Is Senator Jeff Flake’s (R-Ariz.) new book Conscience of a Conservative, a stalking horse for President Mike Pence? The dictionary defines “stalking horse” as “something used to mask a purpose or a candidate put forward to divide the opposition or to conceal someone’s real candidacy.”

Flake may not have intended to write a book making the case for Vice President Pence but it is hard to read it without thinking that Flake may have been the first to articulate what many of his Republican colleagues in the Senate are thinking: one way or the other, they should cut their losses and make the Vice President the new President.

The case unfolds in three ways. In the first chapter of his book, we learn that Flake and Pence have been good friends since arriving in Congress in 2001. They are both deeply religious people, although Flake is a Mormon and Pence a fundamentalist Christian. They started their political lives in conservative think tanks: Flake as head of the Goldwater Institute and Pence as head of the Indiana Policy Review. According to Flake, as freshmen they bonded over a passion for marginal income tax rate cuts, tag teaming the Bush Administration in their lobbying. Throughout their careers, they have been stalwarts of the very conservative wing of the Republican Party, with 100 percent ratings from the American Conservative Union.

In addition to letting us know of his respect for Pence, Flake makes two arguments throughout the book’s 136 pages. Each one can be read as – why Pence, not Trump.

The first involves Trump’s unhinged style, which stands in marked contrast to his vice president’s more sober and thoughtful demeanor. A few examples:

“… there is a significant difference between appearing to have problems with impulse control and actually having impulse-control problems.”

“… as a governing philosophy, the instability of flying off the handle is a disaster for the United States and is profoundly unconservative.”

“But in the tweeting life of our president, strategy is difficult to detect…. It’s all noise and no signal….volatile unpredictability is not a virtue.”

“It is not enough to be conservative anymore. You have to be vicious.”

The second line of attack is on Trump’s digressions from classic Republican conservatism. He is critical of Trump’s trade policy, especially his opposition to NAFTA. He is critical of Trump’s belief that we can withdraw from the world and of Trump’s hostility to “globalism.” He is critical of Trump’s promises to coal miners and others that he can restore an economy that is long gone. He is critical of Trump’s immigration policy and his hostility to immigrants. “Never,” writes Flake, “has a party so quickly or easily abandoned its core principles as my party did in the course of the 2016 campaign. … we lurched like a tranquilized elephant from a broad consensus on economic philosophy and free trade that had held for generations to an incoherent and often untrue mash of back-of-the-envelope populist slogans…What does it say that we had instead succumbed to what can only be described as a propaganda-fueled dystopian view of conservatism?”

No wonder that President Trump has gone after Flake by name (after promising not to) and all but endorsed his opponent in the Republican primary. Flake’s re-election bid was one of only two GOP-held Senate seats in play in 2018, and the Republican primary race indicated he was in danger of not even being his party’s nominee in the midterms. So why would he risk making more enemies, especially in the portion of the Republican base that seems to offer the President unwavering support? I have no doubt that Flake is a genuine and committed conservative, but in an era of increasingly ideologically sorted parties, it’s striking to see him more interested in the next president than the current one.

      

 

 

The focus of last week’s news was how many Republican Senators seemed to be in open defiance of their president. This week’s story is the president’s response to a white supremacy and Nazi rally in Charlottesville and its fallout, including the defection of high-level corporate CEOs who were on two presidential advisory councils. In fact, so many defections were happening as of Wednesday afternoon that President Trump disbanded the councils. Sort of like saying “I quit” right before you’re fired.

What’s going on here? The CEOs had options other than quitting. For instance, Walmart’s chief executive, Doug McMillon, sent an email that was subsequently published online, condemning President Trump’s failure to take an unequivocal stance against white supremacy.

There are at least three issues at play here. The first, of course, is the legitimate moral outrage that is the result of the violence that took place in Charlottesville, Virginia over the weekend and the president’s failure to clearly and cleanly condemn the Nazis and white supremacists at the core of the violence. It was no coincidence that the first person to resign was one of the few African-American CEOs in the country, Kenneth Frazier of Merck.

The second reason is, however, more practical. CEOs have to watch over their companies’ brands. And when a politician starts dropping into the “toxic” category he has the potential to hurt a company’s brand. Clearly someone like Kevin Plank, CEO of Under Armour, is not interested in the possibility of a consumer boycott.

The third reason is that, like the Republican Senators who broke with the President last week, these CEOs are not afraid of the president. He has shown little capacity to govern, as illustrated by his failure on health care and his foreign policy gaffes. Because Mr. Trump has no policy expertise it is unlikely that he will be in the middle of the details on a tax bill. Because he has no Democratic friends and has been losing Republican friends at a rapid clip, his political clout is nothing to be feared. For a group of people who pride themselves on performance and who manage down through their companies and up to their boards of directors and analysts on Wall Street, President Trump’s inability to manage his White House, let alone the federal government or Congress, has to have cost him their respect.

Some time ago, I wrote about three possible scenarios for the Trump presidency. The first was that it would, somehow, turn into a more normal presidency. That’s not happening. On Monday, Mr. Trump read a carefully worded statement strongly condemning what had happened in Charlottesville, and by Tuesday, he had undone it. So much for normalcy. The last was that he would be somehow removed, most likely through impeachment. That may still happen but it depends on what the special counsel, Robert Mueller, finds and what the House decides.

The second scenario was that power would simply move away from a dysfunctional president. That seems to be happening. Congress is actually working on a tax bill and talking about infrastructure. The CEOs who abandoned ship this week will probably stay in close touch with House and Senate leadership. The American presidency, for all its elaborate trappings, is actually a pretty weak office. The Founding Fathers built in a system of checks and balances to make sure that there were no kings running America. There are other places to get things done than the White House: Congress, State Houses, and the Courts. This seems to have eluded President Trump—he’s not the king, there are other branches of government.

      

 

 

Casting immigrants as violent criminals, refugees as terrorists, and the border as unsecured, President Trump’s rhetoric on immigration has painted a grim picture. The Center for Effective Public Management has assembled the following key statistics on immigration to examine his claims and his policies.

      

 

 

Just when President Trump needs friends in the Senate, he’s been busy starting a fight with yet another Senator. As I noted in a blog post yesterday, 12 Republican Senators have broken from their president in one way or another, but number 13 is a doozy—Senator Mitch McConnell (R-Ky).  McConnell, of course, is the Senate Majority Leader. He has led the Republican Party in the Senate, either as Majority Leader or Minority Leader, for a decade. It’s safe to assume that other Republican Senators like him or at least, respect him, and are willing to follow him—which is why Senator number 13, by my count, may well be Donald Trump’s unlucky number.

In a speech back home in Kentucky, McConnell made a fairly bland statement to the effect that President Trump is new to Washington and thus may have had “excessive expectations” about how quickly things can happen there. To that, the president fired back one of his famous early-morning tweets: “…After 7 years of hearing Repeal & Replace, why not done[sic]?” That followed a tweet by White House social media director Dan Scavino, Jr.: “More excuses. [McConnell] must have needed another 4 years – in addition to the 7 years — to repeal and replace Obamacare…”

As I argued in my initial piece, the Senate is the only body that can kick a president out of office. Trump’s habit of picking fights with senators of his own party is mind-boggling behavior for someone who is under investigation and who could very well end up impeached and in a trial in the Senate. It is yet another self-inflicted wound by a man who doesn’t seem to have read the Constitution of the United States. So here it is—Article 1: Section 3:

The Senate shall have the sole Power to try all Impeachments. When sitting for that Purpose, they shall be on Oath or Affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no Person shall be convicted without the Concurrence of two thirds of the Members present. [Emphasis added.]

It is also important for the president to remember something else critically important to the future of his presidency. If impeachment happens and the Senate trial begins, Senators will have to ask themselves two questions. First, is it politically risky to remove President Trump from office? (My colleague, John Hudak, addressed the political calculations in a Brookings podcast in May.) And second, would senators rather work with President Trump or President Pence? As the president finds new ways to make enemies in the Senate, Vice President Pence is doing a good job endearing himself to them—and keeping his mouth shut on Twitter.

      

 

 

At some point in 2019 (if not sooner) a Republican Senator may walk into the Oval Office and say to President Trump: “Mr. President, we don’t have the votes,” at which point the Trump presidency will end in a resignation or a conviction in the Senate. This scenario actually occurred forty-three years ago this summer when Republican Senator Barry Goldwater walked into the Oval Office and told Republican President Richard Nixon that they didn’t have the votes in the Senate to save his presidency. Following impeachment in the House, a trial takes place in the Senate. Conviction requires two-thirds of the Senate and by my count there are already twelve senators who have shown a willingness to take on the president when they believe he is in the wrong. If you add that to the forty-eight Democrats in the Senate (who have shown no inclination to work with this President), Donald Trump could be six votes away from conviction in the Senate.

Of course this assumes that the forces now in motion continue on their same trajectory and result in an impeachment vote. They are: the investigations into the Trump campaign; evidence of weakness in the Republican base; historical trends indicating a possible Democratic takeover in the House and, last but not least, defiance in the Senate.[1]

This last trend should be particularly worrisome for the president. Article I of the Constitution gives them the last word on the presidency. And yet instead of making friends in the Senate, Trump has done exactly the opposite.

After the Senate failed to pass his Obamacare replacement, Trump took to Twitter to denounce them as “fools” and “total quitters.” That could not have gone over well with the senators who opposed him along the way. One of them, Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine), arrived home to an impromptu gathering of supporters at the Portland airport who applauded her vote against the president’s replacement of Obamacare.

Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) was defiant after being called out by the president, saying “No second thoughts at all. None,” after her vote against the president on health care. Senator Mike Lee (R-Utah) has been none too pleased with the efforts to repeal Obamacare, insisting that it “does not go far enough in lowering premiums for middle-class families.”

But perhaps the most high profile opposition to the president came from Senator John McCain (R-Ariz.) who returned to Washington from his hospital bed to cast the dramatic and final vote killing the Republican replacement for Obamacare. After Trump, during the presidential campaign, ridiculed McCain’s seven years in a prison camp in Hanoi the Arizona senator showed he is clearly not afraid to take on the president.

Another Republican senator from the west, Dean Heller (R-Nev.) also felt free to criticize the President and vote against him on several key issues. Senators Rob Portman (R-Ohio) and Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) have been vocal in their opposition to the president’s budget—especially the proposed cuts in drug treatment programs. Capito threatened to lead “a bipartisan group of my colleagues on the Appropriations Committee and in the Senate to reject those proposed cuts.” They are part of the 18 Republican senators who voted against the Trump budget.

A second major setback for the president in the Senate was passage of a Russia sanctions bill that curtailed the president’s freedom of action in adjusting sanctions—a clear signal that an overwhelming number of senators don’t trust the president on Russia issues. As a further reflection of that inter-branch distrust, there are two bi-partisan bills in the Senate which would check the president’s ability to fire the special prosecutor Robert Mueller looking into the Russia issue. One is sponsored by Senator Thom Tillis (R. N.C.) and Senator Christopher Coons, (D-Del.) and the other by Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.). Senator Graham has gone so far as to warn the president that firing Mueller would mark “the beginning of the end of the Trump Administration.”

And then there is the man who used to be the president’s closest friend in the Senate, Jeff Sessions, who endorsed Trump when no one else would and became his Attorney General only to suffer weeks of embarrassing insults from the President. Senators such as Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) have defended Sessions against the president, warning that if Sessions is fired there will not be a confirmation hearing for another attorney general this year.

Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) has been a consistent thorn in President Trump’s side, repeatedly questioning his foreign policy appointments and insisting in an op-ed, “Make no mistake, no matter who is president or what their party is, it is my firm belief that the president needs congressional authorization for military action, as required by the Constitution.”

Finally, Senator Jeff Flake, (R-Ariz.) wrote an entire book accusing President Trump of abandoning conservative Republican principles. Flake is facing a tough re-election race, and his book Conscience of a Conservative (the same title used by his hero Senator Barry Goldwater 57 years ago), is either a Hail Mary play, a genuine attack on what Trump has done to his party, or both. In it he writes, “Never has a party so quickly or easily abandoned its core principles as my party did in the course of the 2016 campaign.”

These 12 Republicans have no fear of the president. You could probably add Senator Cory Gardner (R-Colo.), who is up for re-election in 2020 and whose state also voted for Clinton in 2016. The president needs to start making friends in the United States Senate.

[1] On average, since the Truman Era, a president’s party loses more than 28 House seats in his first midterm election. (In 2018, Democrats need to pick up 24 seats to win back the House.)

      

 

 

On a sultry hot day in the middle of summer, a standing room-only crowd gathered here in Washington to hear Molly E. Reynolds discuss her new book, Exceptions to the Rule: The Politics of Filibuster Limitations in the U.S. Senate. The topic of the book—Senate procedures adopted to reduce the hurdles a bill must pass before it becomes law—has always been of interest to political scientists and historians of Congress. But in these days of “tribal politics,” previously obscure procedural issues have taken on new importance—especially the budget procedure known as reconciliation.

And Reynolds’ book explains why.

The reconciliation process was created in 1974 as part of the overall budget reforms enacted that year. A reconciliation bill can by triggered by a budget resolution that contains instructions to specific congressional committees that tell them to develop proposals to change certain types of programs they oversee. Unlike most other legislation, reconciliation bills cannot be filibustered. For the budgetary policy priorities that are eligible to be handled through the reconciliation process, this leaves the majority party with a decision about the best way to get to what they want. Reynolds sums it up as follows: “If the majority party…is better off with the policy that reconciliation can produce, we would expect the majority leader to initiate the process. The leader’s expectations about the different policies that can be achieved, however, are shaped by the preferences of the other actors who are powerful in each instance.”

In today’s tumultuous congressional politics, the decision to use reconciliation is basically an indication that the party in charge wants to go it alone, in part because they know it is unlikely that a filibuster can be overcome on a key piece of legislation. This is what happened in the Senate’s consideration of their seven year-old campaign pledge to repeal Obamacare. Senate Republicans chose to use reconciliation, betting that they would get no Democratic votes and that they could hold onto nearly everyone in their caucus and that, if needed, Vice President Pence could break a tie in their favor. In other words, they bet they would lose only two votes—not three. But in the end, they lost three votes, with Senator John McCain making a dramatic comeback from his hospital bed, and the measure died.

So what’s next? As Reynolds teaches us—watch the procedural choices. As Congress turns to tax reform, Majority Leader McConnell has signaled that he will use reconciliation again. This means he expects to be able to muster 50 votes for a Republican-only bill; a conclusion reinforced by a letter from 45 Democratic Senators said they would only cooperate with Republicans if the tax plan did not add to the deficit or cut the annual tax bill of the richest one percent of taxpayers.

Given the drama around the failure to repeal Obamacare, reconciliation is getting a lot of airtime, but Reynolds’s book discusses other “exceptions to the rule” that are also central to the current political drama in Washington. Congress has also been known to pass legislation that gives it a say in how a president is implementing the law in order to, as Reynolds writes, “increase Congress’s ability to oversee the actions of the executive.”

This week Congress sent a bill to the President increasing the already stern sanctions on Russia. In it they included a provision that would allow congressional review of the president’s attempt to ease sanctions, including some special procedures smoothing the path of a legislative response to the president’s decision. The White House objected to this provision in a signing statement, calling it an unconstitutional restriction of the President’s powers to negotiate with foreign powers.

But the bill passed both houses of Congress by overwhelming numbers, making it unwise for the president to veto (as Congress had more than enough votes to override), and so he signed the bill.

This humiliation was overshadowed by the health care drama, but it is, perhaps, more significant for President Trump in the long run. The promise to repeal Obamacare started in 2010 and pre-dated Trump’s presidential campaign. While failure to repeal is probably more of a Republican Congressional failure than a Trump failure, Russia is 100 percent a Trump problem. By including restrictions on the president’s actions in the sanctions bill, both Democrats and Republicans have indicated that, when it comes to Russia, they do not trust the President—and that could have ramifications as the many investigations of his campaign unfold.

      

 

 

Elaine Kamarck, senior fellow in Governance Studies and founding director of the Center for Effective Public Management, discusses President Trump’s decision to forbid transgender individuals from serving in the military and considers previous rulings on inclusion in the armed forces.

Show notes:

Why Presidents Fail And How They Can Succeed Again

The art of the political deal

When will Donald Trump start looking like a president?

Subscribe to Brookings podcasts here or on iTunes, send feedback email to bcp@brookings.edu, and follow us and tweet us at @policypodcasts on Twitter.

5 on 45 is part of the Brookings Podcast Network.

      

 

 

After seven years of promises that they would repeal and replace “Obamacare,” a government totally controlled by Republicans is having a very hard time making it happen. A vote to debate the GOP alternative passed by just one vote in the Senate—and required Vice President Pence to play tiebreaker. Despite the Republicans’ narrow victory on the Motion to Proceed, the debate ahead doesn’t guarantee eventual passage of their health care law.

So what’s going on here? What are the lessons?

One of the biggest lessons is that polling rarely tells the real story in politics. And politicians who think it can are bound to find themselves in trouble.

To understand the pitfalls of polling, let’s go all the way back to 1978, before cell phones and the ability to block calls made polling even tougher. In that year, a political scientist named George Bishop and his colleagues at the University of Cincinnati conducted a poll asking citizens the following: “Some people say that the 1975 Public Affairs Act should be repealed. Do you agree or disagree?” Some people responded that they had no opinion on the question. The others were about evenly split.

In 1995, the Washington Post conducted a second poll on whether the 1975 Public Affairs Act should be repealed. This time pollsters asked the question a bit differently. “President Clinton said the 1975 Public Affairs Act should be repealed.” When asked whether they agreed or disagreed, 43 percent of the public expressed an opinion. Democrats agreed with Clinton on repeal and Republicans didn’t.

However, there was never any such a thing as the 1975 Public Affairs Act.  Bishop and his colleagues invented it to demonstrate something that became the title of his book: The Illusion of Public Opinion.

Let’s face it. In the 21^st century, we are in love with data. And yet, so much of what we rely on from polling is just an illusion—one that gets repeatedly shattered. So let’s go back to polling on the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare. Much of the opposition to it was an illusion. As we saw, when Clinton’s name was added to the question about the fake 1975 Public Affairs Act, it distorted the answers in a predictably partisan manner. This has also been true since the beginning of the Affordable Care Act. On the eve of its implementation (September 2013), 37 percent of those polled disapproved of the Affordable Care Act, while 46 percent of those polled disapproved of Obamacare.

In addition and from the beginning, more people liked parts of the law than the law as a whole. For instance, with the exception of the individual mandate, most people, including Republicans, liked the individual provisions of the law.

Taken together, this polling should have been a warning to Republicans, especially once the individual provisions of the law were actually implemented and the law’s popularity skyrocketed. Today, a large number of Americans support individual provisions in the law. One journalist commenting on the polling said, “Apparently all it took for Obamacare to become popular was for Obama to leave office.” The following graph drives that point home:

The point is that in politics, data is a very tricky business. The political world is littered with debris from data that turns out to be fundamentally flawed. The most spectacular example is the Hillary Clinton campaign. Led by young Robby Mook, a thoroughly modern campaign manager, i.e., someone in love with data, the Hillary campaign relied on its models even while other, more traditional politicians were telling them they were in trouble.

Now, as the Trump presidency careens from one embarrassment to another, we are repeatedly told that the Trump base is solid and that therefore, the president is safe from the normal punishments the electorate doles out to politicians. And yet, three political scientists at Emory University have called into question whether or not Trump is defying the laws of political gravity. Most journalists look at the presidential approval numbers among Republicans and conclude that the president is okay with his base. But a new paper covered by the NYT’s Upshot column suggests that the conventional wisdom is missing something critical.

B. Pablo Montagnes, Zachary Peskowitz and Joshua McCrain contend that you can’t just look at presidential approval ratings among Republicans when the Republican party itself appears to be losing support. They argue that “…when presidents are losing support, the naïve partisan approval rate can overestimate the approval rate among presidential co-partisans because of compositional change.” In other words, the four-point decline in the number of people identifying with the Republican party since the 2016 election most likely reflects the fact that Republicans who disapprove of the president aren’t too fond of calling themselves Republicans, resulting in high approval ratings among a smaller group of people.

These researchers showed once again that politicians can’t count on polls to tell them the whole story. The Republican party has staked their political fortunes on repealing the Affordable Care Act, and President Trump has repeatedly claimed that he could do better than Obama. The cheering section for repeal might have shrunk too much for them to cash in now. The Republican health care law may still pass and Trump may still right his wobbling presidency, but to all who think data is the answer: beware.

      

 

 

Elaine Kamarck, senior fellow in Governance Studies and director of the Center for Effective Public Management, discusses her new report (with John Hudak and Christine Stenglein) “Hitting the wall: On immigration, campaign promises clash with policy realities” and addresses the costs associated with implementing Trump’s proposed policies.

Also in this episode: David Wessel, director of the Hutchins Center on Fiscal & Monetary Policy, explains productivity growth in our regular “Wessel’s Economic Update” segment.

Show notes:

Hitting the wall: On immigration, campaign promises clash with policy realities

Why the wall on the Mexican border won’t happen

Trade, security, and the U.S.-Mexico relationship

Why Presidents Fail And How They Can Succeed Again

Ways to listen to this episode:

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• Direct download (mp3)

Thanks to audio producer Gaston Reboredo with assistance from Mark Hoelscher, and to producer Vanessa Sauter.  Additional support comes from Jessica Pavone, Eric Abalahin, Rebecca Viser, David Nassar, and Richard Fawal.

Subscribe to Brookings podcasts here or on Apple Podcasts, send feedback email to BCP@Brookings.edu, and follow us and tweet us at @policypodcasts on Twitter.

The Brookings Cafeteria is a part of the Brookings Podcast Network.

      

 

 

Donald Trump rode to the presidency on immigration issues. During the Republican primaries and then again during the general election campaign, Trump’s most loyal followers erupted in cheers whenever he mentioned getting tough on unauthorized immigration. The list of ways he would “get tough” was long: building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico, ending the “catch and release” program, instituting zero tolerance for criminal aliens, hiring more border agents, ending funding for sanctuary cities, removing people who overstay their visas, instituting “extreme vetting” for refugees and making sure unauthorized immigrants don’t get any government benefits.

Now, President Trump must deliver on his promises to protect the country from unauthorized immigrants. To accomplish this goal, he will largely have to work through the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). DHS is the third largest Cabinet department and is composed of 240,000 employees, the bulk of which are located in two enormous agencies: Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). These agencies are significant in size and scope. ICE employs over 20,000 individuals and maintains a budget of $6.2 billion; CBP has a staff of just over 60,000 with a budget of $13.5 billion. The fate of President Trump’s campaign promises to his base rests largely with these agencies.

In this paper, John Hudak, Elaine Kamarck, and Christine Stenglein examine specific elements of the president’s immigration agenda and DHS’s path toward implementation. Taking into account the policy, personnel, financial, and logistical realities facing the department, the authors demonstrate just how difficult—if not impossible—it will be for the president to keep his promises related to immigration. Some of the specific and challenging realities identified and discussed in the paper include:

• In order to build a border wall, the federal government would have to exercise eminent domain—a deeply unpopular practice among conservatives.
• By initiating a massive public works project (construction of a border wall), demand for additional labor may unintentionally increase the number of unauthorized individuals entering the country.
• The president has proposed adding 15,000 new agents to CBP and ICE. Such an increase would require a tremendous pool of applicants to agencies that already have difficulty attracting applicants, let alone qualified applicants—most people who apply for jobs at CBP fail to meet the minimum qualifications.
• The cost of hiring 15,000 new agents would result in an estimated 14.7 percent increase in the CBP budget and an astonishing 60.8 percent increase in the ICE budget.
• The U.S. refugee admission process is a long, complex, multi-agency process that admits only a small percentage of the world’s refugees. Iraqis and Syrians face an even more intense evaluation process than those from other countries. It is unclear exactly what more President Trump could do to make the refugee vetting system more “extreme.”

Although Donald Trump has painted a dire portrait of a nation overrun by “illegal immigrants” and dangerous refugees, well-documented trends examined in this paper paint a different portrait and illustrate the political risks associated with the president’s campaign rhetoric.

Read the full paper here.