On the menu: Trump approval bounces back; toastmasters; Dems argue over which way out of the wilderness; warning sign for Cuomo; his ship has come in.
Dysfunction is both the cause and result of the most dangerous problem in Washington today: an imbalance of power between the branches.
President Trump is intent on mowing down the remaining restrictions on executive power, and a series of cases awaiting the Supreme Court could scythe through many of the few remaining authorities Congress keeps for itself.
This is the result of a decades-long effort by members of both parties to only oppose executive abuses when they come from the other party. Congress hasn't so much been defeated as surrendered, one majority at a time — and Trump is intent on taking all the spoils won by his predecessors' 50-year siege.
Another way in which partisanship has brought us to this incipient defeat of the constitutional order is that the Congress has been rendered all but incompetent by faction. Over that same 50 years of executive pushing, pushing, pushing, the partisan primary system was coming into full force after a halting initial implementation. With a tiny sliver of activist voters holding the same power to deny a candidate an office as a majority of the broad general electorate, the incentives for bipartisanship have all but disappeared in most states and districts.
The idea of Congress working smoothly in a bipartisan way on substantial issues isn't entirely dead, but almost. The policy divisions are often arbitrary — think of the reversals on trade, spending, national security and even the primacy of Congress itself — but party allegiance is constant. Even on matters where there is broad popular agreement among the people, like immigration or abortion, the duopoly forbids constructive action.
With Congress perpetually stuck, frustrated citizens look to the only office elected by the nation as a whole, the presidency. But when presidents act, as they increasingly have this century, outside of the limits of their office, the results tend to be unsatisfying. This slate of overbroad executive actions will be reversed in part by the courts. What remains will be countermanded at the next change in power, the countermander then adding his or her new round of decrees, and on and on. And so it will go until one day, the courts give up and let presidents rule by the strokes of their pens, ultimately bowing to the will of the people who will prefer substantive action from a despot to a permanently dysfunctional republic.
That's what will eventually happen unless Congress gets a hold of itself and starts delivering results on major issues and returns to the fight against executive overreach in a meaningfully bipartisan way.
But the trick is that those two things aren't often complementary.
After months of declaring themselves wholly devoted to the legislative filibuster, indeed after years of having raked Democrats for their enthusiasm for ending it, Senate Republicans dipped their toes in the cool waters of majoritarianism.
Republicans overruled the Senate parliamentarian, who had ruled that a measure repealing a Biden-era regulation allowing California to ban gasoline-powered cars was subject to regular rules and a 60-vote threshold, not the simple majority allowed under the 1996 Congressional Review Act.
That is certainly within the power of the majority. It takes a simple majority to evade the 60-vote threshold. Majorities can even get rid of parliamentarians, replacing them with ones of their choosing. Between 1981 and 2012, there were only two parliamentarians, but not consecutively. When Republicans had the chance, they picked Robert Dove (1981-87 and 1995-2001) while Democrats preferred the ministrations of Alan Frumin (1987-95 and 2001-12). One imagines that the Democratic-picked Elizabeth MacDonough, who has served since then, is feeling the winds of change herself these days.
What happened with the California rule should be thought of as something of a test case for what's coming this summer as Republicans take the plunge on the reconciliation package that landed in the Senate's lap this month after the House produced its version. The secret trick of reconciliation is that Congress gets a chance to add tweaks to the budget — to reconcile it — twice every federal fiscal year.
Harry Reid, also remembered for starting the rollback of the filibuster by excluding some presidential nominations from the rule, was the great innovator of imaginative reconciliation when he found a way to say that the invention of a whole new federal program, ObamaCare, was actually just a little tweak and didn't need to meet the higher standard in 2010.
Now Republicans are ready to take their latest turn with the filibuster hall pass, and the pressure will be on MacDonough to be creative in her thinking about what is legislation and what is reconciliation. She was game in 2017 for the Trump tax cuts, but this package appears to have actions that would typically fall outside the rules. If she doesn't agree with the majority, one suspects that she will get the boot in favor of someone with a more capacious definition of reconciliation.
Similar things have happened before, so that would hardly be the end of the Senate, but it all points in the same direction: Frustrated primary voters put pressure on senators for both action and strict partisanship, which do not work well together. In order to have both in a narrowly divided nation, lower standards are required.
And that's the funny thing about power in a government of separated powers.
Presidential power is straightforward: Presidents want more of it and seek to destroy obstacles to its swift and easy exercise. Congress, though, derives its power through complexity. The Senate has more power because of the 60-vote threshold because it must be catered to and heeded in order to build a large enough coalition. The easier it is to get legislation through Congress, the less power Congress has.
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