A Congress That Votes Yes and Hopes No

The Atlantic

2 days ago

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In fall 1963, as President Lyndon B. Johnson struggled to pass the Civil Rights Act, some allies warned him that the success wouldn't be worth the electoral hit he'd take. Johnson was insistent that the point of winning elections was to push the policies he wanted. 'Well, what the hell's the presidency for?' he said.
No one would have to ask President Donald Trump that question. His vision of power is dangerous but clear, and he's wasted little time in implementing it. One reason he's been so successful is that members of the House and Senate seem to have no idea what the hell the Congress is for. The past few weeks have seen Republican members of Congress wringing their hands furiously over bills under consideration, criticizing the White House's legislative priorities … and then voting for them.
The most torturous, and tortuous, example is Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, a prominent member of the supposedly populist wing of MAGA Republicans. On June 28, Hawley criticized Medicaid cuts included in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act in the form of work requirements. 'If you want to be a working-class party, you've got to deliver for working-class people,' he said. 'You cannot take away health care from working people.'
Three days later, on July 1, he voted for a bill that did exactly that. It also cut funding to rural hospitals, and yet, a few days later, he told NBC News, 'I think that if Republicans don't come out strong and say we're going to protect rural hospitals, then, yeah, I think voters aren't going to like that.' This week, he introduced a bill to roll back some of the Medicaid cuts he'd voted for two weeks earlier.
If Hawley didn't like the cuts, he could have voted to stop them. I don't mean that symbolically: The bill passed 51–50, with Vice President J. D. Vance breaking the tie. By withholding his vote, Hawley could have killed the bill or forced changes. This is how legislating is supposed to work. But in his defense, Hawley has terrible role models: He's a relatively young senator surrounded by elders who seem just as confused about their role.
Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska voted for the OBBBA too, and then told reporters that she hoped that the bill she had just voted for would not be enacted as written, pleading with the House to do her job for her by altering it. (The House didn't.) Years ago, my colleague Ashley Parker, then at The New York Times, identified the existence of a Republican ' Vote No/Hope Yes Caucus.' Murkowski is perhaps the spiritual founder of a Vote Yes/Hope No Caucus.
She has plenty of company. Her comrades were out in force for this week's vote on rescissions, retroactive budget cuts requested by the White House and approved by Congress. Some members worry that acceding to the rescissions is effectively surrendering the power of the purse to the executive branch. 'I don't have any problem with reducing spending. We're talking about not knowing,' complained Kentucky's Mitch McConnell, the former Senate majority leader. 'They would like a blank check, is what they would like. And I don't think that's appropriate. I think they ought to make the case.' McConnell voted for the bill.
'I suspect we're going to find out there are some things that we're going to regret,' North Carolina's Thom Tillis, ostensibly freed up by his decision not to run for reelection, said on Wednesday. If only there were some way to avoid that! But Tillis voted yes, because he said he'd been assured by the White House that certain programs wouldn't be cut. It should be clear by now that the administration's promises to senators aren't worth the red cent that Trump is eliminating; regardless, the way to ensure that something happens is to write it into law. Isn't that what we send legislators to Washington to do?
Apparently not. Also this week, Senate Majority Leader John Thune paused a bill to levy sanctions against Russia, deferring to Trump, who has threatened to impose tariffs on Moscow. 'It sounds like right now the president is going to attempt to do some of this on his own,' he said. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise concurred: 'If anybody's going to be able to get Putin to the table to finally agree to peace, it's President Trump.' Never mind that the Constitution places the tariff power primarily with Congress.
Trump's executive-power grab, I've argued here and in my recent book, is the product of careful planning laid out in Project 2025, whose authors make a case for how and why the president should seize new authorities. In Project 2025's main document, Kevin D. Roberts, the head of the Heritage Foundation, attacks 'Congress's preening cowardice' in refusing to exercise its duties and leaving them to the presidency. Project 2025's paradoxical response is for the executive to seize even more power. That has worked because members of Congress are—unlike LBJ—afraid to take votes that might create some sort of political backlash.
They might pay the price anyway. 'In recent decades, members of the House and Senate discovered that if they give away that power to the Article II branch of government, they can also deny responsibility for its actions,' Roberts writes. That trick works for only so long. Trump never has to face voters again, but having passed up the chance to set their own agenda, many members of Congress will have to answer for his decisions in next year's midterms.
After the longest vote in House history this week, Speaker Mike Johnson—no relation genealogically, ideologically, or stylistically to Lyndon—lamented the state of affairs in the legislature. 'I am tired of making history; I just want normal Congress,' he said. 'But some people have forgotten what that looks like.' It's a shame that Johnson doesn't know anyone who has the power to change the way things work at the Capitol.
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