Trump Was Right

With Florida taking a horrific pounding from Irma so soon after Harvey’s flooding farther west, it’s now plain that President Trump was right to take that deal with Democratic leaders Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi last week.

By agreeing to kick the can on the debtlimit and spending battles three months down the road, Trump avoided having Washington locked in another inside-baseball battle when so many Americans are suffering.

Maybe the president could’ve been nicer to GOP leaders Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan while taking the Dem offer. But the grim truth is that the Republicans’ elaborate strategizing has failed utterly so far this year.

It’s September, and Obama Care remains unrepealed, unreplaced and unfixed. Any kind of tax reform or tax cut is now dicey, and even funding the government through the end of the next fiscal year is almost certainly going to require another one of those ginormous, swamp-feeding omnibus bills.

We doubt there are many future deals to be had with the Democrats, but Ryan and McConnell were going to have to swing one on the debt limit eventually: Dozens of House members in the Freedom Caucus won’t budge on their demands for spending cuts in exchange for raising the limit, but those demands won’t pass in the Senate.

Ryan wanted to push for a longer extension of the limit in the deal, but there’s zero certainty he’d have gotten it. And it’s entirely possible that Schumer and Pelosi would’ve increased their demands as time went on.

And, again, a standoff would have left Trump and the GOP Congress looking utterly self-absorbed in face of what will now be hundreds of billions of dollars in damage from Harvey and Irma, on top of all the lives lost and disrupted.

Moving change through Congress may sometimes require risking a public-relations hit, but it’s just crazy to fight such battles in the middle of huge natural disasters. Irma’s devastation is just more proof that Trump was the one seeing clearly here.