America Has Two Presidents

by dap | Dec 22, 2024 | Outside The Beltway

As regulars are well aware, I did not vote for Donald Trump to be President. Indeed, I’m 0 for three on that score, having voted for his Democratic opponent in 2016, 2020, and 2024 despite having voted Republican in all eight previous presidential elections for which I was eligible. Nonetheless, I have expressed my frustration multiple times since the election that President Biden, whose administration was soundly defeated* in the election, has used the lame duck period to “Trump proof” the government, rushing to carry out policies that the voters just rejected** and endeavoring to make it harder for the victor to carry out the policies he was elected to enact.

This, however, goes both ways. We only have one President at a time and Trump is currently interfering with the affairs of state in ways I find quite problematic. While I find it unseemly, I don’t much mind that foreign heads of state are flocking to Mar a Lago to kiss the ring; the leader of the free world needs to be able to hit the ground running and establishing relationships and setting expectations during the transition enables all concerned to plan for the future. But, to take the latest example, intervening at the 11th hour to scuttle a budget deal that would have kept the government running during the holidays is not something a President-Elect should be doing.

Ultimately, while I believe both Biden and Trump are violating longstanding norms, the problem is the absurdly long transition period between administrations. Trump was elected on November 5—over six weeks ago. He won’t be sworn into office until a month from tomorrow—a day short of 11 weeks after the election. (And, yes, I’m fully aware that the inauguration was in March until the passage of the 20th Amendment in 1933.)

By comparison, our cousins across the Pond manage to get a new PM clapped into 10 Downing in as little as two days after an election. France, which also has a presidential system (although a very different one) executes the transition in less than a week.

Certainly, it would take some planning to make our transitions faster. It would, for example, require candidates to announce their intended nominees for major cabinet posts ahead of time so that they could be vetted and confirmed quickly. But the current system is not only wildly undemocratic but creates truly perverse incentives.

*I’m aware that, as laggard states slowly counted their votes, the margins shrank considerably from what they appeared to be on Election Night. Trump appears to have won slightly less than a majority of the vote. Nonetheless, he swept all seven of the “swing states” that both candidates spent most of their resources on and made gains over his 2020 totals in virtually every county in the country.

**Parsing voter intentions when there is a binary choice is, to be sure, complicated. I voted for the Democratic nominee in the last three elections despite having significant policy disagreements with each of them; presumably, a lot of folks who voted for Trump disagreed with him on some issues. Regardless, he made his stance on immigration, Ukraine, and several other issues rather clear for a very long time.

The Limits of Trump’s Power

by dap | Dec 22, 2024 | Outside The Beltway

WaPo’s Dan Balz analyzes the bizarre scramble to keep the government funded over the holidays (“Republicans averted a shutdown, yet showed boundaries of Trump’s power“):

It could have been worse. In the end, Congress averted a government shutdown. But the events leading up to Friday’s late-night passage of a spending bill illustrated the perils of governing that President-elect Donald Trump and congressional Republicans are likely to face in the year ahead, even when they have control of all branches of government.

As we’ve seen over and over in recent years, having a President and slim majorities in the House and Senate does not necessarily equate to “control of all branches of government.” We saw that as recently as Joe Biden’s first term, when the recalcitrance of Joe Manchen and Kyrsten Sinema derailed the President’s agenda time and again. And, of course, even if one can get every member of the party coalition on board, the existence of the filibuster in the Senate means that, effectively, the party gets two shots a year at passing whatever than can through the loophole of the reconciliation process.

The drama of the past week highlighted problems for various players. For Trump, this was recognition that as much power as he has, there are limits  to what governing-by-Truth-Social can accomplish in a legislative environment. No wonder Trump prefers executive action and recess appointments to the gritty business of holding his own party together.

Trump can dictate and he can threaten, as he has been doing. His allies can warn Republican lawmakers in the House or the Senate that if they don’t toe the line, they will face primary challenges. But when 38 House Republicans  reject his entreaties, as they did at one point in the negotiations over the legislation to keep the government open, that’s evidence that his power has boundaries.

So, one would hope. It gives some indication, at least, that they feared backlash from their voters over shutting down the government just before Christmas more than they feared punishment from Trump. But if Trump successfully follows through on his threats to primary those who bucked him—backed by Elon Musk’s infinite bankroll–that could change.

Then again, whether a handful of Republicans actually stood up to Trump during this debacle is not all that clear. The WaPo report “How Trump and Musk set off the shutdown crisis — but got little in return” points to confusion and lack of communication between principals.

Some time after Donald Trump won the Nov. 5 election, he told House Speaker Mike Johnson that he wanted the federal debt limit taken care of before he took office, according to people close to both leaders. That’s all they agree on.

After that, the accounts diverge. Multiple House Republican lawmakers said the president-elect mentioned eliminating the debt ceiling casually and in passing, and that he understood Johnson’s explanation that the proposal didn’t have the votes to pass. Hill Republicans broadly agreed that no one got the impression Trump was repeatedly and clearly demanding that they raise the debt ceiling before Christmas. His sudden red line Wednesday reverberated across the Capitol, shocking House and Senate Republicans.

Advisers to Trump, though, said he had made his position clear to Johnson for weeks or even a month — long before going public Wednesday with the demand that upended the lame-duck congressional session and brought the government to the brink of shutting down.

This is followed by a long who-shot-John based on dozens of anonymous accounts from Congressmen and those in the Trump camp.

Back to Balz:

Whether it’s levels of government spending or nominations for his Cabinet and other positions that require Senate confirmation, Trump and his party may control both chambers in the coming year but not with such commanding majorities that he can have his way willy nilly.

Will this past week’s drama, for example, remind Republicans in the Senate that they represent a separate branch of government and therefore have the power to block a few of Trump’s most controversial nominees, even at the risk of displeasing him?

Presumably, they had not forgotten their Constitutional role. The question, again, is whether they’ll value stopping wildly unqualified people from holding some of the most important posts in our government enough to weather the backlash Trump and his minions can unleash on them. Joni Ernst, who was brave enough to lead two battalions of soldiers in Iraq, did not .

Regardless, as Balz notes and we’ve all seen in recent years, the real problem for Republicans is their oddball coalition in the House.

House Republicans again revealed themselves as a fractured family. No surprise there. Trump can’t do much about that, but it will affect his legislative agenda, most clearly on how much and where the government spends its money. He lost a battle to suspend the debt ceiling for two years, revealing a split within Republican ranks over the debt, deficits and spending cuts that has been playing out for years and giving a succession of Republican speakers heartburn.

House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana), in fits and starts, got the win needed to avert a shutdown. But victory again required the help of Democrats and again underscored his vulnerability in a GOP conference that has only a slender majority and that will have an even smaller majority in the new Congress next year — one of the smallest in history.

Johnson emerged with big questions about whether he can be reelected as speaker in January. If Democrats under House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (New York) hold firm, Johnson would need a fully united conference behind him when the election of a speaker comes up at the start of the new Congress.

Already, there are some Republicans who are saying they will not support him. Let’s see what transpires over the next few weeks. Do they want to start the second Trump era mired in their own internal battles at a time when the incoming president wants to tell the country and the world that he and his party are in charge and prepared to do the people’s business?

Republicans made a hash of themselves at the beginning of the last Congress, going through 15 ballots before they elected then-Representative Kevin McCarthy (R-California) as speaker, only to depose him less than a year later. Getting Johnson elected required more drama and missteps. Would another contested speaker’s race be any different?

Presumably, it all depends on whether Trump endorses him or sics his horde on him.

And, of course, there’s a new wild card:

The newest player in all this was Elon Musk, the world’s wealthiest person and seeming a confidant of Trump who is using his association with the president-elect to the fullest. Musk helped kill the first bipartisan spending package with posts on his X social media platform, some with inaccurate claims about the legislation, that helped sink what Johnson thought was a carefully crafted agreement.

It’s not at all clear to what degree Trump controls Musk or vice-versa. If the two work in tandem, though, Trump’s power is certainly heightened.