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.
When I studied in France in the 1970’s, what amazed me was the lack of a centrist party. It was a subject I discussed with Jean-Louis Servan-Shreiber (the brother of Jean-Jacques Servan-Shreiber who founded the “radical” or centrist party in France). In every French election approximately forty percent of the population voted for right-wing parties and forty percent voted for left-wing parties and the “centrists” made up less than twenty percent of the popular vote. I have the distinct impression that the U.S. is following that pattern. Those in the center are being shut out by those on the left and right – possibly because those on the left and right have more passion. Of course, the French concept of right and left is much more broad than the American concept – in school in Paris (L’Institue d’Etudes Politiques) we had people who were die-hard communists and die-hard royalists (and some who would not deny being fascists). Free speech has always been much more “free” in France and other European countries than the U.S. – but we are getting there – gradually.
Eddie – So you do remember me? It’s only been 37 years since we last talked. I assume you’re not going to be at Emory for our 35th alumni reunion next weekend? Nice to see a classmate do so well. My opinions have not changed one bit in the interim. When we last argued, I was working for McGovern and you weren’t. My political participation since then has been off and on.
John
John:
I’ve been pretty much in the same place politically for a quarter century or so, but yeah, I went through all sorts of changes before that. And for the record, I worked for Zell Miller before his bizarre apostasy.
I’m still no radical, but what’s happened to the Right in this country tends to make one get a mite intemperate now and then.
Hope you are well,
Ed
Well, I’ll tell you what: I was one proud Democrat today, listening to the President’s Cincinnati speech. High energy, down to earth, eloquent, funny, youthful, spirited, smart and wise. I was enormously encouraged. It reminds me of 1917, when the European powers were bogged down in a war of attrition. Then America jumped in, and all those rested young doughboys came to the battlefield. It seems to me that if Obama is now rolling out his biggest weapon — himself — it won’t take long to eclipse the images of shrieking retirees with too much time on their hands and swastika signs, demanding the the government not get involved in health care for anybody younger than 65 and not to cut one dime out of their Medicare. And the sorry, daily parade of parochial, dishonest, vain, dumb, ill-intentioned, pandering and deeply dishonest politicians (some of them on the Democratic side of the aisle) is going to look like a tub of fishbait by comparison.
Testing this out.
When I was a boy at Emory University in 1971, I made friends with a fellow student, we didn’t get along at first because he was somewhat conservative and I was not. Then he changed (or became more honest) and we began to seriously discuss political theory and I thought I had met my political twin, left-wing to the core and violently anti-Vietnam war. Then I went to study in Paris (where I ran into his girlfriend) for a year and when I came back this boy had become a Catholic Republican and we ceased to talk. Last thing I heard he was working for Zell Miller. I went on to Mercer Law School and we lost tract entirely. I’m still the radical that I always was, although not for the reasons he suspected. It looks like he came back to the fold. Right?