Republicans May Enact More of Trump's Agenda Than Expected

Are people underestimating the incoming president?

Photo by Cameron Smith on Unsplash

Happy New Year!

I’ve been a bit quiet for a simple reason: I want this to be a place where you get the analysis you need to make sense of politics and the media. When the news cycle is crazy or an election is impending, that can mean almost daily columns, as it did in late October and early November. But I’m a firm believer that the 24/7/365 news cycle is toxic. It forces the media to hype things that don’t warrant the attention, it entices people to treat politics like sports, and it fuels polarization.

So when there is just noise — not news — I don’t want to pretend it’s worth analyzing. And noise is basically what we’ve gotten over the past few weeks. It makes sense: the Biden Administration is on its way out, and the Trump Administration can’t do anything yet. Donald Trump has announced his most important nominees, but none have even had confirmation hearings yet. While the former and future president has generated lots of chatter with his comments on Greenland, Canada, the Panama Canal, and the California fires, among other topics, that’s just Trump: he’s a showman who wants to constantly make news.

Ignoring some of his outrageous comments that aren’t likely to result in any action (There’s a better shot of my beloved Philadelphia teams delivering two championships in 2025 — matching their entire total from my 41 years of life — than of Canada becoming part of the U.S.) would allow Americans to better make sense of and focus on what he says and does that is actually important. Too often it gets buried in a barrage of “OMG, he said WHAT?!?!” type stories, and it’s hard for those who are less engaged to make sense of when an outrageous deed or comment really threatens the national well being, or when the left is just hyperbolizing and hyperventilating.

But as the news cycle picks back up, rest assured I’ll be writing weekly or more. As always I appreciate your support and readership, and will endeavor to provide you with the best analysis and content I can.

With that preamble out of the way, it’s now on to a look at the legislative politics likely to dominate the next two years…

It’s always risky to make predictions about the future. That’s doubly true with anything related to Trump, given that he changes his mind on a whim, and consistently produces situations that no one had ever dreamed of (if you had a sustained push to make Canada the 51st state on your interregnum bingo card, please share the lottery numbers with me).

Nonetheless, at the moment, it appears as though Trump’s plan is to attempt to jam his entire agenda through Congress on a partisan basis. That will involve using the budget reconciliation process, which allows for circumventing the Senate filibuster. There is still much disagreement among House and Senate Republicans as to whether to do this in one big bill, or two smaller bills.

Yet, regardless of which option they choose, one piece of conventional wisdom has been that it may be tough sledding because of the historically narrow margin that House Republicans have. Their caucus is fractious and last Congress, with a slightly larger majority, they often ran aground, leaving the House barely functional.

Which brings us to the Speaker vote on Jan. 3 that kicked off the new Congress. There was drama leading up to the vote. In fact, I didn’t write a preview column, because the whole thing came down to what one or two mercurial, extreme, non-team player members — who were holding their cards close to the vest — would do. Even the best reporting basically boiled down to the fact that no one was 100% sure what would happen.

It was always more likely than not that Speaker Mike Johnson would eventually round up the votes necessary to keep his job — the alternative was a paralyzed House that threatened Trump’s ability to reenter office and that was untenable to Republicans. But there was a big question as to when.

Instead, while Johnson initially lacked the votes to secure the speakership, Republicans kept the first vote open, Trump twisted a couple of arms — and not very hard — voila, Johnson was speaker once again in a relatively painless process. Oh, there was a letter from 11 hardliners warning Johnson to heed his antagonists’ wishes. Yet, the bottom line was that in a matter of minutes the resistance folded, wary of earning Trump’s wrath.

It was a far cry from the days long, multi-ballot slog that opened the last Congress. Eventually, Republican Kevin McCarthy secured the speakership, but only after making significant concessions that would eventually produce his downfall.

And it boded incredibly well for what Republicans might be able to achieve in a partisan fashion over the next two years. Because, yes, the GOP caucus is deeply polarized. Some members flat out don’t like each other either. It’s also true that somewhere between one and three defections (it will be three after special elections take place in the spring to fill three vacancies) is all it will take to doom legislation if Democrats stick together.

Yet, the model that delivered Johnson the speakership underscored the major difference between the last Congress and this one: Trump. In one week, he’ll return to the White House, delivering Republicans unified control of government. That means voting against the House Republican leadership will mean voting against Trump and impeding his agenda. And as he showed with the Speaker vote, the president-elect is willing to twist arms, and use a mixture of threats and cajoling (he met with the hardline Freedom Caucus at Mar-A-Lago over the weekend) to secure the 218 (or 217) votes necessary to do what he wants done.

This matters because members of the GOP are all too aware of how politically dangerous it is for a Republican to cross Trump. There is a long list of Republicans who have retired or lost as a result of earning Trump’s ire over the last eight years: Bob Corker, Jeff Flake, Adam Kinzinger, Liz Cheney, Anthony Gonzalez, Jaime Herrera Beutler, Fred Upton, Peter Meijer, Mitt Romney, Bob Good, the list goes on and on. Other onetime Trump critics and skeptics, from Elise Stefanik to Nancy Mace, did abrupt about faces and contorted themselves to see who might be the Trumpiest to avoid this fate. While challenging Trump hasn’t been politically fatal in 100% of cases — Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, for example, overcame a Trump endorsed primary challenge — the record of Trump’s Republican antagonists isn’t good.

So vengeful is the president-elect, that in at least one case, he endorsed a Republican in a close race in 2018, knowing that it would hurt the representative in his moderate district.

This history reveals the stark truth: opposing Trump is incredibly risky for any Republican with designs on continuing in office, let alone advancing to higher office. This reality probably helps explain why the potential rebellion against Johnson fell apart — the right wing firebrands behind it had little interest in crossing Trump and risking primary challengers.

That dynamic is going to continue. Will they stick to their guns in the future? It seems doubtful.

There is another related dynamic at play: these firebrand members largely, though not entirely, have a good relationship with Trump and they understand what makes him tick (often commentary on Fox News). In late 2018, they used this knowledge and their relationships with the former and future president to precipitate a government shutdown.

In many ways, they have as much influence over Trump as Republican congressional leaders. It’s not hard to envision a scenario where Johnson and his leadership team and Senate Majority Leader John Thune settle on a compromise measure designed to secure support from the least conservative members of their caucuses, only to have the firebrands convince Trump to support them and not the leadership. The vast majority of the House caucus — which lives in fear of primary challenges in their overwhelmingly red districts — will quickly follow suit, not wanting to get askance of Trump and conservative media.

The question then becomes will the least conservative members of the House GOP actually vote no? Their history indicates that the answer is probably not. They rarely hold legislation hostage in the way the firebrands do. Temperamentally moderate, and inclined to be team players, they might vent to reporters about being forced to vote for things they dislike, but they hold their noses and go along.

All of this means that it’s not hard to imagine looking up in two years and thinking that Trump had a wildly productive start to his second presidency, despite narrow margins in Congress.