Republicans in Disarray?
Sort of.
Time to check in on the megabill. The good news for Republicans is that it passed the House, and the Senate Republican leadership is pushing hard to get that chamber’s version of it through the committee stage very quickly.
The bad news for them?
The votes aren’t there yet, with Rand Paul, Ron Johnson, and others pushing for much bigger spending cuts, although the House version may lose the two least conservative Republicans already, and it’s not clear how others feel about cuts that will hit their supporters hard.
Some House Republicans, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, have “discovered” after the fact that there are various provisions that they don’t like and claim they would have opposed the bill had they known about them;
Donald Trump came out (again) in favor of doing away with the debt limit entirely, only to be overruled by CBO director Russ Vought later in the day. (Vought said they would work toward eliminating it in separate legislation, but that would be subject to a filibuster - and it wouldn’t be packaged with must-past provisions. In other words, it ain’t happening later).
Elon Musk is if anything increasing his attacks on the bill and those congressional Republicans who support it.
Two interpretations. James Fallows notes this and other internal GOP conflict and wonders why no one calls it “GOP in disarray.”
I see others, however, dismissing it as all phony, and claim that congressional Republicans have never defied Trump and they won’t now.
I’m on sort of a modified Team Fallows here.
First of all, congressional Republicans defy or just plain ignore Trump all the time. Most famously, they failed to pass Obamacare repeal, and then gave up on it. But even in his current term, several executive branch nominees have been withdrawn because they didn’t have support in the Senate. Indeed, you may remember that Trump ordered Congress to allow him to fill his executive branch with recess appointments that wouldn’t need Senate confirmation. They ignored him.
Just on this bill: Trump has repeatedly said he wants no Medicaid cuts, and he’s wound up with a bill with huge Medicaid cuts. Trump does have some wins here (so far), with some of his campaign promises of additional tax cuts making it into the bill. But most of this is pretty much meat-and-potatoes Republican priorities, not Trumpy ideas.
As far as how seriously to take threats to oppose the bill? Surely some of it is normal congressional position-taking. It’s fair to call that “kabuki” I suppose. But some of it is probably a form of serious negotiating over various provisions in the bill – or things that aren’t in the bill that some Senators want. Don’t be certain, by the way, that supposed opponents of government spending aren’t holding out for goodies for their states, but prefer in public to bash the bill for spending too much right up to the point that they win additional spending they want.1
And then some of the threats to oppose the bill without big changes may be absolutely sincere attempts to push policy in their direction. After all, extremists were able to add further cuts to Medicaid before House passage. Why shouldn’t Paul and Johnson push for more? Are there really four Republicans who would oppose the bill over even bigger cuts? Maybe not.
There’s more. Plenty of provisions of the House version are unlikely to survive a “Byrd bath” and will therefore be stricken from the Senate version of the bill — unless Senate Republicans decide to use this opportunity to further erode Senate practice, and thereby further erode the filibuster. (The megabill is passing through the “reconciliation” procedure, in which only a simple majority is needed but only a limited set of provisions are allowed within the bill). Republicans currently say they have no intention of doing that at this point, even if it costs them some sections of the bill that have strong supporters. It’s possible that some of the noise is part of the negotiations over whether to do that or not.
I absolutely do not consider it unthinkable that congressional Republicans would vote against Trump’s instructions on this or anything else. However, once again, this is as much or more their bill as it is his. Especially because if they do nothing at all, the 2017 tax cuts will expire, and businesses and wealthy taxpayers will suffer a significant tax blow. Whatever Republicans disagree about, they’re pretty much united on preventing that from happening. There’s also the debt limit, which must be raised this summer to avoid a government default and subsequent catastrophic effects on the economy.2 Surrounding the debt limit increase with loads of (what congressional Republicans consider) loads of sweeteners is the only way to get it through.
So, yes, some form of this probably does pass, and pass relatively quickly. Just walking away really isn’t an option. What’s not as clear is how exactly they get from here to there, especially if the megabill as currently structured can’t hold together. Could they pass a simple extension of the existing tax cuts packaged with the debt limit? If they try, various GOP factions will try to revive their favorite provisions of the larger bill, and who knows what happens next?
But the main point here is that some form of the bill will likely pass, despite considerable Republican disarray. Not because Trump wants it but because the core provisions here are consensus priorities for almost everyone in the GOP. And yet the disarray is real, in part because there are plenty of very serious conflicts here, with major aspects of public policy on the line that will make a huge difference in the lives of millions of people. Fighting over those things isn’t phony; it’s one of the things that politics is suppose to be all about.
And most importantly, anyone taking the cynical view that it’s all shadow-fighting and kayfabe is missing out on those serious conflicts — important fights in which constituent opinion can sometimes really matter. So may advice would be: Don’t do that.
I suppose we can’t rule out, in these Trumpy days, the possibility that one or more congressional Republican could hold out for just plain bribes.
Some Republicans have claimed to believe that breaching the debt limit is no big deal, but presumably most of them, including the leadership, are aware of just how dangerous a default would be to the economy — and therefore to their re-election prospects in 2026. Of course, Trump could mint the coin. If that or some other backup plan is being considered, it doesn’t seem to be widely reported.