The Patriot Post® · Hurricane Funding
I don’t think I have much of a future as a politician. I don’t understand how they think, and really don’t get how they negotiate.
Take last week’s “deal” on the debt ceiling and hurricane aid. The media is painting it as the death knell of the GOP because it signaled that Donald Trump has abandoned the GOP leadership to cut a deal with Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi. There’s no disagreement that Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan might have felt a tad left out and embarrassed by the process, but what actually happened? The basics of the deal are that billions of aid was approved for hurricane victims, the debt ceiling was raised to allow for the extra spending, and the can was kicked three months down the road on the next review of the debt ceiling.
After looking at the devastation in Texas with more to come, the odds of hurricane aid being held hostage to spending cuts were as close to zero as you can get. The money was going to get approved by both sides. And if the debt ceiling (which, by the way, is the second-silliest financial management provision in government, exceeded only by the balanced budget amendment) had to be raised to accommodate that, so be it. Only the purist budget hawks in safe seats on the Right would push the nay button. So that leaves only a small amount of time before the next debt ceiling deadline is to be negotiated. Apparently, the GOP wanted 18 months, and the Democrats wanted three. What did Trump want?
Trump was probably as baffled as I was about the rationales behind the competing positions. The GOP apparently didn’t want to have two votes on the debt ceiling before the next election because it has postured itself as fiscally conservative. And since the ceiling always gets raised in the end, voting yes twice might not endear them to their base. The Dems wanted as many debt ceiling votes as they could get, because they always win the PR war by painting the GOP as the party that is willing to “shut down the government” over some minor spending issue, and the GOP caves. But the conclusion that this issue would give one side more negotiating leverage at the next go-round is lost on anyone but the inside baseball DC crowd. Why not have them all just do their jobs and engage in the really hard work of voting on a budget that addresses the kind of things businesses do in the real world every budget cycle — choices on revenue, spending, appropriate levels of debt, etc.? Having a debt ceiling just adds another artificial and arbitrary vote. I guess it was put in to save the legislators from themselves, but why not wrap everything together? After all, it’s the budget that drives everything anyway.
Trump just wanted to help the hurricane victims and not have a public brawl over whether FEMA would have the funds to do its job. It’s no more complicated or devious than that. He was acutely aware that Hurricane Katrina almost destroyed the Bush presidency, unfairly in my view, but perception is the ball game. And Trump wasn’t about to let that happen to him. Understandably after the fiasco on health care and the delays in getting tax reform on the table, Trump felt he couldn’t rely on the assurances from the GOP leadership to get the hurricane funding passed without a PR disaster, so he took the bird in the hand that was most important to him.
It’s ridiculous to consider this deal as anything but a one-off. The Dems initially praised Trump for agreeing to their timing idea and hinted at bipartisan deals to come. But the Dem base will never allow compromises to the Trump agenda, and the idea that if we had an 18-month lag we could all focus on tax reform ignores that reality. Ditto for Trump. He’s not all of the sudden going to abandon his campaign platform just to curry favor with Schumer, so we will be back where we started whenever the debt ceiling is reached again.
Trump’s looking presidential in his handling of the hurricane crisis has boosted his poll numbers. (You can tell Trump is doing a good job on this when you can’t remember the last time you saw the words “Harvey” or “Houston” in the mainstream media. If it were otherwise, those words would be in every paragraph on Irma). And that will mean more to him in future negotiations that any phony time schedule on the debt ceiling will to the leadership in both parties.
Trump is not a conservative ideologue; he’s a dealmaker with fiscally conservative leanings and a focus on growth. The one time deal with the Dems is not important because it might hand negotiating leverage to one side of the aisle or not; it doesn’t. It’s important because it got Trump what he wanted — positive public perception of him as able to govern, and competent and compassionate in effectively putting hurricane victims first. It also improves his negotiating leverage with his own party, which he needs for major agenda items like tax reform. Trump cut the deal primarily to blunt Katrina comparisons, but contrary to what the media wants you to think, the deal also makes GOP cooperation on major issues like taxes more likely. Whether that was part of the grand Trump strategy or not, I’ll take it.