Legislating is a messy, ridiculous, often brutal affair, especially at the congressional level. It’s rare that one party controls the House, the Senate and the White House. With divided government characterizing most of modern American history, senators, representatives and even presidents learn to triage their priorities and take whatever victories they can. “I have always figured that a half a loaf is better than none, and I know that in the democratic process you’re not going to always get everything you want,” then-President Ronald Reagan told reporters in 1983.
For many Republicans in Congress these days, that’s no longer the case. Partial victory is no longer better than no victory. Outside of the rare governing trifecta, control of the legislative branch is most useful as a leverage to help the GOP’s political fortunes — particularly control of the executive branch. Policy achievements have taken a back seat to returning Donald Trump to the White House.
Partial victory is no longer better than no victory.
What makes this particularly detrimental to congressional Republicans is that it now extends to both sides of the U.S. Capitol. For much of 2023, House Republicans shot themselves in the foot repeatedly as their Senate counterparts looked on with a mixture of bemusement and horror. This year, there are several opportunities that are available to notch wins for the GOP, but there are enough holdouts in each chamber to potentially tank each of them.
The House actually managed to get its act together for long enough Tuesday to pass a bipartisan tax bill that restores several major tax breaks for corporations that were part of the 2017 Trump tax cuts, a major win for Republicans. In return, Democrats get the chance to expand the Child Tax Credit once again. The proposed increase is still smaller than the pandemic-era expansion that raised millions of children out of poverty, but it’s still a boost and was only made possible through the trade-off. But Senate Republicans are skeptical, insisting on taking it up themselves to get changes that might doom the bill entirely or at least prevent it from passing before the current tax season.
At the same time, on immigration, Senate Republicans are on the cusp of extracting the steepest concessions Democrats have offered in years, in exchange for finally approving President Joe Biden’s requested aid for Ukraine and Israel. But their House counterparts, led by Speaker Mike Johnson, insist that any deal is “absolutely dead” on arrival.
The stumbling block in both cases is a fear of success. Republicans worry that if these bills become law, Biden will be the only person to get the credit. Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, made that subtext into text earlier this week: “Passing a tax bill that makes the president look good — mailing out checks before the election — means he could be re-elected, and then we won’t extend the 2017 tax cuts.” Likewise, the main reason that House Republicans are so leery of the Senate immigration deal is that actually addressing the problem removes one of their party’s main lines of attack against the Biden administration. And should border encounters actually fall, the GOP thinking goes, that hurts the chance of a re-elected Trump forcing through even stricter provisions. (Let’s leave aside the fact that, as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has reminded his colleagues, this is likely the GOP’s best shot, as Democrats would filibuster any more punitive measures under Trump.)
The stumbling block in both cases is a fear of success.
It can be hard sometimes to step back and appreciate how much the political landscape has shifted. Washington used to see deals between the two parties, between the House and the Senate and between Congress and the president — regardless of who was in the Oval Office. Democratic Speaker Tip O’Neill and Reagan found compromise on taxes. After Republicans swept the 1994 midterms, then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich and then-President Bill Clinton struck deals to pass welfare reform and a balanced budget. As late as the first two years under President George W. Bush, Congress managed to pass No Child Left Behind and campaign finance reform.
You can argue about whether these compromises were net positive or negative for the country in the long term, but they still involved both sides giving up some of what each one wanted to get a partial win. But since Barack Obama’s presidency, we’ve seen Republicans treat the merest shred of compromise as verboten. The day Obama took office, senior Republicans agreed at a private dinner to obstruct every part of his agenda. That uncompromising hostility continued for eight years, torpedoing deals on gun safety reforms, immigration and other issues that still haunt us today. For this GOP, lawmaking is no longer the responsibility of Congress as a separate branch of the government but an extension of the presidency.
If Republicans want to forgo lasting achievements in favor of short-term politics, I’m not going to stand in their way. But the continuing breakdown of the legislative branch as an autonomous body rather than a rubber stamp for the White House is unhealthy for the country. Legislators are elected to do what they think is best for their constituents and the nation, not whatever will help Trump get re-elected.
Moreover, these pyrrhic victories that Republicans see as stifling the Biden agenda stand in the way of progress on policies that help people — including people who will still vote for Trump in November. So I would love for congressional Republicans to acknowledge that, sometimes, a win is a win and take their dang half-loaf.