The House treads water in Trump’s first 100 days

It took until just past the 100 day mark for House leaders and President Trump to rack up their major achievement of the opening months of the 115^th Congress: a vote to repeal and replace parts of the Affordable Care Act (ACA). The bill’s passage in the House marks an important step towards a major goal: rolling back provisions that expanded health insurance coverage and cutting the taxes that paid for them.  The very public legislative fights that it took to get to yes on the health care bill, however, reveal some challenges that the House will have to continue to confront going forward.

In the early days after Trump’s election in November, some thought that the presence of unified Republican control of the House, Senate, and the presidency for the first time since 2006 would heal some of the divisions that had plagued congressional Republicans in recent years. As Representative Chris Collins (R-N.Y.) put it, “The big difference is we now have complete Republican control…We’re all on the same page give or take 10 percent, which is nuances more than anything.” The first 100 days of the Trump administration, however, have suggested otherwise. As my colleague Sarah Binder and co-author Mark Spindel noted recently, not only are the two parties polarized in the House, but the chamber’s Republicans are also very internally divided. Trump, meanwhile, is not well-positioned to help House GOPers overcome these challenges. His low approval ratings, for example, limit his ability to provide potentially cross-pressured Republican members—like those from districts won by Hillary Clinton—with political cover for casting unpopular votes.

Nowhere were these challenges better illustrated than on House Republicans’ efforts to pass the American Health Care Act (AHCA), their bill to repeal and replace parts of the ACA. Republicans initially expected to be able to move quickly on such legislation, but policy disagreements about what such a bill should look like slowed down the process. The particular procedural strategy that congressional leaders chose also created its own set of challenges. In January, congressional Republicans began down a clever path for addressing the ACA: use a leftover, unfinished budget resolution from last year to initiate the budget reconciliation process, which would prevent a filibuster of a repeal bill in the Senate.

The prospect of eased passage through the Senate, however, has not come without costs. With only 52 Republican senators, a Democratic filibuster of ACA repeal would be assured under the regular legislative process. Even securing one or two Democratic votes for the measure would likely prove difficult. Because Republicans have chosen to use a party-line procedural strategy, however, virtually all of the attention has been on the divisions within the Republican caucus over the bill. Adopting a strategy that means Republicans don’t need Democratic votes makes it more difficult for the former to blame the latter for any potential failure.

In addition, the AHCA is a complicated piece of legislation, made even more so by the complexity of the reconciliation process. The Senate’s Byrd Rule, in particular, limits the content of reconciliation legislation in the upper chamber, but its interpretation and application in particular situations can be difficult to predict. Together, these features of the bill created the potential for an informational asymmetry between GOP leaders and their rank-and-file, with the former knowing more about the bill’s content, and the strategy being used to advance it, than the latter. (House GOP leaders only added to this dynamic by keeping the initial draft of the bill so closely under wraps that Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) staged a high-profile stunt to search for it.) As political scientist Jim Curry has argued, leaders often create these informational advantages on purpose to maintain their influence over their members, especially when the potential for persuasion by outside groups is high. When rank-and-file legislators do not trust their party’s leadership or believe that leaders’ goals on behalf of the party conflict with what is best for them individually—as some clearly did on the AHCA—they can become frustrated with the process.

With the health care bill—and, of late, efforts to prevent a partial government shutdown—front-and-center for most Congress watchers, less attention has been paid to an area in which the House did make legislative progress in Trump’s first 100 days: the rolling back of Obama-era regulations under the Congressional Review Act. Between Trump’s inauguration and the end of April 2017, 15 CRA resolutions were adopted in the House, with 13 of them also passing the Senate and being signed by the president; they included rules in several policy areas that are important to the Republican base, including gun rights, abortion, and federal regulation of education. Importantly, CRA resolutions, like reconciliation bills, are protected from a filibuster in the Senate, making them attractive ways to score some early policy wins with key interest group allies. As Congress and President Trump look ahead to the second 100 days and beyond, however, the map is filled with more stops like the health care bill—including tax legislation and this year’s spending bills—than the easy victories of the CRA. Regulatory rollbacks constitute important policy, but are not the high-profile legislative accomplishments that voters may expect from unified government.