President Donald Trump is now more likely than ever to end his first
year in office without a single major legislative accomplishment.
His
Obamacare repeal collapsed Tuesday. He won’t even release the broad
outlines of his tax overhaul plan until September. The last time
Washington did a major tax bill, in 1986, it took more than a year. A $1
trillion infrastructure plan is little more than a talking point.
Congress ignored his budget proposal. Republicans are as divided on all
of these issues as they are on health care. Lawmakers haven’t even given
him money to build his border wall.
And between now and the end
of the year, Congress still has to approve more than $1 trillion in
federal spending, pass a veterans health-care bill and navigate a
debt-ceiling fight to avoid a potential default, all in the space of
about a dozen working weeks. It doesn’t leave much time for legislating,
even for a Republican president who came into office with a package of
promises and a Republican Senate and a Republican House to boot.
The White House pledges next time will be different -- preparing to
launch a tax overhaul effort, complete with a coordinated strategy and
travel by Trump to key states to promote the plan, something he never
did in a concerted way with the Obamacare repeal. The administration is
asking corporate chief executives and conservative groups to pitch in
with media appearances and town halls and is recruiting governors and
local officials to do the same.
That still might not be enough.
The failed fight over the Affordable Care Act exposed weaknesses that
imperil much of Trump’s agenda: a historically unpopular and inattentive
political novice in the Oval Office, an uncompromising hard-right wing
on Capitol Hill, and their leadership’s inability to bridge internal
philosophical divides.
Fruitless Months
The first casualty
of the Obamacare debate is time: six fruitless months exhausted on a
subject Republican leaders had hoped to dispatch in January. And this
was supposed to be the easy one. Since 2010, Republicans had promised a
repeal. Trump and Republicans campaigned hard on the issue. Yet despite
full control of Washington, they couldn’t get it done.
“Every
Republican for the last seven years has campaigned on repealing
Obamacare,” Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas said Tuesday. “I think
the credibility of the conference is seriously undermined if we fail to
deliver on that promise.”
On Wednesday, Trump said he planned to
meet with Republican senators for lunch at the White House to see if
they could try again to get a health-care bill through the chamber.
“They MUST keep their promise to America!” he
tweeted. “The Republicans never discuss how good their healthcare bill is, & it will get even better at lunchtime.”
Surprised By Defections
Even by the standards of Trump’s own instincts to delegate
the detail work, the president was unusually disconnected from the
debate as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s health-care bill
veered off course.
Last week, he traveled to Paris to participate in Bastille Day
festivities with French President Emmanuel Macron. On Friday, he went
directly from Paris to his club in Bedminster, New Jersey, where he
spent nearly nine hours over three days on the golf course watching the
U.S. Women’s Open. On Monday, he kicked off the White House’s “Made in
America” week with a photo op in which he sat in a fire truck on the
South Lawn, tried on a cowboy hat and hefted a baseball bat.
Two
Republican senators, Mike Lee of Utah and Jerry Moran of Kansas, were
meanwhile planning to publicly defect from the Obamacare legislation.
“I
was very surprised when the two folks came out last night because we
thought they were in fairly good shape,” he told reporters Tuesday at
the White House.
Trump gamely tried to put the blame on Democrats.
“We’re not going to own it,” he said “I’m not going to own it. I can
tell you the Republicans are not going to own it.”
The public
would disagree. Americans say they would blame Trump and Republicans for
a problems in the health care system over Democrats by 59 percent to 30
percent, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation
poll taken June 14-19.
All
52 Republican senators were invited to the White House for lunch on
Wednesday to discuss health care with Trump, White House spokesman Ninio
Fetalvo said.
Currency markets reacted strongly as traders
concluded Trump’s overall agenda is imperiled. The dollar slid to a 14-month low against the euro.
Pivot to Taxes
The
White House argues that Trump has been successful outside of
legislation. He won confirmation of his nominee for the Supreme Court,
Neil Gorsuch, and his administration is making steady progress on
deregulation.
Congressional Republican leaders and the White House
have to now figure out whether they can salvage any of their
legislative agenda, particularly the promise of major tax cuts.
The
Obamacare repeal effort has weighed on the popularity of both Trump and
his party. The public rejected the health-care legislation they drafted
mostly behind closed doors without any Democratic input. Trump’s
approval
rating is 40 percent.
The president says he’s ready to abandon health care and move on to tax cuts he believes will goose the economy.
“It
will go on and we’ll win, we’re gonna win on taxes, we’re going to win
on infrastructure and lots of other things that we’re doing,” Trump
said.
Congressional Priorities
But the Senate isn’t quite
done with health care. McConnell still plans a vote on a repeal bill
early next week. And he acknowledged that if it fails the Senate may
hold bipartisan hearings on legislation to stabilize Obamacare’s health
insurance markets -- exactly what the Senate Democratic leader and Trump
foil, Chuck Schumer of New York, has sought for months.
White
House officials say they’ve learned lessons from the health-care
experience, and they believe Republicans, desperate for a political win
after the collapse of the Obamacare bill, can rally around a compromise
tax plan.
Rather than letting the House and Senate draft their own
versions of the bill, as the White House did with health care, the
administration plans to release a unified framework for changes to the
tax code -- with compromises on rates and loopholes already baked in and
signed off by leaders in both chambers.
September Release
A
small group of top Republican leaders -- McConnell; House Speaker Paul
Ryan; Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah and Representative Kevin Brady of
Texas, who chair the Senate and House tax-writing committees; Treasury
Secretary Steven Mnuchin and National Economic Council Director Gary
Cohn -- are discussing high-level principles for an overhaul, according
to one person familiar with the matter.
They aim to outline their
principles by the end of the month, vet them with members of Congress in
August and release a plan in September, the person said. Debate would
extend through the fall.
White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer
is developing a comprehensive messaging strategy, recruiting surrogates
and interest groups to support the legislation even before the details
are final.
Marc Short, the head of the president’s legislative
affairs team, has said he recognizes that opponents of the health care
bill did a better job rallying their supporters.