Trump accidentally sabotaged his own party

The Democrats in the Congress held the line and won. So far, that’s the story of the fight over the shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). They told the Republicans they can have funding for DHS but not Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Or they can have funding for all of DHS, including ICE, but with major reforms to ICE.

The Republicans said no to both proposals for weeks, during which time airports nationwide descended into chaos. Employees at the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) were working without pay. Over time, they called out sick so much that lines were growing to five and six hours long. At least one plane crashed as a consequence of the shutdown.

The mess was getting so messy that last weekend, Senate Republicans went to the president with a deal. The Democrats would fund all of DHS but not ICE. Airports would return to normal. The GOP would get a chance to secure ICE funding later. But Donald Trump said no. He said he would agree if the Democrats supported unrelated legislation called the SAVE Act.

But the president didn’t stop there with his unrealistic demands. To create what he believed was leverage over the Democrats, he dispatched ICE agents to airports around the country. It was reported that they were “assisting” the TSA, but in reality, Trump was trying to bully the Democrats, especially Chuck Schumer, into giving him everything he wanted.

The Senate minority leader stood firm, though. Despite the implicit expectation by the Washington press corps that he would surrender to Trump's demands for the sake of the country, he outmaneuvered Trump by arranging a series of votes in which Senate Democrats made clear their intention to restore order at airports by funding all of DHS, except for ICE.

Meanwhile, pressure was building, especially on the president. His remedy of sending ICE agents to “assist” the TSA was transparently bogus as ICE agents stood around doing nothing in full view of people waiting in line for hours. Moreover, Connecticut Congresswoman Rose DeLauro (my representative) got the TSA's administrator to confirm that DHS had made the decision to pay ICE, Border Patrol, the Secret Service and Coast Guard but not TSA workers.

Until Thursday, the Senate Republicans could still plausibly blame Schumer and the Democrats, but all such plausibility went out the window last night after Trump claimed for himself imaginary emergency powers to fund the TSA without the Congress. He said he was going to sign an “executive order” to “immediately pay our TSA Agents in order to address this Emergency Situation, and to quickly stop the Democrat Chaos at the Airports.”

No one seems to know what he was talking about. Executive orders claiming the authority to pay for things without an act of Congress would not only be illegal and unconstitutional but “anti-constitutional,” said Josh Chafetz, a law professor at Georgetown. “They strike at the core of one of the principles that allows our entire constitutional order to function.”

But before anyone had a chance to figure out what Trump was saying, or whether to debate it, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, in the wee hours of Friday morning, brought a bill to fund DHS, but not ICE. It passed by voice vote, according to the Post, “with only a handful of senators in the chamber.” Chuck Schumer stood firm and won. The bill is now in the House.

Schumer did not get the ICE reforms that the Democrats wanted, including a ban on agents wearing masks and a requirement that they follow warrants signed by a judge, not an official in the administration. But forcing the Senate Republicans to cave is a victory when Senate Democrats usually cave. It's arguably the best sign yet that the party establishment understands the need to fight. Even a squish like Schumer may have internalized that Trump's power comes from the willingness of his enemies to defeat themselves.

For over a year, Schumer has been the subject of intense scrutiny by the Democratic base. During the last shutdown, in November, he engineered a surrender before Thanksgiving. It was a situation similar to what we have seen this week in which air travelers were stressed. Because of that history, many liberals expected Schumer to surrender again. Yet he didn’t.

But if there’s newfound strength in the Democrats, it’s because there’s newfound weakness in the Republicans, especially the president. By deciding to go it alone – again – and declaring for himself the authority to pay TSA workers on his own, he was met immediately with the question of why, if he could do it by himself the whole time, he didn’t from the start.

In effect, he sabotaged his own party’s negotiating position. Thune could have kept blaming the Senate Democrats for the airport chaos. He might have worn Chuck Schumer down, and perhaps he would have succeeded. He will never know, however, because the leader of his party threw away what little leverage he had. And without it, the House Republican leadership can do little but complain about the fact that the Senate Democrats didn’t cave.

Indeed, the House Republicans are experiencing what can only be called disarray. Speaker Mike Johnson rejected the Senate bill, calling it “a joke.” He said the House would vote on its own DHS funding bill. He said there’s only one party that’s treating Americans like “pawns.”

An hour later, the AP reported that Trump signed the executive order claiming for himself the authority to pay TSA workers. While that is dubious, legally and constitutionally, it still raises the question: if Donald Trump has the power to do this now, why didn’t he use it back then? If he had the power, why make Thune and Johnson jump through hoops?

Someone is treating someone like pawns and those someones are Trump and the Republicans. (Whether TSA workers are actually paid appears to be an open question.)

But Trump’s weak bargaining power has deeper roots. As I mentioned in Tuesday’s edition, his decision to dispatch ICE agents to airports was a strongman’s decision – if the Congress can’t fix the problem, he’ll fix it himself. But doing so not only made the problem worse. It revealed the strongman’s impotence. ICE agents mostly stood around doing nothing.

At the same time, his decision made clear to a class of Americans that is not usually exposed to the consequences of politics – affluent white people – that they will feel the consequences of politics given enough time. Elect a man who believes that every problem requires him to “be strong” and get a president who is so incompetent that he sabotages his own party.

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