Lawmakers leave agenda in limbo
Despite control of Congress and White House, the GOP has made almost no progress advancing Trump’s priorities
USA TODAY WASHINGTON With senators having wrapped up business for the month and joining the House on recess, they’re leaving behind a highly unproductive first half of the year. The Trump agenda has barely moved, despite the GOP enjoying a majority in both chambers of Congress and a Republican in the White House.
Republicans set out an ambitious agenda after President Trump’s surprising win in November. Lawmakers vowed to repeal Obamacare, reform the tax code, build up the nation’s crumbling infrastructure and help Trump build a wall on the U.S.Mexico border. GOP leaders also promised to crack down on illegal immigration and roll back the banking regulations in the DoddFrank Act.
While the House has passed a few of those measures, none of the agenda items has passed in the Senate. Instead, the single biggest piece of legislation passed out of both chambers and signed into law by Trump — though begrudgingly — is a bipartisan bill that would increase sanctions on Russia and put safeguards in place to keep the president from loosening them.
“We’re getting nothing done. All we’ve really done this year is confirm Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court,” Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said on the floor late last month after a dramatic return to Washington following a brain cancer diagnosis. The conservative Gorsuch was only put on the court after Republicans changed Senate rules to allow Supreme Court nominees to be confirmed by a simple majority, rather than the usual 60-vote threshold.
“Democrats made it their goal in life to obstruct everything that we tried to do and that the administration tried to do. I think that’s probably the single major reason,” Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn of Texas told reporters last week when asked why more wasn’t accomplished in the first half of the year.
At various points this year, Democrats did slow-walk Senate business, particularly on some of Trump’s nominees and GOP efforts to repeal Obamacare. However, in the most high-profile legislative fail, Republicans proved their own worst enemy.
After the stunning defeat to Republican-led efforts to repeal Obamacare at the end of July, the president, in a tweet, blamed “3 Republicans and 48 Democrats” for letting “the American people down.” No Democrats supported the GOP’s attempts to roll back the law, but that wasn’t why the bill failed.
In their party-line effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act, the GOP — which has a narrow 52-48 majority — used a special Senate procedure that would allow it to pass with just 51 votes. If Vice President Pence cast the tiebreaking vote, that number of senators could drop to 50.
But even that proved impossible. GOP Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and McCain joined Democrats in voting against the measure.
“It’s pretty obvious that our problem on health care was not the Democrats; we didn’t have 50 Republicans,” Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said last week.
Sen. Ron Johnson, R-Wis., told reporters that GOP senators might have been able to accomplish more if they had taken up their legislative priorities in a different order.
“In hindsight, truthfully, we started on the right issue, which was regulatory reform. The next thing we should’ve taken up is tax reform, but we took up Obamacare,” Johnson said just before the Senate broke for recess.
The conservative senator said he was not satisfied with what the Senate had accomplished this year. He did point to a series of reversals of Obama-era regulations Congress had pushed through as successes that had not gotten enough attention.
Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah, a member of GOP leadership, told reporters that the Senate had been productive, and it just was a slower timeline.
“We got a lot of things done,” Hatch said. “Like massaging almost all of these problems that we have and getting them in a position where we may be able to work on them. I mean, it’s a lot of work to do, legislation. One bill alone can take the whole year, and right now it is.”
The House, which has a larger GOP majority, has cranked out a series of bills that go along with the Trump agenda, including a bill to repeal and replace Obamacare and the rollback of DoddFrank regulations, which aimed to prevent Wall Street from sparking another recession but have been criticized by conservatives as a government takeover of the financial services industry. Both of those efforts fell flat when they reached the Senate.
In late July, the House passed a security-themed spending bill that included $1.6 billion to begin construction of a wall along about 70 miles of the 2,000-mile Southwest border. However, Democrats have already warned that they will oppose the funding in the Senate, where Republicans need Democratic support to pass spending bills.
“They have to figure out what they can do; we’ve shown what we can do,” Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., told reporters after the health care bill failed in the Senate. “This is a problem the Senate has to solve for itself.”
Senate rules mean that most legislation — except those bills attempted through budgetary procedures, like the Obamacare repeal — require 60 votes to pass. As Trump’s poll numbers continue to drop, Democrats, even those from states Trump won by double digits, are seeing fewer benefits to voting with the GOP.
Sen. Joe Manchin is close with the president and his Republican colleagues. But even he would not side with the president on health care.
Other red-state Democrats had previously said they could see themselves working with Trump on infrastructure. But they had expected the government to create jobs by investing tax dollars in improving the nation’s aging roads, bridges, dams and airports. But Trump’s plan is to provide incentives to private companies to help build the projects. Democrats fear private investors would try to make their money back by imposing new tolls and fees. and would like to see payments go cashless.
Globalism and advancements in technologies, such as bar codes and credit cards, periodically trigger “mark of the beast” concerns for those who take seriously the prophecy, which talks of a onegovernment world and a cashless society.
Randall Balmer, the chair of the religion department at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, said the Book of Revelation presents a real challenge for those such as evangelical Christians who take the Bible seriously and often try to interpret it literally.
“A lot of evangelicals certainly take the Book of Revelation seriously. They try to understand it,” said Balmer, an Episcopal priest who grew up in an evangelical Christian family. “This is a source of real fascination for a lot of people, but it’s also kind of a parlor game.”
Vlachos said popular depictions in the media often drive people’s views.
“The majority of people are getting their notions on this issue from movies and novels rather than the Book of Revelation and apocalyptic genre material in the Old and New Testament,” Vlachos said.
Reading the Book of Revelation is complex, said Vlachos, who teaches a class on it. The first chapter points out that some of it is meant to be taken symbolically.
But even if a believer interprets the entire text literally, Vlachos said the “mark of the beast” verses specifically mention two key details.
“Taking the mark goes hand in hand with the conscientious decision of publicly pledging one’s allegiance or loyalty to the beast and worshipping his image,” Vlachos said.
The mark is not a random number, either. It always names the Antichrist, either numerically or alphabetically.
“I often say to my students, ‘No name, no worries,’ ” Vlachos said.
While he said he doesn’t think technologies like microchipping are a sign of end times, Vlachos doesn’t rule out that they could be one of the precursors, like birth pangs, preceding the end that Jesus talked about with his disciples. It’s fine to put them on the back burner and focus on clear issues like an allegiance to Jesus, he said.
“I call it like an apocalyptic inoculation,” Vlachos said. “The more Christlike, the less we’ll be duped by Antichrist.”
Balmer said he can see why people connect microchipping and the prophecy.
“It may not be the ‘mark of the beast,’ but it certainly is a slippery slope,” Balmer said. “I think we should be cautious about allowing that measure of control or surveillance into our lives.”
Concerns about the “mark of the beast” in the workplace have made their way into the U.S. court system, too.
A West Virginia coal miner’s belief in the “mark of the beast” won him more than half a million dollars in a workplace discrimination case. An appeals court recently affirmed the federal court’s 2015 decision.
Beverly R. Butcher Jr., an evangelical Christian and minister, worked for decades in a mine owned by Consol Energy but was forced to retire when the company refused to accommodate his religious objection to its newly implemented biometric hand scanner, court documents say.
The scanner tracked employee attendance and hours worked by assigning a number to an image of a worker’s hand.
Citing the Book of Revelation, Butcher said he feared the scanner could link him to the Antichrist.
Other “mark of the beast” cases have made their way into the court system, but they’re not common, said Howard Friedman, who writes the Religion Clause blog about church and state legal issues. Religious workplace cases more often focus on employee clothing and work schedule accommodations.
Friedman, who is also an emeritus law professor at the University of Toledo, said he doesn’t anticipate the Wisconsin company’s microchipping effort will end up before a judge.
“As long as they continue to make this voluntary, there isn’t going to be much of a legal confrontation,” Friedman said.