It’s the GOP Congress’s Fault
While President Obama remade the country in his image with the help of unprecedented majorities in Congress, Republicans found that their best ticket to both headlines and renewed electoral relevance was obstruction and rhetorical excess. It wasn’t enough merely to oppose President Obama’s massive majorities and ambitious legislative agenda; they had to be loud, decisive, and definitive when doing so.
In doing so, Republicans were writing promises to their constituents that they couldn’t keep. They were going to defund Planned Parenthood, repeal Obamacare, reverse Dodd-Frank, undo executive amnesty, and more — all without holding the White House.
Well, Republican voters turned out in droves in the midterm elections to give Republicans back the majorities in Congress. Republicans could do hardly any of the things they promised to their voters, and their voters have now turned to an authoritarian strongman. Elected Republicans, it’s your fault that Donald Trump is destroying our political system.
It didn’t have to be this way. Politicians lie to their voters all the time, but the particular promises that Republicans made in the Tea Party era and couldn’t back up when they actually regained Congress were exactly the kinds of promises that made it easy for an outsider like Donald Trump to exploit.
Trump has made his brand on being a “winner” — whatever that may mean. What the GOP in the Obama era has done is lose, time and again. They lost in the supermajority era and made promises that they’d win if they regained Congress. They lost in the divided government era, when the GOP House couldn’t do a thing while Democrats controlled the Senate. They lost the 2012 election while promising that President Obama’s policies had made him so toxic that it would be impossible for him to win reelection. They lost the era of renewed GOP control of Congress, with majorities in the House and Senate, because they can’t figure out a coherent strategy and, well, President Obama’s 2nd term has been mostly dedicated to merely preserving the astonishing victories of his first term.
Many Republicans have acknowledged and even responsibly reckoned with what their strategy meant. “Throwing grenades is easier than catching them,” Sen. John Thune said in 2010.
Speaker Paul Ryan — the GOP vice-presidential nominee in 2012 — said that the 2012 election was an Obamacare referendum. “We think we can still repeal this law if we win this election,” Ryan said in 2012. “The American people will be the judge and jury on this law come November.”
It never stopped. On January 6, 2016, Republicans in Congress passed and sent to President Obama’s desk an Obamacare repeal bill, as they thought their constituents wanted. It was done with little fanfare. It was vetoed on January 8.
In response to what they perceived as the procedural extremity of President Obama’s first term, Republicans vowed to the country that they’d use every tool in the legislative kit to get their agenda passed. After the 2010 midterm election, incoming Speaker of the House John Boehner said they’d do “everything we can” to repeal the health care law.
Of course, it didn’t happen.
Republican leadership also decided they’d use the threat of the debt ceiling to extract something — anything — out of President Obama. They played chicken, and made it seem like they were crazy enough to allow the U.S. to default on its debt obligations, to force President Obama to the negotiating table. And it worked! The procedural gamesmanship of the Republicans led to the Budget Control Act of 2011 — a piece of legislation that really did rein in spending in a way that conservatives should have supported. But that was a dangerous, reckless game, and one that Republicans did not learn the right lessons from.
“I think some of our members may have thought the default issue was a hostage you might take a chance at shooting,” Sen. McConnell said after a deal was made. “Most of us didn’t think that. What we did learn is this — it’s a hostage worth ransoming. And it focuses the Congress on something that must be done.”
Hostage-ransoming with the debt ceiling is a time-honored Congressional tradition, true. But Republicans leveraged it on one big time, and accomplished relatively little. They didn’t repeal Obamacare. They didn’t repeal Dodd-Frank. They didn’t get anything done that some of their more vocal constituents thought they should have been able to. And all they learned was that the reforms that their constituents believed to be quite meager was worth using the biggest bullet in the chamber for.
For much of the people who make up the GOP base — the working- and middle-class people who vote Republican for cultural and economic reasons — why would they continue to support the politicians who have promised them so much over the last seven years yet failed to deliver?
Enter the capital-W Winner, Donald Trump. How’s he going to win? It doesn’t really matter. He’ll win. He’ll make deals. After losing for so long, and being betrayed by so many politicians, he’ll restore the GOP base’s sense of winning.
Republican voters saw the amazing accomplishments of President Obama in his first term — a trillion-dollar remaking of the economy in ARRA, a 2300-page financial reform law sold as a “fix” to the biggest economic crisis in decades, and the biggest overhaul of the American health system in half a century — and wanted similar accomplishments for themselves. They wanted some sense that they had a voice in Washington after the era of Obama supermajority.
One of the biggest threats to Republican politicians in the Obama years has been the threat of being taken out in a primary election by an outsider touting more conservative credentials. It happened to David Dewhurst. It happened to House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. It happened to Charlie Crist. (Which: good.) The anti-establishment fervor of voters has made politicians feel like they need to buff their own anti-establishment credentials — potentially to harmful extremes, as being an elected politician in and of itself is already a pro-establishment downside.
So we got a wave of anti-establishment “tea party” Republicans who won on their promises to voters that they’d oppose the Obama agenda whenever and wherever possible. Their raison d’etre was not a governing agenda, but an opposition agenda. It was not to bring Democrats to the table, it was to repeal what Obama had already done and strike a blow of revenge for their constituents.
Actual Republican politicians wanted that too. Politicians are petty, vindictive people, and after Obama railroaded them during the first year of his presidency, they wanted to exact revenge. This is an unadmirable trait in politicians, so yes, they deserve blame for that. Some were more explicit than others here — but some of these new tea-party politicians exploited obstructionism for their own rhetorical excess. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, for example, led the charge for Republicans to use every tool possible, no matter how incremental and hopeless their campaign looked to be. Cruz led what the media came to term the “shutdown caucus,” advocating that the Republicans only send government-funding bills to Obama loaded with provisions that he would refuse to sign, in an effort to leverage the power of the purse to win a public-relations battle with the president in a time of government shutdown.
In fact, Ted Cruz explicitly said that he would do “everything necessary and anything possible to defund Obamacare,” and that he would use “any procedural means” to accomplish this goal. He also… Wait. We’ll leave Cruz for a later issue.
The Republican strategy in their time of Congressional majority in negotiation with the Obama White House time and again made the perfect the enemy of the good. President Obama, after the loss of the supermajority and then the Republican takeover, attempted to go into relatively status quo divided-government, but the Republicans, who had their pride damaged during the supermajority era and big promises to their constituents to live up to, wanted more than that. Republicans were actually able to pass some positive pieces of legislation during this time, but left a lot on the table as well when having to deal with a caucus and a GOP electorate that wanted more.
The Republican elected officials in Washington scored political points against President Obama and his policies for the last seven years while not being particularly honest with their voters that, without the White House, they couldn’t actually do much. Republican voters felt powerless: Democrats had gotten oh so much of what they wanted in such a short time period, while their own leaders promised they would be able to counter strike and accomplish their own goals while not really having the tools to do so. President Obama’s 2012 re-election was a shocking wake-up. How could there be so many people who still wanted him to be president, after the 2010 midterm elections looked like a decisive popular revolt against his policies? They were consigned to another four years of powerlessness, hoping that the GOP leadership in Washington could pry meager concessions from the White House all while “negotiating” — with the man they had come to believe was the enemy.
And there’s Donald Trump, the take-no-prisoners strongman who promised they’d win, and called out both the current GOP leadership, and crop of candidates, and Mitt Romney as incompetent losers. It didn’t particularly matter how he would win; after all, the Republican talk of the dirty details and shutdown and debt ceilings and reconciliation and procedural maneuvering didn’t get them anything. Donald Trump, by sheer force of will, would rectify all the wrongs of the GOP leadership. The policies don’t matter; he merely will. And it’s because the Republicans either could not or would not be totally up-front about the inability for big reform without holding the White House.
