The congressional GOP is AWOL.
.. Donald Trump is on the hunt for a scapegoat, and he has settled on Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell.
Trump presented himself to the voters as a master negotiator and dealmaker, but that of course was the character he played on television, not the actual man. Trump cannot sit down with congressional Republicans — much less a bipartisan coalition — and negotiate a deal on health-care reform. The reasons for this are straightforward:
There is disagreement among Republicans about what policies should be forwarded, and President Trump does not know what he himself thinks about any of them, because he does not think anything about any of them, because he doesn’t know about them. Trump does not do details — he does adjectives. He wants a “terrific” health-care system. So does Bernie Sanders, but the two of them don’t agree on what that means in practice.
.. In his decades as a vocal NAFTA critic, he has never offered in any specific detail any proposal for reforming any particular provision of NAFTA, and he has on occasion made it clear that he does not know what is actually in the accord.
.. His public statements about tax reform have been all over the map, out-lefting Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren with his attacks on the carried-interest treatment of some financial firms’ income and then doing his best impersonation (which is a very poor one) of Larry Kudlow preaching the gospel of pro-growth tax cuts. He once reversed and then reverse-reversed himself on H-1B visas over the course of a few hours.
.. The wily McConnell and the steadfast Ryan were fine and effective opposition leaders. But they are not in the opposition any more.
.. The British dumped Winston Churchill after the war, considering him a wartime leader unsuited to the needs of peacetime. If McConnell and Ryan do not want to be considered opposition leaders — and if the Republican party does not want to be considered an opposition party incapable of government — then now is the time to give us all reason to think otherwise.
.. McConnell probably is safe for now, mainly because he has a job no one else wants. He is one of the few Republicans in the Senate not possessed by the delusion that he is fated to be president. If one of those promising young men bruised by the ugly 2016 Republican presidential primaries should ever come to his senses and decide that Senate majority leader is actually a pretty good job, things might go differently.
.. Marco Rubio actually has the political skills and personal ability to be a real leader in the Senate, but he doesn’t seem quite convinced that’s worth doing.
Trump swallows a bitter pill on Russia
Moscow is furious at new sanctions as the White House complains of Congressional interference in foreign policy.
President Donald Trump plans to sign a congressional law restricting his ability to lift sanctions on Russia, the White House said Friday night, in a severe blow to his budding relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin.
.. “Congress would have overriden the veto, and all it will do is fuel the fire of the Russia scandal in Washington.”
.. The timing of the announcement—late on a summer Friday, amid headlines about White House staff turmoil—ensured relatively little coverage for what analysts called a major development in U.S.-Russia relations.
.. It requires Trump to justify in writing any effort to ease sanctions on Russia and mandates an automatic Congressional review of any such move.
That severely limits Trump’s ability to cut a deal with Putin, whose top priority is the rollback of U.S. and European sanctions against his economy and associates.
Mueller Is Trumping Congress
Special prosecutors corrupt; independent counsels corrupt absolutely.
The main headlines of the past week—Is Donald Trump attempting to undermine Mr. Mueller? Will Trump Fire Mueller?—all speak to the challenge a special prosecutor poses to the constitutional authority of the president.
Far less scrutiny has been devoted to the challenge Mr. Mueller poses to the authority of the legislative branch. In this case, ironically, the challenge stems less from the aggressiveness of the special prosecutor than from the meekness of Congress. In between their public tributes to Mr. Mueller’s sterling character, too many in Congress seem to worry more about how they might be affecting his investigation than about what his investigation might be doing to theirs.
.. Mr. Mueller, an unelected appointee, had the Trump memos written by former FBI Director James Comey even as the FBI was refusing to release them to the elected representatives of the American people.
.. Here a May 2017 review from the Congressional Research Service is illuminating. Although witnesses before a congressional committee do have the right to invoke the Fifth Amendment, the House can get a court order directing the witness to testify so long as the threat of prosecution for that testimony is removed. Mr. Mueller might not like this, but that shouldn’t stop Congress from using a power designed to extract information rather than punish.
.. Even more intriguing, sensitive or privileged client information is not exempt from congressional subpoena. This might prove especially fascinating in the case of former Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort, who has had business dealings with a pro-Russia Ukrainian political party. Ditto for Glenn Simpson, whose Fusion GPS commissioned what became the Christopher Steele Russian dossier on behalf of political clients.
.. Not to mention the many other powers of Congress, including impeachment and the purse. The point is, Congress has many ways to get to the bottom of the Russia story and hold people accountable—if it so chooses.
.. In Anderson v. Dunn (1821), the Supreme Court correctly noted that without the power to imprison those found in contempt, Congress would be “exposed to every indignity and interruption, that rudeness, caprice or even conspiracy may meditate against it.” Two centuries later, the different examples of Ms. Lerner and Mr. Mueller both point to a brand new indignity—which Congress inflicts on itself when it is too timid to assert its own powers.
Trump Seems Much Better at Branding Opponents Than Marketing Policies
Donald J. Trump, the master brander, has never found quite the right selling point for his party’s health care plan.
He has promised “great healthcare,” “truly great healthcare,” “a great plan” and health care that “will soon be great.” But for a politician who has shown remarkable skill distilling his arguments into compact slogans — “fake news,” “witch hunt,” “Crooked Hillary” — those health care pitches have fallen far short of the kind of sharp, memorable refrain that can influence how millions of Americans interpret news in Washington.
.. Mr. Trump is much better at branding enemies than policies. And he expends far more effort mocking targetsthan promoting items on his agenda... The word choice is memorable. But it’s also the repetition that’s important. In its simplicity and consistency, that message is textbook marketing.. Marketing research also suggests that the more we’re exposed to a belief or a brand, the more likely we are to believe that others share or use it. And so by repeating the slogan, Mr. Trump also feeds the notion that Mrs. Clinton is widely believed to be crooked... Psychologists have another term for what Mr. Trump does here that is so effective. He “essentializes” Mrs. Clinton and his other opponents, like Lyin’ Ted Cruz... This is the important difference between using a descriptive verb (“Ted Cruz tells lies”) and a noun label (“Lyin’ Ted”). Such minor manipulations of language, psychological research shows, can convey much more deep-seated, stable and central characteristics about a subject. And these labels preclude other identities... The only thing you need to know about Marco Rubio, according to Mr. Trump’s branding efforts, is that he lacks stature. And that’s a deeply embedded quality that the man can never change:.. But the affirmative case for the Republican alternative? None of his language has stuck. When Mr. Trump has tried to brand his party’s health care reform efforts in a positive light, his messages have largely taken the form of unmemorable promises about “better” or “great” health care in the future:.. If any word kept coming up — and this one’s not from his Twitter feed — it was his reference to the House bill as “mean.”.. debates over whether the ban should be called a ban... Mr. Trump for the most part hasn’t done that. He has used the tactic to promote himself: He is, above all, “a winner.” The endless repetition and emotional simplicity seemed to work during the campaign as he promoted the WALL (not a fence!). But now that he’s president, what if he cheered the Republican health plan as doggedly as he scorned “Crooked Hillary”? What if he devoted as much effort to defining the stakes of tax reform as he has spent branding his antagonists in the news media?.. One possibility is that these subjects just don’t interest him as much. Or perhaps it’s much harder to condense the case for complex policies — codified in hundreds of pages of legislation and legalese, devised through countless compromises and trade-offs — down to the size of a hashtag. Either way, one of Mr. Trump’s most remarkable skills hasn’t proved an asset on Capitol Hill.