Things went from bad to slightly worse between Donald Trump and Republican leadership in Congress Thursday. It started—as it always seems to—with a series of presidential tweets.
That “V.A.” bill is a law (the Veterans Appeals Improvement and Modernization Act) Trump signed this week. A Republican Senate source reminds me that Republican leader Mitch McConnell reportedly floated the idea of attaching a veterans bill to the debt ceiling increase last month, before the August recess.
House speaker Paul Ryan told CNBC in an interview Thursday dismissed the idea that Trump’s tweets were a shot at him, saying the veterans bill idea just couldn’t work. “That’s an option we were looking at but the VA deadline came up and we weren’t able to do that then," Ryan said. The idea went nowhere, my Senate source says, because House Freedom Caucus members—the most hawkish on the debt—hated the idea of having to choose between raising the debt ceiling or voting against a bill to help veterans.
The question about the VA bill and the debt ceiling misses the bigger signal from Trump’s tweets: He’s blaming the coming “mess”—Congress will return from its recess needing address the debt ceiling, the budget, and the legislative agenda—on Republican leadership. That’s a short-term political no-brainer for Trump—even among Republicans, the GOP-controlled Congress has a 17 percent approval rating in the latest Quinnipiac poll. And if and when little gets done, Trump will have had built a case over several months that Republicans in Congress are the ones putting up the roadblocks to his agenda.
An unproductive 2017 leaves the Republicans in an even more difficult place for the 2018 midterms. And then there is in Trump’s antagonism toward incumbents like Jeff Flake in seats that could go Democratic next year and his penchant for creating headaches for the likes of McConnell and Ryan on a near-daily basis.
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05.15.2024