. But one that is not far from the mark. It is an extraordinary instrument for legislating the will of the American people.”

Less than two decades later, the passage reads as comedy— or is deeply depressing, depending on your lens.