Having closely watched congressional developments over the last few weeks, I’ve concluded that one much-discussed Democratic tactic for dealing with Trump 2.0 is probably mistaken, as I explained at New York:
No one is going to rank Mike Johnson among the great arm-twisting Speakers of the House, like Henry Clay, Tom Reed, Sam Rayburn, or even Nancy Pelosi. Indeed, he still resembles Winston Churchill’s description of Clement Atlee as “a modest man with much to be modest about.”
But nonetheless, in the space of two weeks, Johnson has managed to get two huge and highly controversial measures through the closely divided House: a budget resolution that sets the stage for enactment of Donald Trump’s entire legislative agenda in one bill, then an appropriations bill keeping the federal government operating until the end of September while preserving the highly contested power of Trump and his agents to cut and spend wherever they like.
Despite all the talk of divisions between the hard-core fiscal extremists of the House Freedom Caucus and swing-district “moderate” Republicans, Johnson lost just one member — the anti-spending fanatic and lone wolf Thomas Massie of Kentucky — from the ranks of House Republicans on both votes. As a result, he needed not even a whiff of compromise with House Democrats (only one of them, the very Trump-friendly Jared Golden of Maine, voted for one of the measures, the appropriations bill).
Now there are a host of factors that made this impressive achievement possible. The budget-resolution vote was, as Johnson kept pointing out to recalcitrant House Republicans, a blueprint for massive domestic-spending cuts, not the cuts themselves. Its language was general and vague enough to give Republicans plausible deniability. And even more deviously, the appropriations measure was made brief and unspecific in order to give Elon Musk and Russ Vought the maximum leeway to whack spending and personnel to levels far below what the bill provided (J.D. Vance told House Republicans right before the vote that the administration reserved the right to ignore the spending the bill mandated entirely, which pleased the government-hating HFC folk immensely). And most important, on both bills Johnson was able to rely on personal lobbying from key members of the administration, most notably the president himself, who had made it clear any congressional Republican who rebelled might soon be looking down the barrel of a Musk-financed MAGA primary opponent. Without question, much of the credit Johnson is due for pulling off these votes should go to his White House boss, whose wish is his command.
But the lesson Democrats should take from these events is that they cannot just lie in the weeds and expect the congressional GOP to self-destruct owing to its many divisions and rivalries. In a controversial New York Times op-ed last month, Democratic strategist James Carville argued Democrats should “play dead” in order to keep a spotlight on Republican responsibility for the chaos in Washington, D.C., which might soon extend to Congress:
“Let the Republicans push for their tax cuts, their Medicaid cuts, their food stamp cuts. Give them all the rope they need. Then let dysfunction paralyze their House caucus and rupture their tiny majority. Let them reveal themselves as incapable of governing and, at the right moment, start making a coordinated, consistent argument about the need to protect Medicare, Medicaid, worker benefits and middle-class pocketbooks. Let the Republicans crumble, let the American people see it, and wait until they need us to offer our support.”
Now to be clear, Congressional GOP dysfunction could yet break out; House and Senate Republicans have struggled constantly to stay on the same page on budget strategy, the depth of domestic-spending cuts, and the extent of tax cuts. But as the two big votes in the House show, their three superpowers are (1) Trump’s death grip on them all, (2) the willingness of Musk and Vought and Trump himself to take the heat for unpopular policies, and (3) a capacity for lying shamelessly about what they are doing and what it will cost. Yes, ultimately, congressional Republicans will face voters in November 2026. But any fear of these elections is mitigated by the realization that thanks to the landscape of midterm races, probably nothing they can do will save control of the House or forfeit control of the Senate. So Republicans have a lot of incentives to follow Trump in a high-speed smash-and-grab operation that devastates the public sector, awards their billionaire friends with tax cuts, and wherever possible salts the earth to make a revival of good government as difficult as possible. Democrats have few ways to stop this nihilistic locomotive. But they may be fooling themselves if they assume it’s going off the rails without their active involvement.
Don’t expect the polls to carry the day.
Bush is a lot smarter than most Democrats, and realizes that polls mean only present support. Once he’s gotten out there and beat the drum for a while, the polls will change.
Unless Democrats respond in kind, with Kristoff’s advice… reject it sight unseen and declare there is no Crisis.
Cranky, Allen and others.
There are big political and mechanical differences between Iraq and pushing Social Security Privatization through. Once the decision is made to go to war the nation is on a speeding train with no way to control the engineer. And all kinds of wells are tapped: general patriotism “we are at war”, “support the troops”. And once you are engaged in combat it is in many ways too late, there is no easy way to extract yourself.
Social Security is different. No one enlisted in the War on Social Security. It may be true that this president has the iron grip over his party and the media that you suggest, and that he will be able to ram some plan through even in the face of productivity numbers that suggest no crisis at all. I don’t agree with the premises, but those are issues for another time.
The problem Bush and the Republicans face is time. Whatever plan is adopted, it will require months to actually put individual accounts into place and then to allow individuals to exercise whatever limited choices in investment vehicles they have. As the actual details of the plan start coming out, mainly the fact that future benefits even with returns on the private accounts will be much less than promised under the current plan, people will begin to murmer.
Now if they were able to maintain the sense of “crisis” they might sell this as being “better than nothing”. But the only way to do this is to stop reporting economic productivity numbers altogether. 4.0% economic growth for 2004, already in the bag, simply blows the doors off the productivity models of the Social Security Trustees, not just the Intermediate Cost (which called for 2.7% in 2004 and 1.8% in 2005) that produces the 2018 and 2042 dates used by all, but all the Low Cost one that shows no long term shortfall at all (2.8% and 2.1%).
By June it will be clear that doing nothing would have been a better deal than doing something, particularly this something. And Republicans will be staring up a hill at 2006. They will be faced with having broken something that never needed a fix, lurching ever closer to that Third Rail of American politics.
The beauty is that there is no downside to cut and run here. There is no way that accounts will be set up by June and the US will have invested probably a few million dollars in staff time. The Republican Congress will have two choices: repeal it, or ride it into the Valley of Death that will be the 2006 midterms.
Bush may not care, he is not running for reelection, but the firmer he grasps that veto plan, the better for Dems in 2006.
And? Not to be rude, but it appears to me that the general public is not going to be given a chance to express its opinion. Transfer of Social Security wealth to Wall Street is already scheduled to happen, and there will be a big “burst” of support at just the right minute to satisfy the media.
Cranky
OK, but since when does this administration need informed public support to achieve its goals? And the goal here of course is not to improve investment opportunities or retirement benefits for retired Americans – it is to destroy a successful and essential government program as part of an ideological crusade to deligitimize all government programs that do not redstribute wealth upwards. They will lie and distort and dissemble to whatever degree necessary unless Democrats stand up and call this for what it is, and contesting the issue on this terrain – what the American people really want – is not what the fight is about.
That is, of course, until they start the lying.
Actually, check out Talking Points Memo – Josh points out that the Post wrote up the poll quite badly and that the numbers look better for the Democrats.
LATEST NEWS IN THE WASHINGTON STATE GUBERNATORIAL RACE
Democratic candidate Christine Gregoire put together a string of victories Wednesday against Republican Dino Rossi. The race, which still isn’t over, has been extremely close.
Permanent Defense: King County reported +59 votes for Gregoire, giving Gregoire the overall lead in the statewide manual recount by 10 votes. This does not count the 725 ballots the Supreme Court said can be counted.
The especially good news about all of this is it shows Democrats are willing to stand and fight. We won’t be intimidated by the GOP….No more stolen elections! Christine Gregoire has held on for almost two months now – and we believe she will emerge from this as our state’s Governor.
He’s hoping to scare the public into supporting his plans, a la Iraq. The advantage he had that time was that a lot of Americans wanted to lash out at Arabs–any Arabs–in the wake of 911, so they were open to persuasion. The advantage he has this time is that the relentless talk of “Social Security crisis” has eroded the public’s support to some extent, since many are skeptical that they’ll ever get benefits. It’s not as strong a card to play as the post-911 anger was, so there’s hope. Given the Democrats’ disarray, however, I’d say he has a decent chance of prevailing. The real test is whether the Dems can wake up and finally start acting like an opposition party, and not get caught up in giving the Republicans fig leafs.