Wall Street Journal (subscription) | A Republican Failure Wall Street Journal (subscription) The Senate left town for its August recess Thursday, a week after the House vamoosed, and let's hope the Members get an earful from constituents at home. The Republican Congress has so far been a monumental disappointment and on present trend is ... |
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A Republican Failure - Wall Street Journal (subscription)
Thom Tillis at the Capitol on July 18.
Aaron P. Bernstein/Reuters
Republican North Carolina Sen. Thom Tillis and Democratic Delaware Sen. Chris Coons are co-sponsoring a bill that would allow a judicial panel to reinstate Department of Justice-appointed special counsels such as Robert Mueller if they are fired without good cause, the senators announced in a statement today. The bill would specifiy that special counsels "may only be removed for misconduct, dereliction of duty, incapacity, conflict of interest, or other good cause, like a violation of departmental policies." (Donald Trump has alleged publicly that Mueller is biased against him and, of course, fired FBI director James Comey while Comey was supervising the investigation into the Trump campaign's ties to Russia.)
Tillis is not the only Senate Republican to have recently challenged Trump. Last week, Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski, Maine Sen. Susan Collins, and Arizona Sen. John McCaincast crucial "no" votes against the "skinny repeal" health care bill that Trump supported, while Judiciary Committee chairman and Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley announced he would not hold hearings to confirm a new attorney general until next year if Trump follows through on his threats to fire Jeff Sessions.
Assuming that all 48 Senate Democrats support the Tillis/Coons bill, which is being called the Special Counsel Integrity Act, two more Republican votes besides Tillis' would be required to pass it. (On that front, South Carolina Sen. Lindsay Graham has previously said he was considering introducing such a bill himself.) If it then passed the Housea big "if" given the lower chamber's more pronounced right-wing leanTrump would presumably veto it, which would mean two-thirds majorities in each chamber would have to vote for it to override the veto. The law would then probably face legal challenge from the president on the grounds that it unconstitutionally constrains his executive authority. And this is all assuming Trump decides he wants to fire Mueller in the first place.
Which is to say, we are a long way legally speaking from a court panel actually reinstating a special counsel. The fact that a Senate Republican is formally supporting Mueller over his party's president, though, is still significantand Trump will almost certainly interpret it as a personal betrayal requiring personal retaliation. Six a.m. presidential Twitter meltdown, here we come!
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Republican Senator Is Sponsoring Bill to Protect Special Counsel From Being Fired Without Cause - Slate Magazine (blog)
West Virginia Governor Jim Justice plans to switch parties from Democrat to Republican at a rally with President Trump on Thursday, according to a report in The New York Times, which cites three unnamed sources.
The announcement is set to take place in Huntington, West Virginia later in the evening. Were going to West Virginia tonight, by the way, Trump said at an event earlier on Thursday. Were going to have a very big announcement, which will be very exciting I think for the media and everyone else.
West Virginia used to be a Democratic stronghold, but the state has grown increasingly conservative in recent years and now votes reliably Republican at the presidential and state level. In 2014, the state legislature flipped from Democratic to Republican control. And Trump won West Virginia in November, defeating Hillary Clinton in a landslide with 67 percent of the vote.
Like Trump, Justice is a billionaire who ran for election as a newcomer to politics, and was elected in November 2016. During his campaign, he took pains to show he was no fan of Clinton. I cannot be a supporter of Hillary Clinton, Justice told a West Virginia radio station last August.
The West Virginia governors office did not immediately return a request for confirmation, nor did the West Virginia Democratic Party, or the Democratic governors association. A spokesman for West Virginias lone Democratic senator, Joe Manchin, declined to comment.
Manchin is up for reelection in 2018 and faces a primary challenge on the left from a progressive candidate running on a Bernie Sanders-style platform. The West Virginia senator also faces Republican challengers Evan Jenkins, a Republican representative who was once a Democrat himself, but switched parties in 2013, and Patrick Morrisey, West Virginias Republican attorney general. Manchin endorsed Justice during his run for governor.
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West Virginia Governor to Announce He's Switching Parties to Republican - The Atlantic
For Republicans, September is shaping up to be a month of bitter pills.
It appears increasingly likely to GOP lawmakers that they will be asked to vote for two things they hate at the end of the month.
The first is a continuing resolution that would keep the government open and funded at current spending levels.
I think were in for a long fall, White House director of legislative affairs Marc Short said at an Americans for Prosperity event Monday night.
Congress faces a Sept. 30 deadline to prevent a government shutdown, while Treasury Secretary Steven MnuchinSteven Terner MnuchinGOP chairman tells agencies to exclude info from FOIA requests 'It takes a village' to protect financial sector from cyber threats G-20 sees role reversal of US, EU leaders on protectionist measures MORE, somewhat conveniently, has set a Sept. 29 deadline for raising the nations borrowing limit.
Mnuchin says the hike should be clean, meaning it should not be tied to spending cuts or reforms demanded by conservatives.
To get the bill through the Senate, Republicans will need support from Democrats, giving the minority leverage.
Republicans loath funding the government with a continuing resolution because it blocks or postpones a slew of their priorities, including funds for President Trumps border wall, significant increases in military spending and cuts to nondefense discretionary spending.
Wed be against a continuing resolution because that wouldnt allow us to fund those priorities, White House budget director Mick Mulvaney said in June.
Republicans could avoid the continuing resolution by reaching a deal on a broader spending bill, but that would also require Democratic support in the Senate, and time is running out.
So far, the House has only managed to approve four spending bills. The Senate has not approved any, and most have not even made it out of committee.
This means the continuing resolution is a more likely outcome and one that would buy time for a longer budget deal at the end of the year.
Several prominent conservative leaders sounded resigned to a continuing resolution as House members began their recess last week.
September is going to be a very difficult month, I mean obviously all of this is coming into play right away, all the fiscal issues and deadlines are going to make it extremely difficult to get everything done in a piece-by-piece basis, said Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), the chairman of the conservative House Freedom Caucus.
I think that there is no way to work quick enough to do a normal appropriations process, so a CR will be the result, because of inactivity in the Senate, he added.
Congress will still be under pressure this fall to secure a spending deal even with a continuing resolution.
New budget caps under a previous long-term budget deal are set to kick in in January. This would reduce spending below existing levels unless Congress passes a new law.
Without a bipartisan budget deal lifting the caps, said Patrick LeahyPatrick LeahyDigital privacy bill still abandons probable cause for our papers Overnight Tech: Driverless car bill advances in House | Bezos now world's richest person | Tech groups hail new email privacy bill Senate panel advances measure to protect medical marijuana states MORE (D-Vt.) vice chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, spending plans currently under consideration would result in a 13.2 percent sequester on national security programs in just a few months, undermining military readiness.
Then there's the problem of the debt ceiling.
Raising the borrowing limit is a difficult vote for most members of Congress, but particularly for Republicans.
A HarvardHarris Poll in June found that an astonishing 69 percent of voters were opposed to Congress raising the debt ceiling, even though the failure to do so could lead the United States to default on its debt. Even the suggestion that the government would not pay its bills could spark a new financial and economic crisis.
Under former President Barack ObamaBarack ObamaOvernight Tech: Senate panel approves FCC nominees | Dem group invests in progressive startups | Tech groups rip Trump immigration plan Russian PM: New sanctions amount to 'full-scale trade war' America's divisions: The greatest strategic vulnerability of our time MORE, conservatives tried to use the must-pass legislation to get spending reforms or other Republican priorities made into law.
With Trump in the White House and Republicans controlling both the House and Senate, however, the dynamics have shifted. Democrats may try to turn the tables and extract concessions from Republicans, who will need Democratic support to pass the debt ceiling.
To ensure that we have robust economic growth and promote fiscal discipline, the Trump administration believes its important to raise the debt ceiling as soon as possible, White House press secretarySarah Huckabee Sanders said on Tuesday.
Even so, some Republicans are still pushing for some sort of policy reform to hitch to the debt ceiling.
Ive been raising the issue of the debt ceiling for months now, and certainly what Id like to see is some meaningful, structural control enacted in conjunction with increasing, said Sen. Ron JohnsonRon JohnsonScrap the Senates 30-hour per nominee debate rule to clear backlog of Trump nominees GOP senators pitch rules change amid nominations backlog Republicans wonder: Can we govern? MORE (R-Wis.).
The difficult decisions come as Republicans grapple with a narrative that they are unable to govern.
In the first six months of the Trump administration, they have yet to finalize a major piece of legislation, including the healthcare bill that failed in the Senate last week.
Come autumn, the GOP will likely have to choose between allowing the government to shut down and default on its debt and making politically difficult, unpopular decisions.
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Cruel September looms for GOP - The Hill
By Zach Gibson/Getty Images.
Still reeling from last weeks health-care disaster, Republicans are scurrying back to more comfortable territory: cutting taxes. Weve had our vote, and were moving on to tax reform, John Thune, the third-ranking Republican in the Senate, said. But after months of promising to overhaul the tax code by the end of the year, the Trump administration has yet to provide a clear, detailed tax-reform plan, leaving rank-and-file Republicans in the dark and the party at risk of repeating the same mistakes that killed Obamacare repeal. There is no detail, Representative Ted Yoho said in an interview. It is a problem.
When Donald Trump unexpectedly won the Oval Office last November, the Republican Party was given the greatest opportunity in 30 years to re-write the tax code. But six months into the new administration, the G.O.P.s tax plan remains inchoate. As the health-care debate was roiling Capitol Hill, the so-called Big Six Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, Ways and Means Committee Chairman Kevin Brady, White House economic adviser Gary Cohn, Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatchreleased a six-paragraph statement on Thursday that lacked any real policy minutiae. A few vague paragraphs isnt even a broad strokes proposalits more like finger painting, Rep. Sander Levin complained. One tax lobbyist echoed the sentiment to Politico: This literally started as principles yesterday and morphed into mindless pablum in 24 hours.
The statement did provide clarity on the controversial border-adjustment taxdefinitively stating that it will not be included in the tax-reform plan. Ryan and Brady championed the idea earlier this year, pitching it as a way to collect as much as $1 trillion in revenue to offset tax cuts elsewhere. But Ryan caved after critics blasted the policy as a tax on consumers. [Ryans] top priority is getting meaningful tax reform done, a House Republican aide told Politico. He had no interest in holding up reform over this one policy, no matter how right he believes it to be.
But beyond settling the dispute over the border-adjustment tax, it is unclear how the Trump administration and Congressional leadership intend to offset the massive tax cuts the president has insisted will be included in the tax-reform plan. There are so many other questions, Mark Meadows, the chairman of the arch-conservative House Freedom Caucus, told Bloomberg. We need a lot more level of detail before you can opine on whether its good or bad.
It remains unclear, for instance, how low the corporate tax rate can realistically go. The House Republican tax plan includes a corporate tax rate of 20 percent, while Trump had been pushing for 15 percent. Hatch, however, characterized the presidents proposal as very unlikely In an interview with Reuters. In fact, it would be kind of miraculous if we could get it down to 25 percent or less. Id like to get it down to around 20 percent. Id love to get it at 15 percent if we could, the Utah Senator added. But I think the odds are, were going to be lucky to get it down at all.
Much like they did on health care, the Republicans are not likely to have much Democratic support. In a letter to G.O.P. leadership and Trump on Tuesday, signed by 45 of the 48 members of the Democratic caucus, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer wrote that they would not back any tax-reform bill that added to the deficit or provided tax cuts to the countrys most affluent. Tax reform cannot be a cover story for delivering tax cuts to the wealthiest, the letter reads. We will not support any tax plan that includes tax cuts for the top 1 percent.
McConnell has said that he intends to tackle tax reform through budget reconciliation, which would allow him to pass a bill along party lines. And while the Kentucky senator will likely face many of the same obstacles as he did on health careuniting the conservative and moderate factions of the Republican Partygetting to 50 votes might be slightly easier if the three Democrats who didnt sign Schumers letterSenators Joe Manchin, Joe Donnelly, and Heidi Heitkampbreak ranks. But with so few details at this stage, it is hard to say how difficult of a lift Ryan and McConnell will face. As William Gale, a tax-policy expert at the nonpartisan Brookings Institution, explained to Bloomberg, Distance is a tax reforms best friend. Once you look at it up close and see the things you have to do, people shy away from it pretty quickly.
The White House, for its part, is pressing ahead, with or without a clear idea of where its going. At a political event hosted by two conservative groups tied to the Koch brothers, Legislative Director Marc Short said a tax plan would be introduced in the House in October and make its way through the Senate in November. So that, I think, is an aggressive schedule, but that is our timetable, Short said, according to Politico. I think were in for a long fall, legislative calendar-wise.
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Republicans Still Have No Idea What the White House Is Doing on Tax Reform - Vanity Fair