August break arrives as tension simmers between Trump, Congress,
Tensions between president, Congress risk GOP agenda
WASHINGTON — They’re going away mad.
As President Donald Trump and the Republicans who control Congress leave Washington for their separate August breaks, simmering tensions bode ill for the party’s agenda going forward.
Lawmakers and the president blame each other for the failure over six months to make progress on promises made to conservative voters in one election after the other, notably the vow to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act.
Trump often cites as his top achievement the seating of Neil Gorsuch on the Supreme Court, ensuring a conservative majority there. Yet as congressional Republicans see it, that success was largely engineered by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.
The president had goaded the Senate into delaying its summer recess by two weeks, mainly to pass a health care alternative to Obamacare. After initially agreeing, McConnell decided to call it quits Thursday and sent his colleagues home, the health care bill all but given up for dead. Trump will depart Friday for more than two weeks at his New Jersey golf club.
Perhaps emboldened by Trump’s steadily slumping poll numbers, lawmakers are showing an increasing tendency to go their own way, even as he taunts them and threatens their jobs. They will work with Trump when it suits their interest, Republicans say, but will not be corralled by him.
“I wouldn’t say ignore the White House, but certainly not be distracted by it,” said Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the third-ranking Senate Republican, in describing the emerging approach.
Thune compared it to bickering relatives. “It’s like any family, you have your days where you don’t get along as well and you might say things you later regret. In the long term, it’s advantageous for us to work together,” he said.
Some Republicans say they welcome the new dynamic.
“Honestly, I enjoy the fact that Congress, the Senate in particular, is charting a course, developing legislation and — let’s face it — leading on all of these issues,” said Sen. Bob Corker of Tennessee, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee.
The latest example: Trump’s announcement Wednesday of a plan to curb legal immigration. That was a signature piece of his campaign platform, yet Trump held a White House event to embrace two Republican senators’ legislation, not unveil his own.
The bill’s prospects are dim in Congress, despite Trump’s senior policy adviser issuing political threats against members of Congress from the White House press lectern.
“Ultimately, members of Congress will have a choice to make,” Stephen Miller told White House reporters Wednesday. “They can either vote with the interests of U.S. citizens and U.S. workers, or they can vote against their interests, and whatever happens as a result of that I think would be somewhat predictable.”
The fraught relations in the GOP family burst into view after the defeat on health care last week. That was followed this week by a reluctant Trump’s signature on a sanctions bill penalizing Russia that ties his hands in a major area of foreign policy. Had he not signed it, Congress would have overridden his veto, Republicans said.
Many GOP lawmakers cited Russian sanctions as a top accomplishment.
Trump called Republican senators “fools” in a tweet last weekend and blasting them for their inability to pass legislation. By Thursday, a day after he signed the Russia sanctions bill, Trump was again stewing.
“Our relationship with Russia is at an all-time & very dangerous low,” he tweeted. “You can thank Congress, the same people that can't even give us HCare!”
Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican who helped sink the Obamacare repeal effort, fired back with his own tweet: “You can thank Putin for attacking our democracy, invading neighbors & threatening our allies.”
Sen. Mike Rounds, a former Republican governor of South Dakota, called the bipartisan sanctions bill a “good example of Congress saying, ‘We have a say in this also.’ That, I think might be more of a harbinger of things to come than some people might think.”
But it’s still a big risk with voters, especially Republicans who believed that Trump and their party’s lawmakers would be able to move quickly on a conservative wish list that piled up during the Obama years.
“I’m not sure that it’s going to be a pleasant recess,” said Chip Felkel, a longtime Republican consultant in South Carolina. “What we said all along was when they get the House and the Senate, we’ll make these changes. And so far we haven’t really seen a whole lot, other than not getting stuff done.”