By Alexis Simendinger & Kristina Karisch | The Hill
President-elect Trump learned a few things about Congress during his first term in the White House. The question is which lessons he applies next year to his heady confidence that Republican majorities in the House and Senate will do his bidding.
In 2017, when GOP lawmakers enacted major tax changes, they handed Trump a victory. When their regional discord over public-private investments in toll roads, bridges and airports became clear, Trump’s anticipatory boasts about “infrastructure reform” curdled into a four-year running joke about the opposite.
Trump has promised Washington his own version of “shock and awe” revolution, but the nation’s capital, even under one-party rule, knows a million ways to grind the gears. There is a reason the Senate is referred to as the “cooling saucer.”
Trump has frequently denounced the late Arizona Republican Sen. John McCain for rejecting a House-passed measure in 2017 that would have permanently repealed the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate, among other provisions. Minutes before his dramatic, career-defining thumbs-down gesture on the Senate floor, McCain was in the cloakroom taking a last-minute call from Trump. The “maverick” senator had made up his mind. He voted with two of his moderate GOP colleagues and the Democrats to reject Trump’s position. His Senate admirers on both sides of the aisle said McCain voted for “what he thought was right.” He died the next year at 81.
Senators have six-year terms and their own ambitions. House members, who face voters every two years, are quick to detect shifting political dynamics in their districts. By 2026, voters’ assessments will mean everything in Washington.
At this moment in the nascent transition, several Trump Cabinet choices face headwinds. The president-elect will need to draw on valuable political capital to get some of his appointees confirmed by the Senate. Both chambers will have to link arms to turn his policy pledges into law.
There are at least nine GOP senators who could derail Trump’s Cabinet nominees, The Hill’s Alexander Bolton reports. And Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), who becomes a back bencher in January while ceding his leadership role to Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), may play a key role behind the scenes on more than just nominations.
At 83, McConnell is an institutionalist and a master Senate tactician. Importantly, he is not a MAGA member and his views, for example on U.S. backing for Ukraine, differ from the president-elect’s.
“I think his influence is real and his voice will matter,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), a Trump ally, said of McConnell. “When he speaks, people will listen.”
The Daily Mail: A reported McConnell comment about recess appointments, shared by a journalist on X and later deleted, agitated some senators.
Meanwhile, House Republicans, with a slim majority, are not without their own jitters.
Majority Whip Tom Emmer (R-Minn.), tasked with rounding up votes for the party’s legislative priorities, told The Hill, “It may not always be smooth sailing, and we may have some disagreements along the way, but I’ve always been a firm believer that there’s more that unites us than divides us.”
Former President Clinton, who campaigned for Vice President Harris this fall, remembers when having his own party in majorities in the House and Senate in 1993 did not smooth the way for his showcase ambition to get universal health care through Congress. By shutting lawmakers and key committees of jurisdiction out of the West Wing’s idea factory, Clinton and former first lady Hillary Clinton ended up without a single vote on a complex bill. By 1994, the push for universal coverage was dead, and the heavy lift cost Democratic candidates.
“Public opinion eventually has an awful lot to do with what happens in the capital,” former Rep. Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.), then No. 2 in House leadership, told reporters in late 1994 while describing his party’s miscalculations over legislation that he said frightened millions of Americans. It was an understatement.
Clinton, interviewed over the weekend on CBS’s “60 Minutes,” noted that in Trump’s situation, “the Senate’s shown some indigestion about some of these suggested appointments. We’ll see what happens there.”
Speaking like a man who learned some lessons during two tumultuous terms in the Oval Office (and from Trump’s defeat of his wife in 2016), Clinton added, “I think the rest of us just have to be diligent, watch the signs, and be willing to stand up for what we think is right.”
“You know, somewhere along the way,” he continued, “[Trump will] have to think about whether, at this chapter of his life, he still thinks the most important thing is to have unquestionable domina