Misreading the Mandate, Again

From one angle of view, the Republican sweep of the White House and—as now appears likely—both houses of Congress will offer a temporary reprieve from the political dysfunction of recent years.

We’ve had plenty of recent experience with such one-party “trifectas”—Ronald Reagan in 1980, Bill Clinton in 1992, George W. Bush in 2000, Barack Obama in 2008, Donald Trump in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020—and they all have followed a similar pattern. In the flush of victory, the new president unifies his party and pushes through an ambitious and highly partisan agenda with little input or support from the other party. And in each case, by overstating their mandate and overplaying their political hand, the winners wind up losing the majority in one or both houses two years later as voters express their displeasure with the heavy-handed tactics.

Based on that past experience, it’s not hard to imagine how this will play out for Trump and the Republican Congress.  

Topping the First 100 Day agenda will be a hardline anti-immigration bill cobbled together by the Trump team and Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson and introduced on the first day of the new session as H.R. 1.  It will all be done with great urgency, behind closed doors, without benefit of hearings and run through a perfunctory markup with no input from Democrats. Then, within days of the inauguration, the bill will be brought to the House floor for an equally perfunctory two-hour “debate” that consists of members giving two-minute diatribes meant not to convince but to create videos that can be tweeted out to constituents.  No amendments will be allowed. Unlike the last session, Johnson will be able to rely on Trump to prevent any defections from moderates concerned it will be viewed as too harsh and damage the economy as well as defections from unruly members of the Freedom Caucus demanding even more draconian measures.  The bill will pass on a straight-line party vote.

From there the bill head to the Senate where Republicans will take the opportunity to force Democrats to make good on their threat of a filibuster. The debate that drags on night after night will be great political theater that serves only to highlight the Democrats’ inability to offer a politically credible alternative, putting pressure on vulnerable Democrats to strike some sort of compromise. Trump and his Senate allies will make noises about eliminating the filibuster only to discover they don’t have the votes. In the end, Republicans will have to make serious concessions and side-deals to get their own moderates and seven Democrats to provide the 60 votes to end debate and ensure passage. A dozen House Republicans will balk at agreeing to the Senate compromise, but in a dramatic finale, with Trump working the phones until the last minute, enough will agree to switch their votes on the final roll call to secure passage. 

Next up will be the push to renew all of the “Trump” tax cuts set to expire next year while adding several new ones promised during the campaign—lower taxes on tips and overtime pay and Social Security benefits and new tax breaks for Republican-friendly special interests, all of it ostensibly “paid for” by big increases in tariffs, deep cuts to food stamps, Obamacare subsidies and green energy incentives and extensive layoffs at the IRS and regulatory agencies. To shield Republicans from having to take “tough” votes that may haunt them in the next election, the massive tax and spending page package will also be crafted behind closed doors by the White House, Republican leaders and Republican-friendly lobbyists, without benefit of hearings or serious committee deliberation.  Then it will be released in the middle of the night with little time for Members, the public or the media to read through it before voting begins. To get around a Democratic filibuster in the Senate, the bill will be considered under an obscure budget mechanism known as “reconciliation” that will allow Democrats to offer scores of amendments, all of which will be voted down during an all-night “votorama.”  Passage in both chambers will be on a straight party-line vote.

While all this is going on, the Republican House, after a series of contentious hearings, will push through a steady stream of bills to overturn Biden-era regulations and initiatives on guns, climate change and “environmental justice, cryptocurrency, race and gender discrimination, voting rights, cryptocurrencies, consumer and worker protections, college loan forgiveness and “ESG” investing.  It won’t matter that few, if any, will survive a Senate filibuster.  The purpose of these “messaging bills” will be to demonstrate to the party’s base voters and contributors that the president and Congress had delivered on their promises while forcing vulnerable Democrats to take votes that can be used against them in the next election.

By July 4, Trump and Republican leaders will declare it to have been the most productive legislative session since the New Deal and Members will head home for the summer recess to accept the huzzahs of an appreciative electorate.  Instead, they will be met by an energized opposition and voter remorse. In response to a barrage of negative press, falling poll numbers and one or two lost special elections, Republican unity gives way to infighting and defections. And with Democrats united in their determination to see Republicans fail, there will be little progress on any other major issue. Congress will revert to the usual partisan gridlock and dysfunction, punctuated by a series of continuing resolutions to keep the government from closing. In the midterm election in 2026, Republicans will lose control of the House and with it any prospect of major legislation for the rest of Trump’s term.

This highly partisan, all-or-nothing model of governing is a relatively new invention.  It was first introduced in the 1990s by Speaker Newt Gingrich and more recently perfected by Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leaders Mitch McConnell and Chuck Schumer.  Both parties now routinely run both chambers in similar fashion. Indeed, it’s been the model for so long that few Members have experienced anything else, while the mechanisms and norms that were once capable of generating bipartisan compromise have atrophied or disappeared.  The result: Congress is able to produce only extreme legislative outcomes that the public doesn’t like or no outcomes at all.

Given what we know about Trump and congressional Republicans, they are unlikely to break out of this political boom-and-bust cycle.  But if they were smart, Democrats would seize the opportunity to achieve a more sustainable majority by embracing a different model. They could start right away by laying out the kind of centrist compromises on immigration, taxes, climate and abortion that they would have been willing to accept, if only Republicans would a vote on them (which they won’t). And Democrats could promise that, when given back the majority, they would embrace a different legislative model, one that returns power and initiative to Members and committees and make it possible for bipartisan compromise to emerge.

The knee-jerk reaction to Democratic leaders will be to dismiss such suggestions as “unilateral disarmament” and “negotiating with ourselves” that serves only to “undermine party unity.”  That’s exactly the kind of logic, of course that sustains all blood feuds. What that misses, of course, is the appeal that such an approach would have to the majority of voters—particularly swing voters—who have had enough of partisan brawling and dysfunction and would reward the party that ends the cycle of partisan retribution and resistance with a majority that could endure beyond the next election cycle.

Steven Pearlstein is a senior fellow at Penn Washington and director of its Fixing Congress Initiative.  He is also Robinson Professor of Public Affairs at George Mason University and a former columnist for the Washington Post. The views expressed here are his own.