For six years, since they took back the House of Representatives, Republicans have added to a pile of legislation that moldered outside the White House. In their thwarted agenda, financial regulations were to be unspooled. Business taxes were to be slashed. Planned Parenthood would be stripped of federal funds. The Affordable Care Act was teed up for repeal – dozens of times.
When the 115th Congress begins this week, with Republicans firmly in charge of the House and Senate, much of that legislation will form the basis of the most ambitious conservative policy agenda since the 1920s.
And rather than a Democratic president standing in the way, a soon-to-be-inaugurated Donald Trump seems ready to sign much of it into law.
The dynamic reflects just how ready Congress is to push through a conservative makeover of government, and how little Trump’s unpredictable, attention-grabbing style matters to the Republican game plan.
That plan was long in the making.
Almost the entire agenda has already been vetted, promoted and worked over by Republicans and think tanks that look at the White House less for leadership and more for signing ceremonies.
In 2012, Americans for Tax Reform’s Grover Norquist described the ideal president as “a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen” and “sign the legislation that has already been prepared.” In 2015, when Senate Republicans used procedural maneuvers to undermine a potential Democratic filibuster and vote to repeal the health-care law, it did not matter that the Obama White House stopped them: As the conservative advocacy group Heritage Action put it, the process was “a trial run for 2017, when we will hopefully have a president willing to sign a full repeal bill.”
“What I told our committees a year ago was: Assume you get the White House and Congress,” House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, R-Wis., told CNBC in a post-election interview last month. “Come 2018, what do you want to have accomplished?” Negotiations with the incoming Trump administration, he said, were mostly “on timeline, on an execution strategy.”
Few presidential candidates have dominated the coverage of an election like Trump did in 2016. In the campaign’s final stretch, Republican candidates often got less attention for their records in Congress than for their positions on Trump’s controversial statements.
The irony, as Democrats realized after the election, was that congressional Republicans were poised to have more influence over the national agenda in 2017 than congressional Democrats did after the 2008 election that put Obama in the White House with his party in control on Capitol Hill.
While the Democratic majority in 2009 was larger than the GOP advantage this year, the Democrats were hamstrung in ways they came to regret.
Responding to the Great Recession, they spent the transition and first month of 2009 on a $831 billion stimulus package, with Obama aides openly hoping that they could pass it with bipartisan supermajorities. Every House Republican and all but three Senate Republicans opposed it, and within 20 days of inauguration, the first tea party protests had broken out against it. Protesters twinned their opposition to the stimulus with opposition to the bank bailouts, which had bipartisan backing.
Since November, Republicans have pre-empted any problems like this by making no attempt to frame their agenda as bipartisan.
In his first news conference after the election, Ryan said that voters had delivered a mandate for “unified Republican government.” Eight years earlier, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., had said only that Americans “voted in large numbers for change,” and said the White House would be driving the agenda.
This year’s agenda from House and Senate Republicans has clarity that was often lacking from Trump’s own campaign. Senate Republicans favor using a procedure known as “budget reconciliation,” in which measures can be passed with a simple 51-vote majority rather than a filibuster-proof 60 votes, to tackle the ACA and to undo much of the 2010 Dodd-Frank financial reform.
As part of undoing the financial overhaul law, some GOP leaders have begun planning strategies for how to effectively kill the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau, whether by giving Congress control over its budget or finding cause to replace its director, Richard Cordray, with a weaker board.
“I’d like to repeal the whole thing, period,” Senate Banking Committee Chairman Richard C. Shelby said of Dodd-Frank in a December interview with The Wall Street Journal.
