Donald Trump and Jimmy Carter revisted, Part II: Negotiating with Congress

 As I pick up from yesterday's comments, let's just jump right into the main substance of the Trump-Carter line of reasoning.  According to Nelson W. Polsby's Consequences of Party Reform, Jimmy Carter's consistent failure to convince Congress to pass legislation that met his approval was the result of the McGovern-Fraser reforms.

Carter was an outsider.  He was the Governor of Georgia, with no connections at all to the national Democratic Party.  Being a governor, particularly now, does not preclude connection to the national party apparatus, but Carter did not have any real connections to the national party.  And, in 1976, the way things worked in Georgia was not how things worked in D.C.  You may not remember this, but the 1976 election gave the Democratic Party not just a majority in the House of Representatives, but 60 seats in the Senate.  As in... if the party could hold it together, enough to invoke cloture and override a filibuster.  In fact, it was 1975 when the cloture rule was changed to reduce the threshold from 67 to 60.  To be sure, the Democratic Party was different in 1976.  There were plenty of conservative, southern Democrats (read:  racists), in contrast to the pinkos of today, and shut up, you know I'm right.  Still, comparatively speaking, he was sittin' pretty.

Yet, by Polsby's analysis, Carter did everything wrong.  He made few outreach efforts, when he did, they were ham-handed, and as a result, his negotiations broke down.  So, Carter did not achieve his legislative goals.  And he did have legislative goals.  This puts him in contrast to the misunderstood Eisenhower.  Eisenhower was often described as a less successful president, thanks to the highly influential analysis of Richard Neustadt, but Fred Greenstein's analysis set things right, to those who read The Hidden-Hand Presidency.  Eisenhower just had fewer legislative goals.  Carter did have goals, but he failed to convince Congress to pass them, and Polsby's analysis suggested that this was because he failed to understand how D.C. worked, because as an outsider, he had no connection to those in D.C.

As I wrote yesterday, my original prediction regarding Donald Trump was that his presidency would resemble Jimmy Carter.  He was an outsider with no experience.  He had no connection to the national party.  Rather,  he was elected because of the post-McGover-Fraser system, in which The Party Decides is and has always been wrong.  Moreover, the party leaders in Congress hated him, and contrary to his The Art Of The Deal con, he doesn't actually know anything about "deals."  He only plays a businessman on tv.

So what has happened, legislatively?

Legislatively, Trump has been a spectacular failure.

Let's keep in mind that his term has been bifurcated by the 2018 midterm election.  When the Democrats took the House in 2018, the federal government reverted to divided government, and when we combine extreme ideological polarization with divided government, very little tends to pass.  Of course, if Trump really were some master deal-maker, as he claims, he would be the guy who would overcome that, and something would pass.  Say, an infrastructure bill.  It's always "infrastructure week!"  According to Mayhew's famous work on divided government (Divided We Govern), it doesn't preclude legislative activity anyway.  Polarization, of course, complicates things, but still.  Systemically, we know why nothing has passed for the last two years, but it does contradict Trump's lie about his capacity for deals.  Instead, then, we turn to his first two years, when the GOP had unified control.

What passed?  Basically, one thing.  A tax bill, which mostly contained tax cuts, along with some tax increases, advertised as a tax reform, but which wasn't much of a simplification.

"Repeal and replace?"  Nope.  Didn't happen.  The individual mandate was repealed as a part of the tax bill, and the self-congratulating phonies-- McCain, Collins and Murkowski-- who voted down "skinny repeal" in the Senate negated their own votes by voting for the tax bill with an individual mandate repeal in it.  Murkowski at least negotiated some concessions for that vote.  Collins & McCain were just posturing phonies.  I hate sounding like Holden Caulfield.  I need a better word.  I outgrew Salinger decades ago.

Anyway, why did a tax cut pass?  Because Republicans had the White House, the House and the Senate.  How much of a role did Trump play in the content of that legislation?  Absolute, mathematical zero.  The legislation itself was actually, literally written by hand, in the margins of the page, at the last minute on the floor of the Senate before the final vote.  They weren't consulting with Trump, and Trump was locked out of the process because a) he didn't know anything about the details, b) he didn't care-- he just wanted to sign something, and c) every time he got involved, he hurt the process.

What happened with "repeal and replace?"  That was never going to happen anyway.  Will Amy Coney Barrett do what Republicans in Congress could never do with this latest, and absolutely insane* lawsuit?  At this point, I'd bet yes.  That woman is looney-toons.  If I had to bet, I'd bet that Obamacare is a-goner now.  So, hey, liberals.  How happy are you that Ruth didn't step down when Obama could name a replacement?  Just askin'...

Anyway, that's not Trump either.  That's McConnell.  (And... Ruthie.  But you still love here, don't you?)

So what did Trump get, legislatively?  Nothin'.  Bupkis.  The idiot kept threatening a shutdown to try to get wall funding under unified government because his own party wouldn't give it to him!

And that leads to how he has, let's euphemistically put it, "governed."  By executive order.  You know, those things that Republicans hate when Democrats use 'em.  Trump used a phony declaration of a national emergency to usurp Congress's Article I powers because he couldn't get his own party to fund his vanity project.  The one that... Mexico was going to fund, right?

So this leads us to where I'm going next.  Because this is a dramatic break from Carter.  When Carter didn't get Congress to bend to his whims, Carter didn't usurp Congress's Article I powers.  Coming soon, to an unread blog near you!  Well, what does "near" mean, in the context of the Void?  Hi, there, navel!

*The current anti-Obamacare lawsuit is so crazy that the conservative legal theorists who worked on NFIB look at it and say, "this is bonkers."  I'm not taking a position on the ACA.  This lawsuit, though, is nuts.  Rest assured that I will be commenting on the long-term dangers of disingenuous bullshit when the Supreme Court hears the case.