Tag Archives: divided government

national news

Trump v. Pelosi: May the better person win

Donald Trump apparently has difficulty with strong, opinionated women. I make that presumption based on how he reacts to their challenges to him. He resorts to insulting them with varying levels of disgusting references.

So it is against that backdrop that the president of the United States is entering a new era in his so-far futile attempt at learning how to govern. The Woman of the House will be Nancy Pelosi, the California Democrat who is returning to her post as speaker of the House, one half of the legislative branch of the federal government.

I have this sneaking, gnawing suspicion that the president is not going to do well as he battles Pelosi over legislative priorities.

You see, Pelosi is something that her immediate predecessor Paul Ryan is not. She is no patsy who is likely to roll over to demands from (a) the White House and (b) rebellious members of her own partisan caucus. Indeed, Ryan’s predecessor as speaker, John Boehner, quit the speakership and the House because he got fed up with the TEA Party wing of the GOP House caucus.

Pelosi certainly faces her own challenges from the far-left-wing base of her Democratic caucus. Do you think she’s going to knuckle under to its every demand? My gut tells me “no.” She is a stern leader, but one who also knows how to schmooze malcontents.

Trump possesses none of those political skills. He barks insults, makes demands and little happens. He gets on his Twitter feed and fires off policy pronouncements, surprising his own key aides and Cabinet. He calls himself a razzle-dazzle dealmaker, but couldn’t cobble together a deal to keep the government functioning even when he and his Republican Party controlled the entire Congress and the White House.

That’s is changing, effective today.

Nancy Pelosi will take the speaker’s gavel. Democrats will manage the legislative flow from the House. She will do battle when necessary with her GOP House “friends” as well as those who still control matters at the other end of the Capitol Building, the Senate.

Donald Trump will be whipsawed by the back-and-forth in the House.

Checks and balances, anyone?

Here we go!

national news

Get ready for plenty of congressional push back

I am willing to concede that I would feel differently if we had a president I supported, someone whose policy I endorsed. That’s not the case with Donald J. Trump.

Having made that declaration, I look forward to the president getting some much-needed push back from half of the legislative branch of the federal government.

The U.S. House of Representatives will flip from Republican to Democratic control in a couple of days. Nancy Pelosi will become the next speaker of the House. Democrats will ascend to committee chairmanships. They, not the GOP, will control the legislative flow. Democrats’ voices will be heard more clearly and plainly than Republicans’ voices on Capitol Hill.

What does this mean for the president? It means he will be unable to dictate to the House which bills to introduce. It means he faces the likelihood of subpoenas being issued for his key aides, perhaps Cabinet officials — maybe even a member or two of his immediately family. They’ll be summoned to testify before House committees on a whole array of issues that have bedeviled the Trump administration since it took office nearly two years ago.

I refer, of course, to “The Russia Thing.”

The House’s first order of business will be to push the Trump administration and their Senate colleagues — who still are run by the GOP — to find a way out of this ridiculous stalemate, the one that has shut down part of the government. Too many families, roughly 800,000 or so of them, have been deprived of income during the Christmas holiday. Just as importantly, too many families have been denied access to key government services to which they entitled.

Donald Trump entered the political world after living in an environment where he called the shots. He didn’t have that luxury even when he and his fellow Republicans controlled the entire federal government.

He really won’t have it now that Democrats take control of the House of Representatives.

The president is entering a new — and for him, uncharted — world when the next Congress takes its oath office.

So are the rest of us. Thank goodness.

national news, political news, State news

‘W,’ Clinton showed us how divided government can work

Since I’ve already noted the arrival in Washington this coming January of a form of “divided government,” I feel the need to offer a two brief examples of how it works.

One party controls one branch of government, the other party controls the other. Such a circumstance doesn’t guarantee gridlock or incessant bickering, bitching and backbiting.

Donald J. Trump is going to report for work in January with Democrats controlling the U.S. House of Representatives; his fellow Republicans will retain control of the Senate. It won’t be a fun time to govern. It doesn’t need to be this way.

I give you two examples, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton.

Before he became president, Bush was governor of Texas. He was elected in 1994. The Republican governor took office with a solidly Democratic Legislature in power. Unlike the man who now is president, he didn’t insult, defame or denigrate legislative Democrats. He learned quickly how to forge alliances — even friendships — with those on the other side.

Two men became his BFFs — before the term became widely accepted. They were the late Lt. Gov. Bob Bullock, the crotchety, curmudgeonly Democrat who controlled the Texas Senate and House Speaker Pete Laney of Hale Center, the affable Democrat who ran the People’s House.

They formed a trio who respected each other’s skill and who managed to notch some notable legislative victories among them. They sought to give public school teachers a pay raise and increase test scores among students, they dipped into the state’s budget surplus to enact a tax cut, they furthered the push to invest in renewable energy resources.

Two Democrats learned to work with a Republican governor who, after all, had defeated a Democratic incumbent, the late Ann Richards, in a bitter campaign.

But “W” didn’t denigrate his legislative foes. He worked with them, understanding the need to cooperate when possible. To their credit, Bullock and Laney  understood precisely the same thing.

Bill Clinton watched the Democrats lose control of Congress in 1994, two years after his election to his first term as president. Newt Gingrich became the speaker of the House, Bob Dole rose to majority leader in the Senate.

Did the president let that loss of congressional power dissuade him? Hardly. He, Gingrich and Dole managed over time to work together to accomplish a budgetary miracle: a balanced federal budget, the first one of them in about 30 years.

They understood each other, just as “W” understood his legislative partners in Austin.

What lies ahead for the next Congress and the president as they embark on the second half of the president’s term? The indications are that it’s going to be a rough and rocky ride. It doesn’t help that Donald Trump doesn’t have the political chops needed to navigate and manage a political agenda with discipline and finesse. Nor does it help that he has bruised and battered so many congressmen and women with his insults and nasty pronouncements on Twitter.

Oh, and he’s that got that “Russia thing” hanging over his head.

I wish it were different. I fear we’re headed down the slipperiest of slopes. It need not be this way.

national news, political news

There goes ‘divided government’

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Republicans in Congress used to extol the virtues of “divided government,” when they controlled Capitol Hill while a Democrat and his family were residing down the street in the White House.

Guess what. Divided government is about to be tossed into the crapper. On Jan. 20, a Republican — Donald J. Trump — will take the oath of office as the 45th president of the United States; meanwhile, the GOP will retain control of Congress, although with slightly diminished majorities.

But we’re going to have one party in charge of everything.

Oh, boy!

The last time one party ran the whole show was from 2009 to 2011. Democrats were the big dog. What did they do when they ran the government? Oh, the 111th Congress — along with the president — managed to save the nation from total economic collapse, despite many Republicans’ best efforts to stop them.

Then the GOP took over both congressional chambers and began obstructing just about everything the Democratic president, Barack Obama, sought to do.

What lies in store for the new GOP president and his fellow Republicans who run Congress? That might depend on how well Democrats learned the obstructionist practices of their “friends on the other side of the aisle.”

Trump intends to do a few things that are anathema to Democrats. He wants to repeal environmental protection laws; he wants to toss aside the Affordable Care Act — although he now says he hopes to save the strongest portions of it; he intends to “build a wall” across our southern border; he hopes to ban Muslims from entering the United States of America.

I believe Trump once also said he intends to make department store owners force their employees to wish their customers a “Merry Christmas” during the holidays. Government overreach? Uh, yeah!

In each of these cases, I am all for a little obstruction. I trust Democrats have learned their lessons well from their Republican colleagues.