·Trump budget director Mick Mulvaney went on Face the Nation yesterday and repeated statements that he and Trump made earlier about the need for a "good" shutdown in order to get the AHCA passed. They had both said similar things before last weeks’ House passage of the AHCA, but that talk was largely ignored as some sort of half-hearted empty threatening. But if that’s the case, after the thing passed the House, why keep going on with empty threatening? It seemed mostly ridiculous then. Now it’s completely ridiculous. Right?
What Is Mulvaney Even Talking About?
My take is that the good news is that there's at least one figure in this administration who has a plan to get things done that doesn't only involve purely personal enrichment. The bad news is that this plan involves public ruin in addition to personal enrichment of the billionaire class.
In his statements a few weeks ago, essentially repeated yesterday, Mulvaney tells us that his strategy for getting the AHCA (whatever it looks like at that point) passed in September involves Trump at least threatening a "good" shutdown. Trump would at least threaten to veto the annual funding bills, thus taking the continued operation of the federal govt hostage, then the opposition to AHCA relents and would let it pass in order to allow the govt to operate.
I don't see why this wouldn't work, if Trump actually did veto the funding bills. At that point perhaps all it would take would be the threat,as that alone might tip McConnell over to nuking the last remnant of the filibuster in order to let the AHCA pass by a simple majority. But even if he has to actually shut down the govt, I think it would work.
The idea that Trump would never do this, shut down the govt, because forcing a shutdown would result in political disaster for him, seems to be the conventional response. He and Mulvaney are mouthing loose unconsidered thoughts when they say these things.
Lord knows that at least Trump is no stranger to the utterance of loose unconsidered thoughts. But, quite aside from the possibility that shutdown could come from the loose unconsidered action that Trump is also known for, the confidence that shutting down the govt would be a political disaster for him seems misplaced to me.
The Rs suffered no discernible political harm from holding the full faith and credit of the US hostage. They won that one, they terrorized our side into agreeing to the sequester. If they suffered political harm from their earlier shutdowns, I think it's far more reasonable to blame that on their having lost the game of chicken they set up when they shut down the govt. Trump would not lose the game of chicken he would set up by vetoing govt funding over his AHCA. He will not swerve first. House and Senate would pass his AHCA in order to end or avert govt shutdown.
Sure, no doubt this would be a high risk strategy. Threaten shutdown and you can't back down without suffering political harm. And if you actually shut down the govt, people who depend on its operations start being harmed. They will blame somebody for that. Your actual and potential allies in Congress will not be happy that you got your way by beating them in a game of legislative chicken.
This Is About Power, Not The AHCA
But that last point is a feature, not a bug. The point of this exercise would not be to get the AHCA passed. Trump doesn't care about the AHCA. It is possible that he doesn't care about a single public policy agenda item. He cares about winning, he cares about being in control. He is very much not in control now, he is very much not winning now. It doesn't seem terribly likely to me that he will ever try to get in control and start winning the conventional way, like no drama Obama, by playing the 11 dimensional game of painstaking negotiation with Congress and careful compromise. He has to win big and bold,by cutting Gordian Knots. Congress has to be on the menu, not seated at the table, for the sort of"negotiation" that will make Trump feel like he's winning.
Congress in general, and the Senate in particular, is the swamp that needs to be drained that he and Mulvaney are talking about. It needs to be drained of the will to oppose Trump. It's never going to submit to Trump because he's some 11-dimensional chess master who negotiates them to his will. He can't be bothered to learn the business being negotiated, health care or anything else, and he has no interest in learning the personalities around the table either. He doesn't seem to particularly like people or enjoy their company, unless they are in a defined position of subservience to him. People who expect to get something from him in return for what they do for him annoy him.
Trump wouldn't risk shutdown to get the AHCA passed. He would risk shutdown because that's the way he beats Congress into submission. The AHCA would just be the public policy pretext. What it says at the moment he uses it is immaterial to Trump. The shutdown will be the thing. If he wins the shutdown he will have proven who is boss, who has the cojones to persist, to not swerve aside first. And to make sure no one can forget who's boss, one of the conditions of his victory will be that the govt is only to be funded on a month by month basis, so that the cudgel will always be handy to beat Congress again should it fail to obey.
Shutdown isn't some desperate measure that Trump would be forced to resort to get the AHCA, or any other public policy measure, passed. Shutdown is what Trump is.
The business world disappointed him as a field for showing his mastery and control. His first business,as a wheeler dealer casino mogul, went belly up when all the aggressive deals he had negotiated went sour in a real world he couldn't be bothered adequately understanding. He only survived by hiring good bankruptcy and tax lawyers, then retrenching to a modest businesslicensing his name to various products and projects, including reality TV shows where he played a caricature of a high-stakes entrepreneur. Even this much more modest business model apparently could only survive by turning to beeznessmen to lend the money that actual businessmen wouldn't risk on such an obvious and proven business loser bankrupt.
A reasonable person should have been able to see that if the business world, even in the maximally business-friendly owners' paradise we have constructed here in the US, was too difficult to master, then the presidency would be a true disaster. If approached conventionally, the job of president of the US involves the most detailed knowledge of the widest chunk of the world and its players of any job in the world. And it involves the maximal willingness to accommodate the widest spectrum of other players' wants and needs And perhaps Trump does suffer from dementia to have decided to pursue a job for which he is so breathtakingly unsuited. But, demented or not, it is also possible that he saw in the presidency -- once the shackles of political correctness are cast aside -- a way to mastery and control that would involve a positive contempt for understanding and accommodating the world. He would win by engaging the conventional politicians in a high stakes game of chicken, and emerge the victor because he has in superabundance the one quality needed to win that game, a willingness to ignore the public good in the single-minded pursuit of personal victory. They care about public policy and the welfare of the country, he doesn't, therefore he wins. The theory and practice of legislative chicken is that terrifyingly simple.
How It Ends
Only two things might save us from this dictatorship of the Scum Capitalists (This is my English translation of “Diktatur des Lumpen-Capitalisten”, a category Marx never actually had to describe because he mercifully never lived to have to fit Trump into his theoretical framework.).
It is quite possible that Trump is far enough gone into dementia as to be too disorganized to pull off even the terrifyingly simple game of legislative chicken. He clearly does not suffer from late-stage dementia. He doesn't think it's 1987, or fail to remember his children's names and faces. Since most people only think of late-stage dementia when they think of dementia, the fact that Trump does not have late-stage dementia has caused the possibility of his having any dementia a tall to be dismissed. Early dementia wouldn't keep him from pursuing the strategy of legislative chicken. It would in fact make it the only strategy he can pursue precisely because of its terrifying simplicity. But somewhere between early and late dementia one becomes dependent on others to provide continuity of plan and purpose. The 4AM rage tweets reflecting 180 degree changes in goals and strategy, the apparent vacillation among sets of advisers,all of that could mean that Trump is in a mid-stage of a dementia that is already so far gone that he couldn't stick with even a simple plan. Maybe Mulvaney has the shutdown strategy all mapped out, but he won't be able to keep Trump to it even if he might be able to get Trump to start it, because the Kushners will get the president’s ear and get him to back down. Or some such. We're on relatively firm ground speculating about mere psychopathology, but get into palace intrigue, and no one can say what’s actually going on.
But if Trump, or some eminence grise who can establish control of his administration, does go in for legislative chicken, that can still be defeated legislatively. His veto of the funding bills could be overridden, but that would take 2/3 in both chambers. I don’t see that happening as long as the issue is the AHCA. I don’t see the House,at least, getting 2/3 to override a veto that was issued in order to get the AHCA, which they voted for, past the Senate. To switch your vote from “yes” on the AHCA to “yes” on overriding the veto you have to say that while you agree with the AHCA as public policy, you disagree so much with the one and only method that will ever see the AHCA become law that you are willing to vote against the AHCA in order to vote against that method, legislative chicken.
That’s not impossible, but that does define what has to happen to make it possible for Congress to defeat any legislative chicken that Trump tries. A 2/3 majority in both bodies would have to come to see shutdown as a power struggle rather than a struggle over any particular public policy result. And this 2/3 would have to identify itself as a new “side” in this power struggle. They would have to get beyond ACA vs AHCA, and D vs R, or Trump wins because they never get to 2/3 as long as they let their public policy and party label differences keep them from reaching the 2/3 mark.
Practically speaking, the 2/3 majority would come mainly from the Ds, joined by at least 1/3 of the Rs in both chambers. This 1/3 has to include the R leadership, because they have to let the override come to the floor for a vote. Maybe these renegade Rs could do this and then go back to the status quo ante as if this was all in a routine day’s work. But I think that’s only a slam dunk if by that time Trump is so discredited with the voters that the radical Rs can’t credibly threaten to primary the RINOs for their treason to party and AHCA. If that’s the case,their best bet would be to remove Trump, presumably by the 25th, for the disability created by his dementia. They would get credit from the swing electorate for taking action to rid the nation of the Trump menace, they would get a pliable conventional politician to replace Trump as R president, and they would get minimum vengeance from their radicals over removing a threat to their movement who actually, in the hindsight that takes shape, will be portrayed as having failed conservatism,because we know conservatism never fails.