FIVE POINTS: A Long December
1. Here are my December/January predictions for Congress. There's a lot going on.
The tax bill will pass before Christmas. This genuinely surprises me. I didn't think there was any way they could get such a large bill together and through both chambers this year, given how late they started. There's a chance it still falls apart coming out of the conference---Senator Rubio used his leverage to demand changes yesterday and you could always get a revolt in the House---but my hunch is that it is going to pass. It just feels like everyone wants to get to yes.
There are a lot of liberals who see the tax bill as so bad/unpopular that they can't understand why the GOP would pass it. At a party level, it's an easy explanation: parties routinely trade seats in the legislature for durable gains on longstanding policy. Parties have goals beyond simply maximizing the number of seats they hold in the legislature. The Democrats explicitly did this with the ACA.
At the individual member level, I expect Members to largely vote with their districts. A fair number of vulnerable House GOP members will vote against the bill, reflecting their district preferences. They may lose---as the Blue Dogs did in 2010---but once the party decides to do the tax bill, all they can do is vote against it. Their opportunity was to alter the bill or take it off the agenda entirely; once it makes it to the floor in a form you can't accept, you just have to vote no as loud as you can.
In general, however, there won't be many members who vote for this bill clearly against their constituents wishes. Maybe a few. But in general, Members vote their districts. On the ACA, literally *every* vote reflected district preference perfectly. Note this is different than voting your constituents best interests; it may be the case that voters are mistaken about what is best for them. But the structure of the districts and the partisan sorting in the U.S. right now creates a situation where a bill can be very unpopular nationally, but reasonably popular in most of the majority party's districts.
The conservatives are going to get rolled badly on the spending deal. The structure of the GOP coalition in the House gives the Democrats just tremendous leverage. The Freedom Caucus Republicans won't vote for any bills that significantly raise non-defense spending, which means the GOP can't move any realistic bill that can get through the Senate without the help of the House Dems. Which means the final deal is going to be amenable to both the Senate Democrats (because you need 60 votes to pass appropriations bills) and the House Democrats. That's a recipe for bill that's ultimately quite centrist.
My guess is that we just end up on a spending spree: the statutory caps on both defense and non-defense spending will be raised by close to $200B over two years, CHIP will be reauthorized, and a massive disaster relief bill will go through that isn't offset by spending cuts. And I think the health care patches will be put through as well. The only sticking point will be DACA, but my bet is that whether it's in or out, it will ultimately be paired with "extra money for border security" rather than anything described as a "wall."
What the House conservatives are going to get here is one or more show-votes Ryan gives them on bills that have no chance of passage. This is straight out of the Boehner playbook, and a movie we've seen over and over again. The HFC prefers voting no on a centrist deal than voting yes on the best deal that can be squeezed through the Senate. So the House will engage in some show-voting for the next bunch of weeks on partisan GOP bills/CRs. A deal will then be crafted by party leaders and moved through the Senate on a bipartisan basis. Then the House will be offered an up/down vote on the deal, and the GOP will use a sizable number of Dem votes to pass it. It's simply not going to go any other way.
I think the spending deal will come in early January, no shutdown. The current CR expires on December 22. It seems impossible to me there would be a deal in place by then. I bet you'll get another CR relatively easily that goes through January 12 or so, and you'll get your deal that week.
2. GOP primary extremism has backfired quite often in Senate races. That the GOP has an extremism problem in its primaries is not news to most people following American politics. In fact, one of the basic assumptions of most contemporary observers of Congress is that the great majority of members, Republican and Democratic alike, are more worried about a primary challenger on their extreme flank than they are about a general election challenger who might defeat them from the center. Consequently, we can observe lots of members rationally responding to this by shifting their positions toward the extremes. In most cases, that's enough to prevent or defeat a challenger, but there have been a number of high-profile primary losses by incumbents.
That's been the standard analysis of the situation for a while, and I think it's correct and a significant part of the changes we've seen in the parties and in Congress during this decade, especially on the GOP side. But there's a second aspect of it that most people don't consider: these GOP primary challenges are also flipping seats to the other party. In the last decade, the GOP has lost at least three Senate seats---and possibly several more---because surefire winning candidates were defeated in the primaries by extremists who went on to lose the general election.
Roy Moore defeating Luther Strange and losing to Doug Jones is obviously the latest example. Mike Castle---the widely popular Representative from Delaware---lost to Christine O'Donnell in the GOP primary for the 2010 Senate special election, and longtime Indiana Senator Dick Lugar lost to Richard Mourdock in the 2012 Senate primary. There's no question Castle and Lugar would have won the seats and would likely currently hold them, but they are now both in the hands of Democrats. Similarl losses occurred in Nevada in 2010, Colorado in 2010, and Missouri in 2012, although those three cases are not quite as clear cut GOP wins if they run a standard conservative.
The upshot, of course, is that the primary system has pulled the GOP members to the right, but it has also overshot a fair number of times and pulled the chamber itself to the left. The 51-49 split in the Senate and the prospects of the GOP losing the chamber in 2018 are, to a large degree, an unforced error of primary miscalculation. Strange, Castle, and Lugar would give them an insurmountable 54-46 edge heading into 2018, and would make everything easier for the leadership when bargaining with the party moderates and other holdouts on majoritarian legislation and nominations.
As I write this, Ezra Klein has preempted me with an entire article on the topic...featuring my original tweet!
3. Doug Jones's victory will have little short term direct impact, lots of indirect impact. As a vote in the Senate, Doug Jones isn't going to matter too much in the next year. Everything that can be done legislatively by bare majority will likely be complete before he arrives, and despite the rhetoric and wishes of the Speaker, I seriously doubt the GOP will do a budget resolution and major reconciliation legislation next year. (If they do, of course, Jones could theoretically become pivotal). Whether he's a solid Democratic vote or a true moderate who often votes with the GOP, the number of instances where a bill will sink that would have passed with Moore in the seat will be near or exactly at zero.
But that greatly understates the indirect effects of Jones's victory and arrival in the Senate, which I see as threefold. First, the election itself sends a signal to all Members about what the future holds. Obviously, a large percentage of the result was due to Moore being an awful candidate, a true extremist who also had allegations of sexual misconduct weakening him. But some portion of his defeat reflects national political dynamics, and that may get some elected Republicans jittery and less willing to back a conservative party line in the agenda setting or crafting of bills. This is very difficult to observe in action, but it's real.
Second, dropping the Senate GOP cushion from two seats to one seat ramps up the bargaining power of the individual GOP Senators who have credible threats to defect on individual issues. As noted, there aren't a lot of 50-vote legislative items left in the 115th Congress, but there are nominations. The bigger the cushion leadership has, the less you can bargain for, because leadership can set you in competition with other possible holdouts to get to 50. This is why it's so hard when there's no cushion; every Senator becomes king and can demand the world. Picture the Dems with 60 in 2009. And remember that bargains in the Senate cross all boundaries; votes on nominations may be traded for consideration on a wide spectrum of issues.
Finally, I have wondered a bit about what tack Jones is going to take in the Senate. He's a clear long shot for reelection in 2020, so he has options. He might go about his job like a vulnerable incumbent and do everything he can to moderate his views in hopes of reelection; he might forget about Alabama and vote with the Dems consistently, or just according to his own conscience. We really don't know. One intriguing possibility I was thinking about was Jones trying to put together a "Gang of 4" style centrist bipartisan coalition that would hold the balance of power in the Senate on some issues. We've seen these before---on judges, on immigration---but I don't know if the right mix of personalities exist or the gap between the parties has grown too large. But Jones is an obvious candidate for that type of move, and there may be some incentives for vulnerable Dems, centrist Republicans, or retiring Senators to join such a coalition, at least on a few issues. So we'll see.
4. I wrote up my Neustadt analysis of Trump for Vox. You can find it here. The main thing I'd add that I couldn't fit in the piece is that a weak president is obviously a foreign policy danger if he undertakes risky strategies as a consequence of low domestic influence, but the larger problem is the administrative presidency. Most citizens perceive the president first as a legislator, second as a foreign policy leader, and third (if at all) as an executive administrator.
That's probably exactly backwards in terms of importance, especially in the modern age where we have statutorily placed so much governing responsibility with the president. Governing is really hard in any case, and managing a bureaucracy where the civil service doesn't respect your authority and the senior leadership feels free to ignore your directives creates a set of agencies that lack focus, provide sub-optimal implementation of law, and ultimately deliver inferior, inefficient, and wasteful governance. None of which will make the headlines like a blundered-into war, but all of which degrades the quality of life in the country.
5. We started a podcast! My colleagues at the Government Affairs Institute and I will be regularly talking congressional politics on our new podcast, Congress:Two Beers In. Our hope is to fit into the niche of smart and entertaining analysis at the intersection of congressional policy, process, and politics. And we're always on our second beer when we start talking. Our most recent episode is here. You can subscribe on iTunes here. And our RSS feed is here. We also want guests, so if you think you'd be a good fit, drop me a line.
See you next time (probably end of next week). Thanks for reading!