Congress Spins In Circles As Partisans Force Pointless ‘Show’ Votes

St. Louis Post-Dispatch (MO)

April 02-- Apr. 2--WASHINGTON -- If you want a glimpse of what the next 19 months in Congress will be like, look at the past week.

High-profile votes in the House and Senate had no chance of passing, yet were pushed by leaders of the party that lost the vote to build political advantage going into the 2020 elections. Another party-line "show vote" -- this one condemning President Donald Trump for backing lawsuits to repeal Obamacare -- could happen in the House of Representatives as early as Tuesday.

That's what Congress is primarily about now, even as hugely consequential questions from climate change to immigration loom over everything.

Meanwhile, members who represent swing districts and swing states and face potentially tough re-elections, such as Rep. Ann Wagner, R-Ballwin, find paths to legislation that could have bipartisan support ever harder to find.

Republicans and Democrats are so far apart on these issues they can't even agree whether they are crises, nor on legislative baby steps to deal with them.

In the span of hours last week, the House failed to override a presidential veto of a resolution of disapproval on Trump's Mexican border wall emergency declaration, then the Senate voted down the Democrats' "Green New Deal" on a vote pushed by Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell, who had spent weeks ridiculing it.

Caught in the no-man's land of these "show-me" votes are members like Wagner. She faces a potentially tough re-election in 2020 after surviving a robust challenge from Democrat Cort VanOstran in 2018.

The suburban and exurban demographics of her district is the ground that the 2020 election will be decided upon -- the ground between intensely pro-Trump rural America and vehemently anti-Trump urban America. It's why she's re-formed a caucus of suburban Republicans in the House that had been dormant for a decade.

Throw in the continuing investigations of the 2016 elections -- House Democrats of Trump, and Senate Republicans of how the FBI and Justice Department launched Trump investigations -- and you have a prescription for 19 months of rancor and partisanship that could rival or even surpass Trump's first election.

"If this is going to turn into investigation, investigation, investigation and 'gotcha' votes, I mean, it's not doing the work of the American people," Wagner said.

But in complaining about Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi pushing "gotcha" votes, Wagner is overlooking her own party's recent history.

When in power in the House, her Republicans constantly forced votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act so they could use them against Democrats in campaigns, even though they knew that former President Barack Obama had his veto pen ready.

This constant cycle of forcing votes for partisan advantage has marked the last decade as a post-9/11 era of bipartisanship faded out of the rearview mirror.

The signature legislation of the last two presidents -- Obamacare for Obama, tax cuts for Trump -- was passed on strict party-line votes.

This uncompromising air is why former Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid changed Senate rules to make it easier to get Obama's judges and other appointees passed through the Senate. It's why Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., is now leading a charge on something similar to speed up approval of Trump's judicial nominees.

One Trump judicial appointee, St. Louis lawyer Stephen Clark, has waited a year for an up-or-down vote in the Senate.

McConnell was blunt on why he forced a vote on the Green New Deal, which is a wish list of environmental goals pushed by freshman Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D.N.Y., that Republicans have attacked as expensive and anti-capitalist.

"This is nonsense, and if you are going to sign on to nonsense, you ought to have to vote for nonsense, and we are going to give them an opportunity to do just that," McConnell said, hours before the Senate voted 57-0 to reject the Green New Deal, with 43 Senate Democrats -- including a dozen who actually sponsored it -- voting "present" in protest.

Asked if he was forcing "sham" votes after complaining that Democrats had done the same thing, McConnell said the Senate could do little else because Democrats controlled the House.

"Look, when you have a Democratic House and a Republican Senate, the opportunity for passing legislation on a bipartisan basis is more limited," McConnell said. "The House is going to send us a lot of bills we are not likely to take up, and we are probably going to send (them) a lot of bills that they are not going to take up."

Minutes later, as McConnell was walking past, Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer railed against Democrats being forced to take a vote on a bill that some of them had actually sponsored.

Schumer called for "not a sham vote to put on the floor to vote no, but a real direction, talking about climate change as a real problem caused by humans."

A side effect of show votes: It gives cover for members to avoid seeking common ground on the root problems that spark the partisan differences.

When freshman Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., was asked why he thought McConnell was pushing a vote on a Green New Deal that McConnell had ridiculed, Hawley responded: "My sense is that the majority leader wants to hold them (Democrats) to account."

Hawley had just toured flood-ravaged northwestern Missouri. He was asked whether what he saw was connected to climate change.

"Is there climate change? Sure, there is," he said. "Are humans affecting the climate? Sure, they are -- we always do.

"But look, what we ought to do right now in the immediate term is we have got to give relief to farmers who are suffering."

So, for now, what settles for bipartisanship in the Senate on climate change is agreeing on how many billions to spend on aid to what the climate-change believers say are the immediate victims of a warming climate.

These kinds of actions are the nature of the legislative beast, according to University of Missouri-St. Louis political scientist Dave Robertson.

"Members of legislatures have tried to advantage themselves at the expense of their political opponents with 'gotcha' votes as long as there have been elected legislatures," he said.

But he added this caution: "In a constantly evolving political context, these 'gotcha' votes can boomerang on the party that advances them."

How so?

"A vote on a Green New Deal might produce embarrassment for Democrats that Republican leaders want," Robertson said. "But if there is a recession before the 2020 election, the idea of a Green New Deal might look more appealing to voters than it does now."

Wagner says she is trying to work out of the "gotcha" grip by seeking bipartisan support on issues such as parental leave.

She's trying to take advantage of what she hopes Pelosi also realizes -- that while a lot of the media focus has been on bomb throwers like Ocasio-Cortez, that many new members of the Democratic majority in the House represent suburban districts like she does, and they are worried about getting re-elected.

"We will see if Nancy Pelosi is going to allow some of these new freshmen that are also anxious to legislate and have deliverables back home -- whether she is going to allow them to do it or not," Wagner said.

But Wagner introduced her new parental leave bill last week without a Democratic co-sponsor. And her political opponents pounce after every show vote.

After Wagner voted to uphold Trump's veto of the resolution condemning his emergency border wall declaration the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, accused her of "putting partisan politics ahead of national security."

But the record also shows that the Democrats passed the resolution knowing it had no chance of surviving a Trump veto. And Wagner has voted for record defense budgets virtually her entire time in Congress.

Exploding defense budgets -- often traded by Republicans for more domestic spending to attract Democrats -- have been one of the major pieces of bipartisanship to survive recent Congresses.

In part because of that, the deficit this year will approach a trillion dollars.

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