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This American Life’s Reporters Don’t Understand This American Government

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The most recent episode of NPR’s “This American Life” continues a line of liberal laments that the legislative process does not work, and blames most of that ineffectiveness on a single source: Donald Trump. (Shocker there.)

But the idea of removing Trump to Make Congress Great Again doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. Even if it did, such a development would not comport with the Framers’ design of our government, which put the “deliberative” in “deliberative process” far more than the modern-day Left would prefer.

The episode follows the trials and travails of retiring Sen. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) as he seeks to pass legislation codifying privileges for participants in the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. President Trump announced last fall that he would end Barack Obama’s executive action on DACA, leaving Congress to find a solution through legislative means. Flake and his colleagues want to enact legislation replacing Obama’s unilateral declaration that his administration would not apply current law to DACA recipients living in the country illegally.

“This American Life” correspondent Zoe Chace laments that the popularity of DACA—which covers individuals brought to the United States illegally as children—has impeded its enactment into law. She thinks lawmakers have used its popularity

as a spoonful of sugar to make tougher immigration measures easier to swallow—stuff like border security, restricting visas, or on the Democrat side, legalizing even more immigrants. That’s the curse of DACA. The most valuable thing about it, on Capitol Hill anyway, is the possibility that it could be used to pass other stuff. So even though we’re a democracy, even though 80% of the country wants DACA, the country doesn’t get what it wants because there’s no incentive for Congress to just put it to a straight up or down vote.

Having castigated Congress for using DACA “to pass other stuff,” Chace spends much of the episode highlighting Flake’s attempts to use “other stuff”—namely, tax reform—to pass DACA.

Looks Can Be Deceiving

Chace calls Flake “the most powerful senator in Congress right now.” Having announced his retirement, Flake has no political constituency to appease. That dynamic, combined with the current Senate split of 50 Republicans and 49 Democrats—Republican John McCain is recovering from cancer treatment in his home state of Arizona—at first blush gives Flake significant leverage.

But the old saying how looks can be deceiving applies on several levels. First, if Flake has enormous leverage due to the 50-49 Senate split, so does every other Republican senator. In fact, Chace discusses efforts by Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins to enact Obamacare “stability” legislation in conjunction with the tax bill, another attempt to shoehorn tangential measures on to a moving piece of legislation.

Second, to pass the Senate, DACA requires not 50 votes, but 60, as most legislation needs a three-fifths majority to overcome a potential filibuster. The tax legislation, enacted under special budget reconciliation procedures, stands as an exception that proves the general rule that would apply to any DACA bill.

Third, by favorably viewing Flake’s attempt (which he privately admits to Chace is a bluff) to tie his tax reform vote to a commitment from leadership to take up DACA legislation, Chace supports the very problem she criticizes—namely, lawmakers using one bill or issue to “pass other stuff.”

Chace’s criticism of the legislative process therefore comes across as inherently self-serving. She doesn’t object to senators using unrelated matters as leverage. For example, she applauds Flake for threatening to hijack the tax bill over immigration, so much as she objects to senators using other matters as leverage on her issue: passing DACA. That double standard, coupled with an ignorance of basic constitutional principles, leads to some naïve misunderstandings.

Let’s Review Some of Those

Contra Chace, the United States is not a democracy. Article IV, Section 4 of the Constitution guarantees “to every state in this union a republican form of government.” The American people do not make laws—their representatives do.

That principle leads to the “other stuff” dynamic Chace described, because lawmakers have other competing priorities to navigate. Some might support DACA, but only if they receive something they perceive as more valuable in exchange—border security, for instance, or a broader immigration deal.

Occasionally lawmakers take this concept too far, but the system tends to self-correct. As the episode notes, Democrats’ tactics led to a partial government shutdown in January, as Senate Democrats refused to pass spending bills keeping the federal government operating unless Republicans committed to enact a DACA measure with it—“other stuff,” in other words.

But although most Democrats support DACA, they divided over the hardball, hostage-taking tactics that tied passing spending bills to enacting an immigration measure. That division and public pressure over the shutdown led them to beat a hasty retreat.

But in general, a process requiring agreement among co-equal branches—and with a supermajority required in one chamber of one branch—makes legislation hard to enact, as the immigration debate demonstrates. Even though “This American Life” argues that “Congress’ dysfunction has changed in ways that are very specific to Donald Trump,” Chace admits that “Flake’s worked on immigration bills practically every year—2003, 2004, 2005, 2006”—well before Donald Trump entered political life—and all of which failed due to lack of support.

In 2007, under President George W. Bush an immigration bill famously failed on the Senate floor, in part because then-senator Obama and other liberals voted to restrict the number of guest workers permitted into the United States—a key provision necessary to win Republican votes.

Consider a Case Study in Virginia

To view the immigration debate in a nutshell, one need look no further than Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA). Or, to be more precise, former Rep. Eric Cantor. In June 2014, Cantor lost his Republican primary to an upstart challenger in Dave Brat. Outrage over the possibility that the House might pass an immigration bill the Senate’s “Gang of Eight” muscled through in 2013 helped Cantor go down to primary defeat, and ended any debate on immigration in the 113th Congress (again, well before most people thought Trump would run for president, let alone win).

A geographically diverse country would make it difficult for any one faction to command a majority, and impose its will on others.

The way Cantor’s 2014 defeat changed the landscape on immigration in Congress illustrates that, while not a direct democracy, the American system remains responsive to democratic principles, even if they resulted in an outcome (i.e., inaction on immigration) Chace would decry. Chace might argue that a June primary election where only 65,017 Virginia residents voted—only about one-sixth the number who voted in that district’s November 2016 general election—should not determine the fate of immigration legislation nationwide.

But by making it difficult to enact legislation, the American system of government accounts for intensity of opinion as well as breadth of opinion. In the case of Cantor, a group of 36,105 Virginia residents who voted for Brat—many of whom cared strongly about stopping an immigration bill—sent a message on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of Virginia residents who didn’t care enough to vote in the Republican primary election. (Virginia conducts open primaries, in which voters can choose either party’s ballot, so any resident could have voted for or against Cantor in the Republican primary.)

That outcome might resonate with a former resident of Cantor’s district, Virginia’s own James Madison. In Federalist 10, Madison wrote of how a geographically diverse country would make it difficult for any one faction to command a majority, and impose its will on others. In Federalist 51, Madison returned to the topic of limiting government’s power by separating its responsibilities among co-equal branches: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”

The stalemate on immigration and DACA would likely prove quite satisfactory to Framers like Madison, who feared government’s powers and purposefully looked to circumscribe them. To the modern Left, however, a constitutional government with limited authority seems an antiquated and inconvenient trifle.

‘Slow Government’ Complaints Are Way Older than Trump

Although Chace’s report claims that congressional dysfunction “has changed in ways that are very specific to Donald Trump,” liberals have criticized government inaction for decades. In “The System: The American Way of Politics at the Breaking Point,” Haynes Johnson and David Broder use their seminal analysis of the rise and fall of “HillaryCare” to decry a Washington “incapable as a nation of addressing the major long-term problems facing the society:”

At no point, we believe, has the cumulative assault on the idea of responsible government been so destructive of the very faith in the democratic system as now. A thoroughly cynical society, deeply distrustful of its institutions and leaders and the reliability of information it receives, is a society in peril of breaking apart. [Emphasis original.]

Again, these words far precede any Trump administration. Broder and Johnson wrote them in 1996, while the tycoon looked to rebuild his empire following several corporate bankruptcies.

As “This American Life” notes, Trump has proved more indecisive legislatively than most presidents did. The episode highlights how Trump went from supporting any immigration bill Congress would send him to imposing major new conditions on same in the matter of hours. That series of events illustrated but one of Trump’s many reverses on legislation.

Presidents prior to Trump have also engaged in legislative U-turns or ill-conceived maneuvers.

For instance, Trump famously called the American Health Care Act “mean” in a closed-door meeting weeks after Republican representatives voted to approve the legislation, and Trump publicly praised them for doing so. But presidents prior to Trump have also engaged in legislative U-turns or ill-conceived maneuvers.

In his 1994 State of the Union message, Bill Clinton threatened to veto any health-care bill that did not achieve universal coverage. As Johnson and Broder recount, that was a major tactical mistake that Clinton later attempted to undo, but ultimately contributed to the downfall of “HillaryCare.” And of course, Clinton himself might not have become president had his predecessor, George H.W. Bush, not made then violated his infamous “Read my lips—no new taxes!” pledge—the “six most destructive words in the history of presidential politics.”

While Trump undoubtedly has introduced more foibles into the legislative process, he has not changed its fundamental dynamic—a dynamic “This American Life” criticizes yet does not understand. Chace says “we’re a democracy,” but she means that she wants a Democratic—capital “D”—form of government, one in which Congress passes lots of legislation, enacts big programs (more funding for NPR, anyone?), and plays a major role in the lives of the American people.

Yet Madison and the Constitution’s Framers deliberately designed a lower-case “r” republican form of government, one with limited powers and a deliberative process designed to make enacting major legislation difficult. That reality might not suit the liberal dreams of “This American Life,” but it represents how American democratic principles actually live and work.