The president has a very real reason for his unhappiness.<\/b>
\nPresident Donald Trump is increasingly putting the blame on Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell for his complete lack of legislative victories so far this year.
On Thursday, the president told reporters that he was \u201cvery disappointed in Mitch, \u201d said that the Senate\u2019s failure to pass a health bill by one vote was \u201ca disgrace, \u201d and intimated that if the health, tax, or infrastructure bills all failed, the majority leader should perhaps step down.
And earlier in the week, Trump tweeted that McConnell should \u201cget back to work\u201d at passing his agenda, and complained the majority leader \u201cscreamed Repeal & Replace for 7 years\u201d but \u201ccouldn\u2019 t get it done.\u201d
It was, however, McConnell who inadvertently kick-started this feud. \u201cOur new president has of course not been in this line of work before, and I think had excessive expectations about how quickly things happen in the democratic process, \u201d McConnell said Monday.
According to CNN, this led to a call between McConnell and Trump Wednesday about the path forward on health care \u2014 a call that seems to have left the president unsatisfied. (\u201cObviously, there is some frustration, \u201d White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said.)
Now, it\u2019s not yet clear whether this week\u2019s sniping will devolve into full-on conflict between the president and his party\u2019s leadership in one chamber of Congress. McConnell has, after all, perfected the art of studiously ignoring Trump tweets. Trump could also realize that he has far more to lose than to gain from antagonizing McConnell and other Senate Republicans.
Still, Trump\u2019s unhappiness here has a very real cause: As has happened with many prior presidents, his dreams of sweeping legislative wins have run up against the cold reality of the United States Senate. And his choice about how to deal with this will have major implications for his administration\u2019s future.
Months ago, back before Donald Trump was sworn in as president, I argued that the US Senate would determine whether he\u2019 d succeed or fail, legislatively.
So far, it\u2019s made him fail.
The Republican majority in the House of Representatives has passed conservative bill after conservative bill \u2014 from the repeal and replacement of Obamacare to the repeal of Dodd-Frank to a series of deregulatory and tort reform bills to immigration enforcement bills \u2014 only to see them go nowhere in the Senate.
The biggest reason for this is the infamous Senate filibuster, which effectively requires a 60-vote supermajority to get a new bill through the chamber. Since Republicans only have 52 seats, that means they need to win over eight Democrats \u2014 a tall order for anything controversial. As a result, McConnell hasn\u2019 t even bothered to take up most of those House-passed bills, since he knows they\u2019 re doomed to defeat and would only waste precious Senate floor time.
But it\u2019s not only about the filibuster. For nominations and other procedures that require a simple majority, Republicans have to hold 50 of their 52 senators together, which is itself a difficult task. And senators\u2019 six-year terms make them less responsive to short-term political or presidential pressure.
For the health bill in particular, Republicans couldn\u2019 t even get that majority needed for the special budget reconciliation process. McConnell\u2019s final Hail Mary \u2014 a \u201cskinny repeal\u201d bill he begged his members to pass to keep the process alive \u2014 fell short because of three Republican defections. All of the more fleshed-out Republican health bills, however, were several more votes short even than that.
Overall, Trump has now spent more than seven months in office with no major legislative accomplishments to show for it, and the Senate is the main reason why. So for months, he\u2019s called on the chamber to change its rules to eliminate the legislative filibuster, to no apparent avail. And now he\u2019s turned his ire on McConnell personally.
As with any same-party president and Senate majority leader, Trump and McConnell have powerful incentives to work together rather than fight with each other \u2014 which, for much of the year, they\u2019 ve managed to do.
Trump needs McConnell to get his nominees confirmed and to help him achieve legislative victories. McConnell wants Trump to keep representing Republican Party priorities in his choice of nominees and his agenda generally, and knows the president remains extremely popular among GOP base voters and in the conservative media.
Perhaps most importantly, the two men have linked electoral fortunes and both want the Republican Party to do well in the 2018 midterms \u2014 McConnell so he can keep his Senate majority, and Trump so his administration won\u2019 t be dogged by Democrat-led investigations.
So McConnell has been extremely hesitant to criticize Trump this year \u2014 he often seems to be pretending he lives in a world in which Trump has no scandals and no Twitter account. Meanwhile, Trump has appointed McConnell\u2019s wife, Elaine Chao, as secretary of transportation and has generally been happy to defer to McConnell\u2019s seemingly superior wisdom on legislative matters. Life is easier for both of them if they\u2019 re getting along.
And for now, despite these recent presidential tweets and statements, they still do appear to be mostly getting along. For instance, just days ago Trump did McConnell a solid by endorsing Luther Strange, the candidate McConnell strongly prefers in the Republican special election primary for Alabama\u2019s Senate seat. And on Thursday afternoon, the White House appointed a former McConnell aide as chair of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.
But President Trump has, of course, proven willing to pick unwise political fights in the past, and may well do so here too by escalating this conflict further. Indeed, Politico\u2019s Josh Dawsey reports that Trump seems increasingly willing to throw congressional Republicans under the bus in an attempt to preserve his \u201coutsider\u201d reputation \u2014 something that could prove disastrous for GOP base motivation in the 2018 midterms.
Now, longtime followers of Republican congressional dysfunction may be getting some d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu from all this, recalling how a small group of conservative critics in the House of Representatives forced Speaker John Boehner from office in 2015.
Yet something like that is far tougher to pull off in the Senate, because there\u2019s a difference in how party leaders in each chamber are chosen.
The speaker of the House is elected by the full House of Representatives. Therefore, to win the position on the first ballot, a candidate generally needs overwhelming support from his or her own party (because the opposition party will vote against him or her) . As a result, a small group of defectors from the speaker candidate\u2019s own party could block him or her from winning a majority.
The Senate majority leader, by contrast, is chosen in a closed-door, partisan election. Only the majority party votes in it. That means that a handful of defectors can\u2019 t humiliate McConnell in a leadership election on the floor. Instead, more than half of his GOP senators would have to turn against him in private.
That\u2019s very difficult to imagine. Any senators \u2014 who prize their independence and the separation of powers \u2014 would likely recoil from a presidential attempt to depose their leader. And for the most part, despite occasional gripes, Republican senators like and respect McConnell\u2019s leadership, and view him as effectively representing their priorities. There are no rumblings of a potential challenge to him, and instead public declarations of support:
Beyond that, many Republican senators simply don\u2019 t like or respect Donald Trump very much. And given Trump\u2019s own unpopularity, they could well calculate that the better long-term play is to stick with McConnell.
And yet if the majority leader does want to stay in the Senate a while longer, the president really could make that a lot more difficult.
McConnell has represented the deep red state of Kentucky for more than three decades. He\u2019s essentially an institution there, and has often been thought to be politically bulletproof (he easily batted away challenges in both the primary and general elections in 2014) .
But Donald Trump is also a very popular figure in Kentucky. And a sustained campaign of criticism from Trump is the type of thing that might be able to badly hurt McConnell\u2019s popularity among his constituents.
If McConnell chooses to run for another term, he\u2019 ll be up in 2020 (when he\u2019 ll be 78 years old) . Trump could, theoretically, back a primary challenger to him that year. That would be the equivalent of nuclear warfare in politics, and would surely provoke retaliation from McConnell (who, even if the challenge were successful, would still be in the Senate until the end of 2020) .
But even if Trump doesn\u2019 t formally endorse a primary challenge, if he continues to criticize McConnell, he would hurt McConnell\u2019s image among the GOP base and foment criticism of the leader in media outlets like Fox News and Breitbart \u2014 which could well spur a more plausible primary challenge anyway.
McConnell has a keen sense of where the political winds are blowing, and he would surely very much prefer to keep his relations with the president positive.
But it\u2019s unclear whether there\u2019s more McConnell actually can do to get anything passed. He will surely argue that he tried his best on health reform, and that he simply can\u2019 t convince his senators to get rid of the filibuster. And he\u2019 ll try to get Trump to accept that he can\u2019 t get everything he wants.
The question will be whether the president listens.<\/p>\n

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