Trump Is Quickly Being Reminded He Must Work With Democrats

Republicans 'won' the election, but there is little they can do legislatively without at least some help from Democrats.

Dear readers,

Like a child without object permanence, Donald Trump seems to have forgotten that you need to build legislative majorities to get your priorities through Congress.

Roughly, there are two ways for him to do this. The simplest one is to encourage Republicans in Congress to work with Democrats: get at least seven Democratic votes to overcome the 60-vote filibuster threshold in the Senate, and get scores of Democrats to vote along with Republicans to pass that Senate-passable bill through the House, because if the bill is remotely controversial, there will surely be lots of conservative Republicans who are opposed to any form of it that is able to pass the Senate. Trump has experience with this: this was, repeatedly, how the government was funded the last time he was president.

The other way for Trump to get laws made is to knock Republican heads together so the party votes in near-unison to pass legislation all on its own, with no Democratic votes. Republicans do hold the majority in both houses of Congress, so it seems like they ought to be able to legislate, and this is how the last Trump tax cut law got passed in 2017. But there are major limitations to this approach: To pass the Senate with just a simple majority, a bill has to move through the budget reconciliation process, which means both houses of Congress must first pass a budget resolution setting out parameters for what the bill can do (like how much it can grow the budget deficit). There can only be one bill per fiscal year. Every provision of the bill must be a fiscal provision that grows or shrinks the deficit. The bill cannot grow the budget deficit in the long term (the period starting 10 years from now). It cannot change the terms of Social Security. And, because the bill is being designed not to require any Democratic support, it must achieve near-universal support from House Republicans due to their extremely narrow majority. When the 2017 tax cut law passed the House, 13 Republicans voted against it. That won’t work this time around — at most, Republicans will be able to lose two of their members on a party-line vote, and during the first few months of this Congress, the margin will be even narrower than that.

This week, Trump tried a third path: issue an eleventh-hour demand that was sure to alienate conservative Republicans (authorize the borrowing of trillions more dollars) while also demanding the removal of concessions to Democrats from previously-negotiated legislation. This, of course, did not work — 38 Republicans defied him and only 2 Democrats were willing to help, leaving his preferred government funding bill far short of a majority even in the House of Representatives.

This week's chaos presages a chaotic path forward for Trump once he's president and his party (nominally) controls the legislature. Republicans have high hopes for passing many fiscal priorities with no help from Democrats — extending the 2017 tax cuts, new tax cuts, immigration enforcement, expanded energy production, and repeal of certain aspects of the Inflation Reduction Act, to name five — and for those, there will be no way around getting nearly every Republican to sign on. There are already signs of trouble. Incorrigible libertarian Thomas Massie, for example, is openly saying there's no money for tax cuts and they need to cut spending first. There will also need to be a debt-limit increase in the first half of next year, since Congress did not accede to Trump’s demand to raise the debt limit now. The new ostensible plan for this is to raise the debt limit early next year by $1.5 trillion, without Democratic votes, by including the increase in a reconciliation bill. This is procedurally allowable, but it would require affirmative votes from dozens of conservative House Republicans who have never voted to raise the debt limit. In theory, their support will be purchased by also including $2.5 trillion in cuts to mandatory spending in the first reconciliation package — presumably cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act, since Trump has insisted he won’t touch Medicare. This is not a theory that seems likely to survive contact with political reality — getting 218 of 220 Republicans to align on a tax policy approach is going to be hard enough without adding the double shit sandwich of a large debt limit increase and what amounts to a re-do of Obamacare repeal. And that $1.5 trillion debt-limit increase wouldn’t even carry Trump through the midterms: He’d need to get Congress to pass another one in 2026.

I wrote a few weeks ago about how Senate Republican leader John Thune (apparently in alignment with Trump) has been pushing to pass two budget reconciliation bills next year, with a tax law going second, after a package with immigration and energy-related policies (the first of which would now presumably need to include a debt-limit increase and huge spending cuts). Jason Smith, the chair of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee in the House, has been borderline-apoplectic about this idea, saying it's a recipe for not getting a tax law done at all. This week's events bolster his point: the team that couldn’t get a continuing resolution done without relying on the Democrats is supposed to line up nearly all House Republicans four times, twice to pass budget resolutions and twice to pass major fiscal policy packages, both of which will have to authorize trillions more in borrowing?

Then-House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) ripped up pages of the State of the Union speech after then-U.S. President Donald Trump finished his State of the Union speech in the chamber of the U.S. House of Representatives on February 04, 2020 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

And then there is the issue of funding the government past next March. Robert Costa writes for CBS News that Trump, according to allies, had decided to push for a debt limit increase or suspension now “so that he could focus on key agenda items rather than being mired in debt-ceiling discussions next spring/summer.” Even if Republicans manage to raise the debt ceiling all on their own (highly dubious), that won't obviate the need for Trump to reach bipartisan deals on spending at least twice next year: once in the spring, when the continuing resolution expires, and again in the fall, when the next fiscal year starts. Regular appropriations bills cannot move through the reconciliation process and must clear at least 60 votes in the Senate. The big idea for "clearing the decks," as was being pushed by Republican leaders on the appropriations committees just after the election, was to pass full-year appropriations before Trump took office, so he really wouldn't need to think about government funding until next fall. If he’d asked for that in November — and had given Republican legislative leaders political cover to work with Democrats and get it done — it probably could have happened. But because he didn’t, he's going to have to be back at the table with Democrats in just a few months working on a bipartisan deal that he’ll have to own politically. It’s not the kind of dealmaking he enjoys, but it’s what he’ll have to do.

He is also very likely going to need to rely on Democrats to get the debt ceiling raised, a fact he does seem to have some awareness of (and be pissed off about). I do see one way he likely could get this done: work with Democrats to abolish the debt limit altogether. This would achieve Trump’s goal of removing the limit as an obstacle to his policymaking desires and Democrats’ goal of ending debt ceiling hostage politics. Republicans would surely be annoyed to have the tool taken away from them the next time a Democratic president is in office, but then that’s not really Trump’s problem, is it?

Very seriously,

Josh