For it to work differently, each party will need to admit to itself that the other isn’t going away.
A few weeks ago, in the print NR, I wrote about the peculiar character of the legislative process that is coming to a head on Capitol Hill now:
The usual logic of legislation involves gaining the support necessary to advance your interests and priorities by providing your support to advance those of others. It’s a balance of achievements and concessions, and when it’s done well, nearly everyone involved can come out feeling as if they got more than they gave. But the logic of the tax bill being pushed forward in Congress this spring exhibits essentially none of these characteristics.
From the beginning, the underlying premise of this legislative effort has been that members will vote for a reconciliation bill only when they absolutely have to. The votes necessary to pass the bill could not be won by including in it the desired legislative aims of enough members to constitute a majority. Rather, those votes could be won only if the costs of failing to pass the bill seemed sufficient to terrify a majority of members into backing it.
The reason the process has worked this way is that Republicans have exceedingly narrow congressional majorities but have chosen to pursue this bill — their only significant legislative objective in this Congress and perhaps in all of Trump’s second term — on a pure party-line vote.
It may seem strange to suggest that any other path could have been possible. We live in an intensely polarized time, and the core message each party now advances to the country is that the other party is dangerously anti-American and totally impossible to work with. But we also live in a deadlocked time, when support for the two parties has stood at roughly 50-50 for many years, congressional majorities and presidential electoral majorities are tiny, and neither party can really hope to get anywhere without significantly expanding its appeal. The logic of polarization makes expanding that appeal more difficult for both parties, because it causes each to lean into its least attractive facets rather than its most broadly appealing priorities, and to serve its most reliable voters rather than try to win over voters who could go either way.
And as a practical matter, this logic of polarization leaves both parties underestimating their potential to pressure each other, particularly in Congress. If Republicans had started the process of writing this year’s tax bill by seeking a bill that could gain the votes of around 25 House Democrats and a few Senate Democrats, they might have found the room to write a more ambitious bill that could also have had more to offer Republicans. By giving more, they might have gotten more.
The concessions they would have needed to make in such a scenario would have been more painful than those they are now making to themselves, but they would also have been easier to justify because they would have resulted in some real policy gains, which the bill they are now voting on will not. They could have afforded to let some of their own members vote against the bill, which could have served those members well at home, while also making it harder for some Democrats to oppose it.
It might not have worked, of course. But trying it first would have created some room for making the bill more attractive to more members and their constituents. There could have been a bit more of a legislative process in which members could have put forward things they wanted, rather than a process that has felt to congressional Republicans like it has consisted entirely of concessions.
If you have a narrow majority, and you pursue legislation on a party-line vote, then you are by definition advancing a bill with narrow appeal. The structure of our legislative branch is designed precisely to discourage that kind of approach, and to create pressure for cross-partisan bargaining over legislation. Both parties have now become pretty good at resisting that pressure. They know they’re pushing against the logic of the Constitution in doing that, but this tends to leave them frustrated with the Constitution rather than open to the possibility that the Constitution is trying to teach them how to get out of the frustrating and thoroughly unproductive rut in which they’ve been stuck for a generation.
If they really can’t imagine a tax bill that 25 House Democrats and a few Senate Democrats might have felt compelled to vote for and Donald Trump would have been willing to sign then congressional Republicans deserve what they’re getting — which is an ugly, messy, incoherent deficit-ballooning bill that many of them detest but nearly all of them will have to vote for.
Congress doesn’t have to work this way. But for it to work differently, each party will need to admit to itself that the other isn’t going away, and that the existence of the other might actually offer some opportunities for more ambitious policymaking, more effective coalition-building, and more successful electoral politics. That kind of legislative process would not yield more squishy or centrist results, it would let both sides make more substantive progress as they understand it. Until members of Congress can wrap their heads around that logic, they’ll stay stuck, and the country will too.