Congress? Maybe Check Back in 2027.
WASHINGTON – State of the Union addresses are typically an opportunity for presidents to dictate the legislative agenda to their party colleagues in Congress. Under divided government, this comes across as scolding, where the president tries to embarrass the opposing party into adopting his popular issues. But in unified, one-party government like we have now, it’s a signal: The president has a set of policies that congressional leaders just need to corral the votes for and pass.
This, of course, is not a typical president, and more important, it’s not a typical majority. It’s not really a majority at all: With 218 Republicans and 214 Democrats, the House currently has a one-vote margin to pass any party-line legislation, and those numbers won’t really change until a special election in California concludes in August, by which time everyone will be back home campaigning for the midterms. Since compromise is not in the MAGA vocabulary, this means Republicans need total or near-total consensus on any bill, which doesn’t really exist.
Even where it does, like with the SAVE America Act, Republicans’ last-ditch attempt to disenfranchise voters before a midterm election they believe they would lose under current conditions, the GOP unity runs into the Senate filibuster. I’m quietly cheering behind House Republicans, who are pressuring senators to force a “talking filibuster”—changing the filibuster rules to make it more painful would ultimately benefit Democrats far more. But it’s not going to happen. Republicans know that they benefit from the filibuster, too, and enough of them have already said they won’t support changing the rules to derail the effort. Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) came out yesterday and declared that the SAVE Act was more of a messaging vote. When Senate Republicans are talking about getting Democratic support for this bill, you know it’s all over.
The filibuster can be circumvented, of course, through budget reconciliation, which requires only a simple majority vote in the House and Senate and would be the only way to pass Donald Trump’s health care plan and his desire to increase the military budget by 50 percent (such a big number that the military can’t figure out what to even spend the money on). But despite the influential Republican Study Committee releasing a reconciliation framework and House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) stubbornly promising it, Trump deflated this balloon before the speech, saying that “we’ve gotten everything passed that we need for four years.”
Congress could, theoretically, wrest back the tariff power from a president who keeps using it illegally—but that just sounds like work.
What exactly is Congress supposed to do for the next 11 months, then? Trump didn’t offer much of a lifeline in the speech for an inert 119th Congress that is playing out the string.
Congress could, theoretically, wrest back the tariff power from a president who keeps using it illegally, as the Supreme Court recently ruled. (The replacement tariff Trump unveiled may well be illegal too.) But that would involve rolling back the delegation to the president of Congress’s exclusive power to tariff, and that just sounds like work. Besides, Trump explicitly said in the speech that he wanted Congress to do nothing on tariffs.
Or Congress could solve the impasse on funding the currently unfunded Department of Homeland Security. But Trump devoted all of 153 words in the longest State of the Union in American history to this topic, simply demanding full restoration of funding without the concessions required to get the bill passed.
And Trump’s first act after the speech was to pause Medicaid funding in Minnesota, a violation of the Impoundment Control Act that reinforces exactly why Democrats should be so wary of authorizing appropriations for an executive branch that has no interest in adhering to them. This is on top of a series of other examples of neglect of statutory obligations and congressional directives, which include gutting the required funding for the Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations or the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
Incidentally, I have to laugh at the boomlet of stories likely seeded by Democratic Appropriations Committee staffers about how they heroically beat back Trump’s requested funding cuts and used appropriations laws to rein in Trump more. Literally the first policy out of the State of the Union is an illegal withholding of funds. Fool me once, as they say.
Congress could also finish off a housing supply bill that appears to have broad support in both chambers and even at the White House. But Trump used his address to call for a different bill that would codify his executive order aiming to ban single-family home purchases by institutional investors. As The Lever reported, the House Republican version of that would literally do the opposite of its intention by pre-empting state bans on investor purchases. There’s a competing Senate Democratic bill released this week by Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) that would take away the long-term tax benefits that investors reap from these deals. But this takes the focus away from the supply bills, and Trump’s insistence makes it hard to separate the two. Some see housing legislation as inevitable given the affordability crisis; I think there’s a real chance now that it gets bogged down.
The House couldn’t even get a pretty basic air safety bill done this week on the suspension file (which means it had enough support for House leadership to expect a two-thirds supermajority to approve it), after the Pentagon objected at the last minute. When thinking about Congress, the phrase “What would you say you do here?” comes to mind.
It’s not like America is going to turn off its challenges for the next year while the Republicans controlling Congress work the kinks out. Credit card balances are at a record high. Student loans are defaulting at unprecedented rates. Credit-juggling has now moved into such fundamentals as shelter, with “rent now, pay later” schemes. People are likely to get a reprieve with higher tax refunds thanks to last year’s cuts, but just in time for that, businesses plan to raise prices again and tell you that you’re just going to have to get used to the idea. That’s alongside pricing games (detailed in this extraordinary Groundwork Collaborative paper on the annoyance economy) that are only growing more sophisticated in the age of AI. But to Trump, affordability is a solved problem, so these challenges are unseen.
I sat in on a town hall meeting this week in Washington where practically every working-class speaker from around the country was terrified over rising health care costs and the threat of losing coverage. “Human beings are not disposable,” said one participant from Bettendorf, Iowa. “We see the fears in patients’ eyes,” said a physician from Flint, Michigan. “The state of this country is sicker and poorer, and I see this every day.” After Republicans let Affordable Care Act subsidies expire in January, the issue has shockingly left the media’s radar screen, a total abdication of reporting on a core stress in ordinary people’s lives.
The larger problem is that economic growth is limited to a few industries, a few executives within those industries, and major shareholders within those industries, with corporate profits dominating the total share of national income. But it’s hard to gain salience for fixing the K-shaped economy when the men and women of our legislature live on the top side of the K and have their campaigns funded by the topmost stratum of the Ks.
It’s not hard to understand why Donald Trump was left with nothing to offer to Congress as an agenda; he doesn’t believe he needs to ask anyone to increase his power, and should instead be allowed to fulfill his own whims without limits. It is harder to figure what members of Congress, particularly the Republicans who have run Washington since the beginning of last year, are going to say when they come before their non-rich constituents. What have they delivered to them, outside of chaos, higher prices, and a few measly tax cuts?
The post Congress? Maybe Check Back in 2027. appeared first on The American Prospect.