---

1. Six weeks from now, we will know a lot more about where American politics is heading. The September agenda in Congress is packed. I drew this flowchart a few days ago to lay out some of the big pieces of the agenda:

Some of the agenda consists of so-call Must Pass items: legislation that, if not approved or otherwise dealt with, would have large negative substantive or political consequences. These include raising the debt limit (to avoid default), passing appropriations for FY2018 (to avoid a government shutdown), and reauthorizing the Children’s Health Insurance Program (to avoid a large number of kids losing health insurance). By their very nature, must-pass items create a very different politics than other issues (such as health care repeal or tax reform); once the status-quo is not an option, everyone who is a player in the game—individual Senators, coalitions of Members, interest groups—shifts their focus to getting their stuff into the bill. And skillful brinksmanship becomes a negotiating asset.

The thing to remember—and one thing my flowchart doesn’t really capture—is that cross-issue bargaining is a huge part of negotiations over must-pass agenda items. You shouldn’t expect any of these issues to be partitioned off into discrete negotiations. And that includes items that aren’t must-pass. Undoubtedly, the BCA caps on discretionary spending will be involved in the negotiations, and perhaps health care and/or tax reform. And looming in the background is the FY2018 budget resolution. As shown in the flowchart, some of these issues are literally connected, because they are procedurally connected; the GOP can’t do party-line tax reform without a budget resolution, and there’s no way the FY2018 appropriations are going to pass without raising the BCA caps. But all of the items are really connected, because Members/parties/interests can withhold support on one to gain leverage on another. This is standard in any legislature (or really any bargaining situation) but a lot of people overlook it.

There has been a tendency to compare September to some of the previous must-pass showdowns over appropriations and the debt limit in the last five years, in which the main players were Obama, Boehner, House conservatives, and Senate compromisers. In many of those interactions, a familiar pattern appeared: Speaker Boehner would pass a very conservative party-line package through the House to allow conservatives to lay down a marker and show off to their constituencies; then Obama, Boehner, and Senate compromisers would cut the actual deal and pass it through the Senate; finally, Boehner would jam the House conservatives by bringing the deal to the floor and pass it using a fair number of Democratic centrist votes, with wings of both parties voting against it and the Speaker graciously taking substantial heat from the right. Many people, including me, expect the politics of September to resemble this. But there are complications:

• It’s not obvious President Trump is on the side of the compromisers (see below);

• It’s not obvious Speaker Ryan is prepared to play the whipping boy role Boehner was so good at but that may have ultimately cost him the Speakership;

• It’s not obvious the Democrats have as much incentive to compromise; and

• It’s not obvious the conservatives are going to settle for base-pleasing optics paired with substantively losing now that they have a psuedo-ally in the White House

We simply don’t know what is going to happen, on many levels. There’s the substantive level of, on balance, who wins the negotiations (border wall?). There’s the future political ramifications of who does well with the constituent and national optics (2018 ramifications?). There’s the internal ramifications of how the process of negotiation affects the coalitions (wither Speaker Ryan?). There’s the future leverage of various factions (does anyone feel the need to prove resolve by blowing things up?)  And there’s the institutional ramifications for the branches (Does POTUS or Congress come out looking small?).

---

2. The President’s legislative strategy looks very high risk. The more I watch how President Trump is approaching the legislative arena, the more I realize how much of his strategy revolves around a few key attributes of his:

• he’s very hesitant to look weak or appear to have “lost”;
• he doesn’t know much about policy and he’s not really interested in it;
• he doesn’t really like negotiating that much, at least not in the political realm.

These things are leading to what appears to be a high-risk strategy. He has drawn some pretty serious lines in the sand—most notably his insistence that he’ll shut down the government if the FY2018 appropriations don’t include border wall funding—and he is absolutely blasting Senators from his own party in public right when he probably would be wise to be courting their assistance on the September agenda.

One way to think about this is to consider Sam Kernell’s well-known critique of Neustadt. For Neustadt, there were two resevoirs of presidential power: professional reputation in DC, and public prestige in the nation. The former was much more important; a POTUS with a reputation as a winner and a skilled bargainer could manipulate the DC coalitions and expect to greatly influence public policy while augmenting his own power.

Public prestige, for Neustadt, was a much more blunt and less useful tool; the president could occasionally appeal to the public and try to influence Congress, but it was a poor second choice. It didn’t work well, it pissed off Members of Congress, and it did nothing to influence the many political actors who were well-insulated from the voters. It could help—IKE’s popularity certainly wasn’t a bad thing—but it could never be the basis of power.

Kernell’s thesis was that, by the 1980’s, the traditional bases of power had broken down and fractured in DC, such that bargaining was no longer a particularly attractive or effective options for a President. Instead, there was an increasing incentive to “Go Public” and try to influence outcomes by turning voters against your opposition, effectively going over the heads of your negotiating adversaries and attempting to get the public to brownbeat them into submission. Given that, public prestige—your standing among the voters—became much more important than your professional reputation in Washington.

Plenty of presidents have tried “going public,” with varying degrees of success. Trump seems to be taking the idea to 11. It really looks like he is rolling everything into one great 2018 Hail Mary referendum on his dominance of federal politics: he keeps lashing out publicly at anyone and everyone, Democrat or Republican, who even mildly gets in his way. Jeff Flake. Bob Corker. Paul Ryan. Mitch McConnel. Chuck Schumer. Richard Bluemental.

This is quite obviously not the way to ingratiate yourself as a bargainer who wants to careful negotiate policy and build a professional reputation in DC. This is someone who is hoping (perhaps just implicitly) that he can activate the public to punish anyone who stands in his way. The happy outcome for Trump might be something like Flake and Corker losing primaries in 2018 to Trump-loyalists who hold the seats, or perhaps McConnell being deposed as majority leader. It just seems like a triple bank-shot, certainly with a lot of upside if successful, but very little actual chance of success. Of course…

---

3. The other side of this is the fixation on dominance politics. I noticed this morning that the administration is now saying it’s not going to release an actual tax plan, and instead leave it up to the House Ways and Means Committee and the Senate Finance Committee to come up with the actual details of the proposal.  Most people are going to see this as either (1) reflective of White House incompetence; or (2) reflective of Trump’s disinterest in policy details and obsession with just winning. Both of these makes sense. The saga that was the repeal of Obamacare seems like good evidence for both of them.

But I’d like to propose a third option: maybe Trump’s personality and need to maintain his public image of dominance makes him allergic to the very idea of negotiation and compromise. If you don’t come up with detailed White House proposals, you don’t ever have to retreat from your ideal position in order to craft a half loaf of incremental progress. You don’t ever have to negotiate away things you’d really like in order to secure a victory. And, of course, you don’t ever have to learn policy details. If you can’t stomach the idea of having to admit you didn’t win everything you said you would win, perhaps the easiest move is to let someone else decide what is and isn’t winnable before you endorse it.

One problem with this, as it turns out, is that the president’s legislative efforts are endogenous to whether or not he “wins.” Trump likes to win, but the absence of presidential leadership is a huge impediment to winning in the legislative sphere. Sure, you can go for a dubious optics victory: let the Hill GOP come up with a plan, half-heartedly push for it in public, and then blame the Senate Democrats when it fails. But if you want to achieve positive, purposeful policy change in the U.S. system, presidential involvement is, by and large, a required ingredient. And so you sort of get a self-fulfilling prophecy here with Trump: he wants to win and doesn’t really care about policy, but he’s scared of looking weak for having compromised away from his starting negotiating position, so he withdraws from the policy arena and leaves it to others, and the absence of the president from the process reduces greatly the chance of success.

---

4. The White House is probably dreading the hurricane in Texas. I mentioned last week that events have a funny way of getting in the way of everything on the agenda at the White House. Hurricane Harvey will be no different. In fact, hurricanes (and other natural disasters) have proven to be particularly tough political events for presidents to negotiate. It’s a situation that calls for the public skills of a different kind of executive: namely, a mayor. Someone who responds personally to events and gets in the trenches to help out. And anyone who’s seen a good mayor in action knows exactly how this goes: he goes out with the first-responders and does hours—or even days—of good old fashioned labor. Piling up sandbags. Handing out meals at a relief shelter. Cleaning up garbage and damage. Being in personal public communication with the chief of police and the head of the fire department. Being visible at the scene, not just as an observer, but as an administrator. The optics are simple: this is a community response and I’m not only the leader of the community, but also an ordinary member of it. Not only am I coordinating this response, but I’m also literally executing it.  And it works. Mayors do stuff in this mode every week. It’s not always a emergency, but it’s always leader-on-the-ground.

The president (any president), however, is not the mayor of the nation. He’s too far removed from the front-lines of the first responders. In fact, he’s too far removed from the coordination of the relief effort. His relevant job is to manage a top-level bureaucracy, position the appropriate personnel, make high-level policy decisions when presented with options, and produce accountability by firing people when things go wrong. Even if the president wanted to behave like a mayor in the wake of hurricane, it’s a nightmare: if he shows up on the scene he can’t really help, because he travels with an entourage the size of a football team and creates a massive media circus wherever he goes. So presidents often look unusually helpless in the wake of natural disasters. Bush in Katrina is a great example. His father’s response to hurricane Andrew was’t much better. It’s just really tricky to figure out how to not appear totally aloof and uncaring, but also to not get criticized for getting in the way and/or trying to capitalize on the politics.

Of course, substance matters as much as optics. But you’ll never really know. The federal government might provide an excellent response to Harvey, with the machinery running smoothly and minimizing the suffering for people to the maximum extent possible. And the president may even have a personal hand in that through his control of the bureaucracy. But that will never be the story. Because the White House role in a hurricane, as a optics matter, is to be the mayor. But the job simply doesn’t allow it. And so they muddle through.

---

5. Jeff Blair started a music podcast.  You might know him as a political writer at Decision Desk HQ, but he’s also a wonderful encyclopedia of knowledge about all sorts of popular music. His tweetstorms on various bands are epic. Elton John. The Beach Boys.  Mott the Hoople. And now’s he’s doing a podcast over at National Review where he’s bringing in a political commentator each week, but only talking about their favorite band. Sean Trende was the first guest, and the band was—wait for it—Van Halen.

Now we’re fucking talking.

Three quick points in response to the podcast: first, they are correct that Van Halen I and 1984 are the two best Van Halen albums. But VH I is way better than 1984. I don’t think it’s particularly close. And that’s before you remember that Van Halen I doesn’t sound particularly revolutionary now, because every band for 15 years tried to copy it. And while many came close, no one really topped it. It’s like A New Hope. You think those special effects look good *now*?

Second, they never really discuss one of the keys to Van Halen. They talk about how great EVH is at guitar, and they talk about the showmanship of DLR, but one of the unique aspect of Van Halen is the combination of hard rock and harmonized vocals. It’s great to have the best guitarist in the world and a top rock showman, and that’s undoubtedly why no one could copy Van Halen. But what makes a song like Feel Your Love Tonight pop is the harmonies.

 

Finally, I dislike Van Hagar as much as the podcast guests do. But I do think Top of the World is a gem of a song.

---

See you next time (probably end of next week). Thanks for reading!

Well, it’s been a long time since I’ve been at the helm of this ship. Here we go. Wheeeeeee….

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about congressional organization and capacity.  You can’t really swing a dead cat in Washington right now without hitting someone who’s writing about the decreased capacity of Congress or their plans to fix it. I also just finished reading Josh Chafetz’s magisterial new book, Congress’s Constitution, and he devotes an entire chapter to how internal chamber rules within Congress affect the external power of Congress in separation of powers battles with the President and the Courts.  And, of course, it’s also my job to write about this stuff.

But mostly I’ve been pondering the current state of affairs, in that we’ve found ourselves in a pretty unprecedented institutional situation right now: strongly polarized parties in combination with a strong institutional presidency. Now, we’ve certainly had polarized parties before. And through much of the 19th century we had polarized parties in combination with a weak institutional presidency. But in the age of the modern, powerful presidency—say, post-1939, after the EOP is created and the President has become the head of a large executive branch—we really haven’t had the sort of party polarization that characterized much of the 19th century. At least not until the most immediate past.

And this has all sorts of implications. Here’s three that I’ve been thinking about:

First, the institutional presidency seems relatively resilient to perceptions of failure or aggrandizement. And I think this is because presidential failure and aggrandizement tends to attach to the individual rather than the institution. I can so clearly remember in 2008 how many liberals were aghast at the state of affairs in the Bush administration—the wars, the torture, the rendition, the Patriot Act, and so on—but refused to see it as problem of the presidency and instead were convinced that it was a problem of the president. The thinking was that if they could just get the right man into the office, everything would be fine. And it was and it wasn’t. Obama certainly made them feel better about the presidency but, on balance, did precious little to hem in the national security state that had them so worried under Bush. It’s not hard to draw up a parallel both going into the 2016 election (for Republicans) and looking forward now for many liberals and a fair number of Republicans. If we can just get Trump out of office and [favorite candidate X] into it, everything will be fine.

Congress doesn’t really attach that way. Start with the Fenno paradox. Despite the absurdly low ratings of the institution, most people like their Congressman! When people say Congress is dysfunctional, they typically aren’t thinking that they have agency to replace a Member and fix it. They really mean Congress—the institution—is dysfunctional. The public is only dimly aware of Members beyond their own, but even in the case where leaders are treated as individual failures by the public, the solution rarely becomes a personnel change. It’s true that many people believe that a takeover of Congress by their party would improve it’s output, but this is almost always at the substantive policy level. I don’t know that I’ve ever heard someone say if we could just get [my preferred politician] into the Speaker’s office, congressional dysfunction will melt away.

And this imbalance between executive branch dysfunction being pinned on the person and congressional function being pinned on the institution has serious ramifications. If you take seriously—as I do—the idea of a public sphere of battle between the branches (as articulated by Chafetz and some others), this works squarely against Congress.  If the institutional balance of power hangs at least partially on the ability of the branches to muster their resources to affect public opinion about the proper division of power between the executive and Congress, the personification of the presidency and the dehumnaization of Congress in the mind of citizens will often lead to (1) hopelessness about Congressional power; and (2) continued belief that executive branch problems are individual flaws of the president; and (3) giving power to the presidency is ok so long as we personally find him competent/likeable/our guy.

Second, the Wilsonian model of congressional reform is a dream scenario for the modern presidency. In brief, Woodrow Wilson was the first of many to articulate a parliamentary-style fix for separation of powers system: strong disciplined congressional parties that treated Congress like an “arena” legislature, merely a location of lawmaking, rather than a transformative institution that developed, negotiated, and compromised legislation. Under this view, parties and executive branch leaders would take over those policy functions, while chamber rules would be streamlined and congressional leaders strengthened so that the existing veto points (committees, filibuster, etc.) would melt away and allow for party government. Versions of this argument have circulated in the U.S. consistently since Wilson’s time, and can even be heard today: the path forward from gridlock is to kill the filibuster and strengthen the congressional leaders so they can ram through party policies, ending the gridlock.

Whatever the substantive merits, this would be a disaster for Congress the institution. Maybe in the days of strong party leaders and a weak presidency, this might have worked. But under the trappings of the modern presidency, there is simply no chance anyone but POTUS would be the party leader in charge of such a majority, and the necessary hollowing out and streamlining of Congress required to grease the skids for party government would simultaneously all but end executive branch oversight. The scary thing for Congress is that the Wilsonian model is not just popular among many observers and practitioners when their party has unified control—that’s understandable situational institutionalism—but also has proven generally popular, especially under divided government. Take Gingrich in 1995. There’s just an incredible lure to centralizing congressional power. Certainly it has some internal positives in being able to move policy and get a party to look discipline and effective as passing legislation. But in order to achieve it, the hallmarks of congressional capacity must be abolished. And thus the Gingrich attacks to weaken the committee chairs, set aside CBO, damage the seniority system, and gut committee staff.

There’s undoubtedly an allure here. After all, if you could centralize Congress to an absurd degree, you could bring the President to his knees. Centralization could create a more powerful Congress. Imagine a Congress with literally all power centralized in the Speaker. Everyone in both chambers will vote for whatever the Speaker wants. That would effectively abolish the veto, giving the President no leverage in domestic legislation. The Speaker could redesign the bureaucracy at will, adjust all funding levels by fiat, and even remove the president at any time. But it’s a pipe dream: centralization can never practically achieve that, and on it’s way to trying, it ends up killing congressional capacity.

The alternative mode of congressional reform is the obvious one: reinvest in congressional capacity to reshape the balance of power between the branches. Add committee staff and conduct more oversight; distribute power to create more veto points for the executive to navigate. Beef up non-partisan institutions to reduce reliance on executive and executive-allied information. Equip individual Members with more resources so they can promote homegrown ideas in the public sphere. Pay staff better to attract experts who can give serious scrutiny to external proposals, be it from the White House or from downtown. In other words, insulate Congress such that it can self-generate quality policy and reduce its reliance on the president. In any case, don’t succumb to the idea that a gridlocked policy process in Congress can only be solved by a hollowed-out Congress. It’s a trap.

Finally, I’d note we actually have a third dimension variable here right now with Trump. It’s not just polarized parties in the age of the strong presidency. It’s also polarized parties in the age of the strong presidency with a very, very weak president. I continue to believe that the Neustadt interpretation of the Trump presidency is the correct one: this is a very weak POTUS, who will have little ability (relative to other presidents) to achieve his policy goals, or to legitimate the actions does achieve. His professional reputation is terrible; no one in his party is scared to speak out against him, let alone go on TV and defend him carte blance. He has few friends on the Hill; if they aren’t quite rooting for him to fail, they aren’t exactly lending a hand. The White House is a mess; he’s fired a laundry-list of senior staffers with no sign of control coming, he has seemingly no control over the bureaucracy as a policy process or even just to prevent leaks. His skill set seems totally wrong for the job. And in a role where one needs hundreds of people to help you if only because they think it is in their best interest, more people are walking away than stepping up. And his public approval is in the garbage. This isn’t a recipe for significant power in Washington or policy achievements; this is a recipe for a complete failed presidency.

But I’m really not sure what this means for the presidency. I certainly think no one will blame the presidency for Trump’s shortcomings (see my first point above today); any executive failures in this administration are going to publicly attach to Trump for sure. The Democrats will undoubtedly make competence an issue in any election involving Trump, and don’t be surprised if there’s a Republican primary challenger to Trump—particularly a very conservative one—making much the same argument. But the larger question is really twofold: first, will the Trump administration makes such a dog’s breakfast of governance that a significant portion of the population comes to view it as not just a question of getting the right man in office, but also as a question of rearranging congressional/executive power because it has become apparent it’s too risky to put so much power in the executive. You can see the strands of this in congressional proposals to limit the use of the nuclear arsenal. In my mind, those aren’t really about Trump; those are about the realization, via Trump, that the presidency should have that power at it’s unilateral disposal.

Second, absent that sort of public clamor, is it possible Congress simply is forced to step up and assert power in the vacuum created by an incompetent White House? This goes less to hard statutory powers like nuclear weapons use and more to softer powers like control of the agenda. You see some signs of this in the health care debacle from last month; with the president MIA, the driving forces of the legislation were left to come from Congress. And they did and they didn’t. But I think in this instance, Congress was still a step behind the game; it was really the proof-of-concept that Trump wasn’t going to be able to lead a serious policy push, and would at best be a neutral factor, if not a negative one. And so it remains to be seen whether Congress steps up in the absence of the White House serving as driving and coordinating principle for policy. Maybe the White House will get its act together (I suspect they will do better on tax than health care), but I still find it hard to imagine POTUS himself being a driving policy figure in private or public. And maybe even if Congress did step up to a new sort of policy leadership role, it would only be temporarily. Unlike the nuclear weapons usage possibility, it’s entirely reasonable to think things might revert under a new presidency. But we don’t know; only time will tell.