‘Time to Move On’: Senate GOP Flouts Trump After Health Care Defeat
August 2, 2017 by admin
Filed under Choosing Lingerie
“I don’t think he’s got much experience in the Senate, as I recall,” Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, said of Mr. Mulvaney, tweaking a former House member. “And he’s got a big job. He ought to do that job and let us do our job.”
The Senate has planned non-health care votes all week on the president’s own nominees.
After subsisting around the edges of criticism throughout Mr. Trump’s tenure so far — saying they were “concerned” by his campaign’s Russia ties, “troubled” over the firing of the F.B.I. director James B. Comey, unsure if a war with MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” was helping the conservative agenda — Republican senators have emerged from the health care defeat with fewer apparent qualms about flouting the White House.
Unlike many state-level Republicans who have long defied the president, like Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, Mr. Trump’s allies in the Capitol have generally held firm all year, almost always voting to support his agenda and deflecting questions about his erratic behavior and chaotic West Wing.
To date, lawmakers’ loyalty has been rewarded with presidential finger-pointing, attempted intervention into the Senate voting calendar and threats against lawmakers’ own health care coverage, Mr. Trump’s latest gambit over the weekend.
The senators are not tired of all the winning, as promised. They are grappling with how to navigate a moment that might include little of it, despite total Republican control in Washington, led by a distractible and often disengaged standard-bearer who has never much tried to sell the public on the merits of their policy aims anyway.
“If this was our Faustian bargain,” Senator Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, wrote in a new book, “Conscience of a Conservative,” reckoning with the Trump age, “then it was not worth it.”
Mr. Trump’s reign atop American politics has been specked with misguided predictions of Republicans’ mass exodus from his thrall.
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Surely the “Access Hollywood” video, in which he boasted of sexually assaulting women, would be too much.
Or his baseless claims of voter fraud in an election he won.
Or his firing of Mr. Comey.
In all these instances, and likely more to come, expectations have been upended by a simple reality: Republicans are politically tethered to Mr. Trump, who remains broadly popular with Republican primary campaign voters, and any hope of legislative accomplishment runs through his desk.
Lately, though, frustrations have seeped into open view with notable frequency.
Senators have stewed most recently — perhaps more than at any other point in Mr. Trump’s term — over his public disparaging of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a former senator from Alabama.
Several of Mr. Sessions’s former colleagues rallied behind him and strongly cautioned Mr. Trump that “there will be holy hell to pay,” in the words of Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, if Mr. Sessions is fired.
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The president’s latest rampaging Twitter posts, including renewing his call to do away with the legislative filibuster in the Senate, have not helped, either. Among other issues, like widespread support in the chamber for maintaining the 60-vote standard on most major legislation, Mr. Trump has overlooked the fact that his health care bill failed to meet even the 51-vote threshold required in this case.
“If we change those rules, it’d be the end of the Republican Party,” said Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah, the body’s longest-serving Republican. “And it’d be the end of the Senate.”
Asked if Mr. Trump’s antics were hindering progress, Mr. Hatch said, “It doesn’t help.”
“He just doesn’t understand,” Mr. Hatch added of Mr. Trump’s grasp of Senate protocol. “He’d like to get more cooperation up here. And he’s not getting very much, to be honest with you.”
Yet while Republicans have said they will not give up on a health care overhaul in the long term, last week’s failure has made clear the limits of their legislative ambitions.
At least as troubling to some Republicans is what the president’s conduct — and the party’s tolerance of it — has reflected about the state of modern conservatism.
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“We have principles for a reason,” Mr. Flake said in an interview, alluding to concerns “in matters of demeanor and character.” “If we’re willing to abandon those principles at the drop of a hat, then we aren’t very committed.”
Mr. Flake, one of the few national Republican officeholders who declined to endorse Mr. Trump last year, was asked if Mr. Trump is fit to be president.
“That was decided by the voters,” he said. “They decided.”
Asked if he preferred President Barack Obama, with whom he had a warm relationship despite disagreements on policy, Mr. Flake said he was “not going to grade presidents here.”
Public introspection has not been universal. Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the chamber’s laconic majority leader, told reporters he had not yet read Mr. Flake’s book — with its blistering words about the party’s direction — but said he planned to “get around to it at some point.”
Still, Mr. McConnell and his conference have at times demonstrated their independence from the president. Last week, the Senate and the House both passed sanctions on Russia nearly unanimously, against the administration’s wishes.
And Mr. McConnell has made two things clear to the president: He plans to move on from health care repeal for now, declining to mention it from the Senate floor so far this week, and he has no plans to scuttle the legislative filibuster.
“It’s pretty obvious that our problem on health care was not the Democrats,” he told reporters on Tuesday, challenging Mr. Trump’s logic on the prospective rule change. “We didn’t have 50 Republicans.”
Some lawmakers have seemed to relish Congress’s assertions of autonomy, after years of mushrooming executive power.
Senator Richard Shelby, Republican of Alabama, was asked if Congress had succeeded in demonstrating its muscle anew during this chapter of the Trump administration.
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“I think we should,” he said. “We have three branches of government.”
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