By Sheeva Azma
One cool thing about my life’s work is that it has included serving as a check on executive power.
Just a few weeks before Trump shutdown 1.0, in early January 2018, I wrote about the role of Congress in President Trump’s first administration — that was just a couple of weeks before the government would shut down for the longest time it ever had. I had just interned in Congress a few months prior, from January to March 2017, which is something I will never stop telling people about, because it was just so incredible. You can read a whole essay about it here.
Below is my own analysis of the legislative politics of Trump 1.0 here, back when I was a lowly freelance writer with a love of politics trying to make sense of the political world I had newly joined.
For anyone who somehow ignored all the politics of early 2017, the beginning of the Trump administration was plagued with conflicts between the House and Senate, specifically within the GOP, and the executive branch. Despite the fact that Trump addressed both chambers of Congress within the first few weeks of taking office, the president was still learning how to play the rules of the political game (just like me at the time, but in a different branch, I guess).
Trump had no idea how to work with Congress when he first took office. His supporters’ most loved policy platforms from the 2016 election – building a wall, eliminating Obamacare, immigration bans, etc. – were largely too expensive and grandiose, and in some cases, unpopular to Congress and even his own party, who constantly spoke of the usurping of power of the executive branch.
Trump’s surprise victory and lack of political experience made him an anti-establishment figure. Trump did have a handful of legislative allies who had endorsed him during the election (for example, Jeff Sessions), but these people were mostly promoted to Cabinet positions after Trump’s election. This made making legislative inroads at the White House very difficult. Paul Ryan and other House and Senate leaders — on both sides of the aisle, but surprisingly, mostly within the GOP — at first found Trump’s early legislation to be either bad policy or an overreach of executive power, or both. I think this is why Trump decided to, or perhaps was forced to, govern mostly through executive orders in the early days – even on issues typically formally handled by Congress such as immigration and healthcare. Trump was seeking to put Congress in a lesser position than the executive branch, when really the two are of equal importance and even of equal power in the American political process.
In our office, we worked very hard to undo the bad legislation and the effects of some of the executive orders passed down by the new administration in the first month or so. In many ways, in those early days, we were successful – probably owing to the fact that Trump was still learning how to work with Congress and our office worked in a bipartisan fashion to rally support from ultra-conservative House members such as the Freedom Caucus. In other ways, however, the Senate and House Democrats were not successful at all – such as in confirming Cabinet appointments. I was out on a break getting pizza a few blocks away from the Capitol Building when Mike Pence arrived to cast a quick tie-breaking vote confirming the super-controversial Betsy DeVos as Secretary of Education. Oops!
I feel like most people have put Trump 1.0 out of mind, but there are many lessons to be learned from the differences between Trump 1.0 and Trump 2.0 — indeed, they are like two different worlds, politically! If I had to choose one takeaway message to teach you from it all, I would say that one should not underestimate the power of learning how the political establishment works. You can learn and become a political insider, too. Check out our free resources!
Fancy Comma, LLC 