One of those low-grade-fever, under-the-radar discussions that often consume the chattering classes involves the possibility that the Republican Party will offer up John McCain as the successor to George W. Bush in 2008. It’s an especially interesting topic to us political junkies who know (a) how much savage hatred was built up in 2000 between McCain and the movement conservative/K Street/theocon establishment backing Bush; (b) how often McCain has violated conservative litmus tests on domestic issues ranging from tax cuts to global climate change to ethics legislation; and (c) how tempting it is to McCain’s old GOP enemies to bring him back into the establishment to save it from total immolation in 2008.I’ve already weighed in on a TPMCafe discussion of McCain’s future, but was prompted to say more here by an interesting assessment of McCain’s rapproachment with conservatives written by Byron York of National Review, published by The New Republic.York is a very good old-school reporter who knows the conservative world intimately, so I’ll take his word for it that McCain’s efforts on Bush’s behalf in 2004; his base-pleasing outspokenness about the righteousness of the war in Iraq; and the recent conservative convergance with the Arizonan on the fiscal profligacy of the congressional GOP; are all factors that cover a multitude of McCain’s past and present heresies against Republican orthodoxy. But I submit those heresies–which include McCain’s sponsorship, with Joe Lieberman, of the climate change legislation conservatives hate passionately–remain a bar to a McCain run in 2008, unless he goes far out of his way in the future to tack back to the Right. The other factor, of course, is exactly how desperate Republicans are becoming when they think about 2008. Do they embrace their ancient intraparty enemy over their friends? Will they demand McCain bend the knee on a variety of conservative litmus tests? How many assurances will they require about the shape and the staffing of a potential McCain White House? (Will my colleague The Moose, for example, be banned from grazing among the canapes at White House receptions?).My own gut feeling about the current conservative flirtation with McCain is that it’s all a matter of hedging bets. The Right will look high and low for a presidential alternative to McCain, but the big priority is to make sure they get a sufficiently clear set of commitments from him to make the competition as insignificant as possible.For us very interested outsiders in this Republican debate, the major question is how big a piece of his own persona McCain has to repudiate to attract GOP forces who’d rather try to tame and train him, than to actually listen to his words. And for McCain, the question is how far he’s willing to go to make his own proud and independent words meaningless.
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Editor’s Corner
By Ed Kilgore
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May 23: Trump’s BBB Far From Final, But Democratic Message Is Pretty Clear
Having followed the ups and downs and twists and turns of House passage of Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, I offered some thoughts at New York of where things stand for Republicans and for Democrats:
Republicans are in a state of euphoric self-congratulation over House passage of what’s known as the Big Beautiful Bill.
Politico Playbook, the Beltway’s daily bread, referred to the GOP Speaker of the House as “Magic Johnson” for his last-minute deal-making and cat-herding in securing its passage by a single vote, which happened before a Memorial Day deadline that many had thought unrealistic. He’s sharing credit, of course, with The Boss, Donald Trump, who wheedled and threatened and thundered in the presence of BBB holdouts at several key moments. In the end, for all the interminable talk of “rebellious” GOP factions unwilling to support the gigantic bill as either too vicious or not vicious enough, the price of collective failure was just too high for nearly all of them.
But now, of course, we are about to be reminded that Congress is a bicameral institution, and despite Republican control of both chambers, there are enough issues in the Senate with the carefully balanced Jenga tower the House built to endanger the edifice anew. And when the Senate does produce its version of BBB (the informal but very real deadline is July 4), the two bills will have to be reconciled, and the final product passed by both Houses and sent to Trump for his signature. This needs to happen before the arrival of the so-called X Date — likely in August — when the Treasury finally breaches the statutory debt limit, which is increased in the BBB.
As a former Senate employee, I can assure you that members and staff of that body have enormous institutional self-regard, regardless of party, and will not accept take-it-or-leave-it demands from the petty little pissants of the House. Beyond that, it’s important to understand that what makes “reconciliation” bills like BBB possible is the ability to avoid a Senate filibuster, and there are arcane but very real rules, policed by the non-partisan Senate parliamentarian, about what can and cannot be included in a budget reconciliation bill. So some changes may become absolutely necessary.
More importantly, the very divisions that came close to derailing the bill in the House exist in the Senate as well, with some special twists.
One of the most powerful House factions was the SALT caucus, a sizable group of Republicans from high-tax blue states determined to lift or abolish the cap on SALT (state and local tax) deductions imposed by the 2017 tax cut bill. They were able to secure an increase in the cap from $10,000 to $40,000 (with an inflation adjustment over the next ten years), a juicy treat for upper-middle-income tax itemizers with big property-tax bills, costing an estimated $320 billion. There are no Republican senators from the big SALT states, but there are a lot who deeply resent what they regard as a subsidy for free-spending Democrats in the states most affected. Maybe they’ll care enough about GOP control of the House to throw a lifeline to vulnerable members like Mike Lawler of New York or Young Kim of California, who have made SALT a big personal campaign-trail issue. But there are limits to empathy in Washington.
Another red-hot issue in the House was the size and nature of Medicaid cuts, with the BBB winding up with big cuts mostly accomplished via new “work requirements” that will cost millions of low-income people their health insurance. Senators are divided on Medicaid as well, notes Politico:
“GOP Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine have all warned they have red lines they will not cross on Medicaid and that they believe the House bill goes beyond ‘waste, fraud and abuse.’ The alignment between Hawley, a staunch conservative, with moderates like Murkowski and Collins, underscores how skittishness over changes to the health safety-net program is resonating across the ideological spectrum.”
There are similar problems with the SNAP (food stamp) cuts that shift many billions of dollars of costs to the states. And the way BBB structure the SNAP cuts the cost-shift will be particularly egregious for states with high “error rates” for SNAP paperwork and benefit determinations. Three states with two Republican senators each, Alaska, South Carolina and Tennessee, could really get hammered. They won’t be happy about it.
But at the same time, the HFC hard-liners, who were the very last faction to cave in to Trump’s pressure on the BBB, have counterparts in the Senate with their own complaints about the roughly $3 trillion the BBB adds to the national debt, notes Politico:
“Sen. Ron Johnson … is pushing for a return to pre-pandemic spending levels — a roughly $6 trillion cut. The Wisconsin Republican said in an interview he knows he won’t get that level of savings in the megabill but wants to tackle a chunk under the budget reconciliation process and then set up a bicameral commission to go ‘line by line’ to find the rest.
“Johnson also believes he has the votes to block a bill that doesn’t take deficit reduction seriously, pointing to Republican Sens. Mike Lee of Utah, Rick Scott of Florida and Rand Paul of Kentucky as senators sharing his concerns.”
If Mike Johnson is “magic,” Ron Johnson is “poison.”
On top of everything else, the budget resolution the Senate passed to set up its version of BBB includes an accounting trick that basically means the two chambers are operating from very different baseline numbers. The Senate’s insistence on “current policy scoring” means $3.8 trillion worth of expiring tax cuts that will be resurrected are deemed as “revenue neutral,” a fancy term for “free.” Perhaps the Senate parliamentarian will blow up that scam, but if not, it will cause problems in the House.
These are just the most obvious BBB problems; others will emerge as senators use their leverage to shape the bill to reflect their own political needs and the grubbier desires of the wealthy interests Republicans tend to represent. And for all the talk of the House being the body in which Republicans have no margin for error or division (two voted no and one voted “present”), the same number of GOP senators, four, could blow up the BBB. It’s going to be a long, wild ride, and the only people in Washington who know exactly what to say about the BBB are Democrats. No matter what tweaks Republicans make, the final product is still going to “cut safety net programs to give the wealthy tax cuts” while borrowing money to do so. That’s just baked into the cake.