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Trump Has Already Carved a Lasting Legacy

ELIZABETH DREW, NEW REPUBLIC


Can the GOP’s victories be reversed? Some Democrats may be comforting themselves with the thought that the legislative damage caused by Trump can be rolled back if they take both houses of Congress in next year’s midterms—an uncertain but not impossible prospect. But they and much of the rest of the country might well find that repairing Trump’s domestic policy damage is very difficult. Even if they could pass a new tax bill to offset the just-passed one it’s highly doubtful they‘d have enough votes (two-thirds of each chamber) to overcome a presidential veto. Further, it’s unlikely in any event to be easy to eliminate the 2017 tax bill root and branch. While Democratic presidents have been able to raise rates to overcome big cuts by their Republican predecessors, it could be quite difficult to take away all the numerous breaks that businesses will have just won. Democrats also have business donors, if not as many of them—which makes them all the more valuable. And those individuals who’ve been hurt by the bill  cannot be retroactively healed. The pain will have been suffered, and the Republicans have made sure that there won’t be enough money to compensate for what was lost.

In the 2018 legislative year, the Republicans will push for cutbacks in almost all domestic spending, with an emphasis on entitlement programs such as Medicare and Medicaid and also the welfare program. While creating a debt through tax cuts and then cutting benefit programs for ordinary citizens has been Paul Ryan’s dream since his college days (and he has allies for this on the far right), such cutbacks could be harder for the Republicans to pull off than the tax bill was. With the addition of Alabama’s Doug Jones, and the Democrats presumably united against such cutbacks, and at least two Republicans presumably unwilling to go along with steep cuts in these programs, it could be difficult to get a majority behind them. Moreover, in light of the $1.5 trillion by which it’s estimated that the tax bill will raise the national debt—some estimates say its cost will turn out to be higher, but the $1.5 trillion figure is convenient because that’s all the new debt that’s allowed under the budgetary rules—Democrats will be hard-pressed to increase spending on any domestic program, much less enact new ones. This is exactly how Ryan and his like-minded colleagues want it.