Читать книгу Understanding a New Presidency in the Age of Trump - Joseph A. Pika - Страница 11

As noted by Pfiffner, presidents often seek to move quickly in the legislative sphere, hoping to take advantage of a honeymoon period in which members of Congress are deferential to the presumed mandate achieved by the president in the election just past. The Trump “contract” listed ten bills (as well as an additional constitutional amendment to impose term limits on members of Congress) to be introduced in the first hundred days of his administration. These included measures to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, raise tariffs, crack down on illegal immigration, lower taxes, and “clean up corruption.” However, the contract had little in the way of policy details, and the president’s first address before a joint session of Congress on February 28, 2017—well received but long on generalities and short on specific measures—did little to clarify his agenda. The competing agendas of the different power centers in what would prove to be an exceptionally chaotic White House made it even more difficult to rank presidential priorities.⁵⁰

Photo 5 An activist in New York City holds a sign protesting the repeal and replacement of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as “Obamacare.” Trump had promised reform of the ACA during his campaign; but its proposed replacements have faced a rocky road in Congress and in the court of public opinion.

Albin Lohr-Jones/Pacific Press/LightRocket via Getty Images

Trump chose Marc Short (who had previously served as a legislative aide to Mike Pence and as president of the Koch Brothers’ political fund Freedom Partners) to be his Director of Legislative Affairs in the White House, but the president’s impetuous style and the lack of clarity as to who was in charge made life difficult for Short and his office (itself not fully staffed until March 22).⁵¹ Trump did have one clear early legislative victory: the confirmation of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch to fill the seat vacated by the death of Antonin Scalia on February 13, 2016. According to Article II, Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution, the power to appoint justices to the Supreme Court is shared between the executive and legislative branches; the president nominates individuals to serve on the Court, but those nominations are subject to the “Advice and Consent of the Senate.” In other words, the Senate has the power to confirm or reject nominees.

After the Senate confirmed Gorsuch by a 54–45 vote on April 7, 2017, Trump bragged (correctly) that he was the first president to fill an open Supreme Court seat in the first hundred days since Chester A. Arthur in 1881. However, Trump neglected to note that it is highly unusual for a president to take office with a vacancy on the Court; the vacancy existed only because Republicans had taken the extraordinary step of refusing even to consider Barack Obama’s nominee to fill the seat.⁵² In fact, filling a vacancy within any hundred-day period—even the first—is not a particularly significant feat, comparatively speaking. Prior to Gorsuch, whose confirmation process took 66 days in all, the average length of time required to confirm, reject, or withdraw a Supreme Court nominee was a mere 25 days. Only two successful nominees in the entire twentieth century took longer than 100 days to be confirmed: Woodrow Wilson’s nomination of Louis Brandeis in 1916 (125 days) and Dwight Eisenhower’s nomination of Potter Stewart in 1959 (108 days, although Stewart already sat on the Court by way of a “recess appointment”).⁵³

The confirmation of Gorsuch also required a controversial Senate rules change. Although Democrats had eliminated the filibuster as a tool to block both lower federal court and executive branch appointments when they controlled the Senate in 2013, they left in place the opportunity to filibuster Supreme Court nominees.⁵⁴ When employed, the filibuster would require sixty votes (rather than a simple majority of fifty-one) to confirm—a threshold that Gorsuch could not reach. Thus, the 2017 Republicans followed the Democrats’ lead and took away the opportunity to use filibusters against Supreme Court nominees.⁵⁵ This ensured Gorsuch’s confirmation and eased the way for future nominees (see Section IV). Trump later urged the Senate to abolish the filibuster altogether so that his legislative agenda could advance more easily, but that idea had little initial support among lawmakers.⁵⁶

Despite his victory in securing the Gorsuch confirmation, and despite having the luxury of Republican control of both houses of Congress, President Trump did not secure passage of any of the ten bills he had promised in his contract to enact during the first hundred days. The contract’s proposed constitutional amendment to impose term limits did not gain any traction either; Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell rejected the idea out of hand before Trump even took office, while House Speaker Paul Ryan offered tepid support for the concept but took no action on the proposal. Indeed, of the ten bills promised in the contract, only the health care repeal-and-replace measure was even introduced within one hundred days.

Health care reform served as a useful indicator of the difficulty the new administration’s agenda faced. In October 2016, then-candidate Trump had promised that fixing the health care system was “going to be so easy.” Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010, House Republicans had voted more than sixty times to repeal it, in part or in whole.⁵⁷ Only a Democratic Senate and, after the 2014 midterm elections, President Obama’s veto pen, had kept the law in place.

Now, however, Republicans controlled House, Senate, and White House, and new President Trump had repeatedly called for the repeal of “Obamacare,” which he termed a “disaster.” “Everything is broken about it,” he insisted. “Everything.”⁵⁸ Obamacare seemed doomed.

But a funny thing happened on the way to repeal: Americans began to rally around some of the law’s basic tenets. Though not widely loved (even its advocates argued for revision), the Affordable Care Act nonetheless had many specific provisions that proved very popular, such as the requirement that insurers cover individuals even if they had pre-existing medical conditions. On the campaign trail, Trump had seemingly embraced those provisions, and declared that as president he would replace Obamacare with “something terrific”; indeed, he told the Washington Post the week before his inauguration that “we’re going to have insurance for everybody. There was a philosophy in some circles that if you can’t pay for it, you don’t get it. That’s not going to happen with us.” He added that the new plan would provide “great health care…. Much less expensive and much better.”⁵⁹

As president, Trump did not back up those promises for “something terrific” with a specific legislative proposal. Meanwhile, Republicans in Congress ran headlong into deep divisions within their own caucus about how to proceed on the issue. While many, including Trump, took the stand (at least early in 2017) that Obamacare had to be repealed and replaced, others thought repeal sufficient. The conservative House Freedom Caucus wanted to deregulate the insurance marketplace and slash federal spending on health care; the more moderate Tuesday Group of representatives preferred providing tax credits to offset insurance costs and worried about rolling back coverage, including the expansion of Medicaid that Obamacare had funded (money on which more than thirty states now depended). To avoid having to win over votes from Democrats in the Senate, the Republicans sought to use a process called “reconciliation,” which prevented legislation from being filibustered in the Senate but could only be used to change provisions that had a monetary impact (meaning that most regulatory change could not be passed in this manner). But even getting support from fifty-one Republican senators would be a hard sell given a party caucus that ranged from Ted Cruz of Texas on the far right to the more purple Susan Collins of Maine.

On March 6, Speaker Ryan unveiled the American Health Care Act (AHCA), a bill crafted by the House Republican leadership and quickly shepherded through committee, even before the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) had the opportunity to analyze its costs. The bill eliminated the Obamacare individual mandate and the law’s taxes on high earners, established tax credits to replace the law’s premium subsidies, and cut $880 billion from projected Medicaid spending over ten years. When the CBO did report, it predicted that federal spending under the bill would decline $337 billion over the next decade—but also that 24 million fewer people would have insurance coverage after that time, and that many (especially those over 50 years old in rural areas) would see huge and immediate increases in their out-of-pocket health costs. Democrats pounced and Republicans split; some among their ranks were nervous about cuts to coverage, others were angry that the bill maintained health care entitlements at all.

Though many of the House bill’s provisions seemed to contradict his past promises, Trump fully endorsed the measure. Yet White House lobbying initially failed to persuade House members feeling the heat from constituents. Moves to the right alienated Republican moderates; moves to shore up subsidies caused the Freedom Caucus to scoff at “Obamacare Lite.” Meanwhile, public support surged for the existing law as fears of losing even imperfect health coverage rose.⁶⁰

As a result, Ryan pulled the AHCA from the floor on March 24. Although Ryan initially said that the United States would “be living with Obamacare for the foreseeable future,”⁶¹ he mounted a renewed push to repeal and replace it later in the spring. In early May, amendments pushing both to the right (allowing states to waive key insurance requirements) and the center (placing $8 billion in a fund subsidizing “high-risk pools” for those expensive to insure)—combined with immense pressure from the White House and the House leadership—managed to convince 217 Republicans (though zero Democrats) to approve the bill just after the end of the first hundred days. Many “yes” voters confessed to being in the dark regarding the impact of the measure, but wanted “a win” to show that the GOP majority could hold together on major legislation. Indeed, President Trump showcased the House action with a triumphant Rose Garden celebration on May 4 where he claimed that Obamacare was “dead, it’s essentially dead,” even though without Senate support it really was not dead at all.⁶² In fact, the Republican-controlled Senate indicated it would begin from scratch in drafting its own version of a law to repeal Obamacare, with no guarantee that it could bridge its own internal divides (see Section IV).

Other measures moved even more slowly than health care reform. The White House hastily unveiled a one-page outline of tax reduction proposals on April 26 (Day 97) but without detailed legislative language. It did not reveal the full presidential budget for fiscal year 2018 (with specific spending targets for discretionary and entitlement programs, as well as revenue estimates) until May 23. Even Republicans were hesitant to embrace the White House budget proposal, which boosted defense spending but slashed $1.7 trillion in domestic programs and health entitlements over ten years.⁶³ When budget hearings finally began in the House and Senate, many of the cuts proposed by the president came under fire and seemed likely to be reversed. Legislators also questioned the optimistic economic forecasts embedded in the administration’s budget, which predicted a 3 percent growth in gross domestic product (GDP) each year for an entire decade. The administration projected that the growth would produce higher tax revenues, thereby shrinking future budget deficits, but economists pointed out that the 3 percent projection far exceeded consensus estimates of GDP growth. (The Congressional Budget Office, by contrast, estimated GDP would grow at a rate of 1.9 percent. That seemingly small gap added up to a $3.7 trillion larger deficit over ten years.)⁶⁴

In the end, of the twenty-eight bills signed by Trump into law during the first hundred days, all originated in Congress rather than from the new administration. Nearly half of them were narrowly targeted (though sometimes substantively important) resolutions rolling back Obama-era departmental regulations. For example, one of the bills reversed a 2016 environmental protection rule that limited dumping mine waste into streams. In another hotly contested reversal of Obama policy, Congress gave states and local governments the power to withhold federal funds from Planned Parenthood and other health care providers that perform abortions.⁶⁵ A third lessened prohibitions against internet providers seeking to monetize user data. The regulations targeted by these laws could be repealed relatively quickly and smoothly, because the procedures established by the Congressional Review Act of 1996 prevented Democrats from filibustering. Thus, the repeals passed on largely party-line votes, with Vice President Pence casting tie-breaking votes in favor when necessary.

For all the optimism and opportunity that comes with any new presidential administration, significant challenges confront them all. Given the size and complexity of government, it is difficult for any president to control even the executive branch itself. At the same time, the reality of polarized politics, which by 2017 was worse than any point since the Civil War, complicates the ability of modern-day presidents to achieve legislative success—even those, such as Trump, who enjoy unified government. To Trump’s dismay, there are simply too many “veto points” in the American government to assume smooth adoption of any new policy.

New presidents also typically face unrealistically high expectations. This is partly a result of their own doing. As candidates, they promise change (for Trump, to “Make America Great Again”) that cannot easily be converted into concrete success. And, of course, unexpected events at home and abroad can thrust a bevy of unanticipated challenges on a president and potentially transform a nascent presidency. For example, the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States made George W. Bush a wartime president literally overnight, even though he had entered office intent on focusing on domestic priorities.

Nonetheless, Trump’s leadership style and management decisions compounded the challenges presidents normally face by creating a variety of ongoing self-inflicted wounds. For example, his previously mentioned failure to nominate sub-Cabinet officials in a timely manner left hundreds of vacancies throughout the executive branch. And while Trump aide Bannon’s pledge to “deconstruct” the administrative state had great rhetorical appeal, the effort to carry out the pledge actually harmed the president’s ability to implement his policy preferences.⁶⁶ (More discussion of the administrative presidency follows later in this section.) Most immediately, it prevented the president from taking advantage of departmental expertise in drafting legislative proposals. Since many of the government outsiders Trump selected for top White House posts did not possess such expertise, either, they were not in a position to pick up the slack. Damage also arose from the chaos generated by Trump’s “team of rivals” approach. Multiple competing power centers in the White House, with no one charged to mediate, exacerbated the consequences of the president’s own lack of government experience and apparent disinterest in the nuances of policymaking. Trump’s penchant for provocative off-message Tweets, abrupt policy reversals, and rash decisions compounded the disorder.

Further, despite Trump’s disingenuous claim to have won a “massive landslide victory” in the Electoral College,⁶⁷ and his groundless assertion that he would have decisively won the popular vote were it not for three million to five million illegal votes,⁶⁸ Trump entered office with no clear electoral mandate. Administration spin about the size of Trump’s victory notwithstanding (“Landslide. Blowout. Historic,” Kellyanne Conway tweeted),⁶⁹ his winning margin in the Electoral College, where he received 57 percent of the vote, ranked forty-sixth out of fifty-eight U.S. presidential elections, while his popular vote share was forty-seventh out of the forty-nine winning candidates since 1824.⁷⁰ This gave Trump minimal leverage over members of Congress, who in most cases were more popular with their constituents than the president (some 90 percent of Republican representatives had outpolled the president in their district). Thus, Trump did not enjoy much of a honeymoon. Most new presidents find it difficult to win support in Congress; political scientists John Sides and Lynn Vavreck caution against “assuming that [an election] constitutes a mandate for the winner’s policy agenda,” and a systematic study of congressional voting identifies only three elections over fifty years—1964, 1980, and 1994—with a clear causal effect on legislative behavior. The chaotic opening round of the Trump administration precluded any possibility that 2016 might join that list.⁷¹

And then there were the lingering questions about links between the Trump campaign and the Russian government that implicated several high-ranking administration officials and prompted several congressional investigations. Even before Trump took office, the Intelligence Community had released its verdict that Russia had sought to affect the outcome of the 2016 election.⁷² This prompted the Senate Intelligence Committee to begin investigating Russian meddling. Then, on February 13, 2017, Trump’s national security adviser, Michael Flynn, resigned after less than a month on the job. He did so amid revelations that he had lied to Vice President Pence about conversations he had with the Russian ambassador to the United States in December 2016—before Trump entered office—about U.S. sanctions against Russia imposed by the Obama administration.⁷³

The next day, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer revealed that the president had known for more than two weeks that Flynn had lied about his contact with the Russians, and the New York Times reported that Trump campaign aides and other associates “had repeated contacts with senior Russian intelligence officials in the year before the election.”⁷⁴ The controversy went on to implicate Attorney General Jeff Sessions. After Sessions denied under oath during his confirmation hearings that he had communications with the Russians while working for the Trump campaign, the Washington Post revealed on March 1, 2017, that Sessions had, in fact, twice met with the Russian ambassador during that period of time (though while still a U.S. senator).⁷⁵ That led many leading Democrats to accuse Sessions of perjury, and call for his resignation; the controversy prompted Sessions to recuse himself from any investigation of Russian intervention in the 2016 presidential election.⁷⁶

President Trump tried to deflect coverage of his campaign’s ties to Russia by accusing the media at a press conference on February 16 of disseminating “fake news”⁷⁷ and describing the media as “the enemy of the people” in a February 24 speech—a charge that prompted Republican senator John McCain to retort, “That’s how dictators get started.”⁷⁸ Trump doubled down, tweeting unfounded claims on March 5 that President Obama (whom Trump described as a “Bad (or sick) guy!”) had wiretapped his phones during the election.⁷⁹ But such efforts to deflect attention from the Russia allegations did nothing to impede the investigations. By March 22—Day 62 of the Trump administration—there were already four congressional committees investigating not only Russian meddling in the 2016 election but the ties of Flynn and other Trump associates to Russian officials: The Senate Intelligence Committee, the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Terrorism, the House Intelligence Committee, and the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee.⁸⁰

Nor was that all. On March 20, FBI director James Comey confirmed in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee that the FBI was investigating the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia and said that there was “no information” to support Trump’s claim that Obama wiretapped his phones.⁸¹ The independent, nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO)—a government agency that monitors the accountability of government through audits and other forms of oversight—also announced an investigation on April 5 of Trump’s transition operation, including its spending, fundraising, and communications with foreign governments.⁸² Thus, even before the end of the first hundred days, an unprecedented range of divergent investigations—congressional and otherwise—distracted attention from the president’s legislative agenda.

In short, Trump did little to heal the wounds of the campaign during the first hundred days, and he suffered a series of self-inflicted wounds that undermined his chances for legislative success. Given the stark polarization between the parties mentioned previously and the divisions within the majority Republicans, building legislative majorities would have been difficult even for a president with extensive Washington experience, deep policy expertise, and longstanding relationships within his party. Trump, with none of that, allowed his frustrations with the lack of legislative success to boil over in a string of tweets attacking the right-wing Freedom Caucus (“we must fight them, and Dems, in 2018!”), the congressional opposition (“Democrats jeopardizing the safety of our troops to bail out their donors”), and Senate rules allowing legislation to be delayed indefinitely unless sixty senators agreed to end a filibuster (“… change the rules now to 51%”).⁸³