What’s on the line - the president’s party has lost the House majority in four of the past five first Midterms

Speaker Mike Johnson. Recent speakers lost their majorities after pushing through sprawling legislation early during a president's term. Photo / Demetrius Freeman, the Washington Post

Republicans say their massive domestic policy agenda is too big to fail. On the other hand, they quietly acknowledge, it might be too big for voters to understand.

“I’ll tell you, vampires are hard to kill. This bill is hard to kill,” Senator Lindsey Graham (Republican-South Carolina) told reporters after Senate Republicans - by the narrowest of possible margins, 51-50 - sent their legislation to the House.

But Graham, the chair of the Senate Budget Committee, who managed the sprawling process, then lamented how the Republicans have fought for months over the most contentious parts of the nearly 900-page bill and not focused on what he considers “popular” items like a surge in border security.

“It’s kind of [been] overshadowed by the complexity of the bill,” he said.

Senator Lisa Murkowski (Republican-Alaska) expressed a similar lament after providing the critical 50th vote for the bill, allowing Vice-President JD Vance to provide the tiebreaking 51st vote.

“There are many provisions in this bill that nobody is really talking about,” Murkowski told reporters.

She then criticised the legislation that she had just voted for and pleaded for House Republicans to realise “we’re not there yet” and further amend the legislation.

Today, House Republicans replied “no thanks” to Murkowski.

After another all-day-all-night-all-morning debate that highlighted obscure congressional process rather than actual policy, the House approved the Senate version without any revisions.

With such a narrowly divided and deeply polarised electorate, both parties feel a sense of urgency to enact their agenda if they win the White House, House, and Senate.

Since 1981, the same party has held this “trifecta” for just 13 years. The president’s party has lost the House majority in four of the past five first Midterm elections, including the most recent three.

Each party’s leaders talked themselves into believing that the only way to retain the majority was by passing a massive agenda, to satisfy their political base and help turn out voters.

Instead, the ugly process of legislative sausage-making has turned away independent voters, while the far left or far right, depending on who’s in charge, feels let down by the inevitable compromises its side made along the way.

Eight years ago, political advisers to then-House Speaker Paul Ryan (Republican-Wisconsin) simply stated that once Congress passed the massive 2017 tax cut plan, Republicans would keep the majority.

Four years ago, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (Democrat-California) used a familiar phrase to describe the Democratic effort to enact President Joe Biden’s agenda - “big, bold, transformational” - for two major bills that dealt with pandemic relief, climate change, and prescription drug costs.

And now Trump has coined the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. It deals with tax policy, border security, restocking the military-industrial complex, slashing spending on health and food programmes for the poor - as well as many, many other programmes.

Ryan and Pelosi lost their majorities, as did Pelosi in 2010 when she was speaker and ordered a pedal-to-the-metal approach to passing the massive Affordable Care Act despite public doubts about the health law.

Polling repeatedly shows that, aside from the massive early pandemic relief packages of 2020, the public has not rallied to support big, sprawling legislation that has many components and takes months, or longer, to pass through the byzantine processes of Congress.

In 2018 Midterm exit polls, fewer than 30% of voters said they had been helped by Trump’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. Exit polls in 2010 showed almost half of voters wanted the ACA to be repealed at that time.

In the autumn of 2021, a CBS News poll showed that the most well-known feature of the proposed Democratic legislation was its massive price tag (then US$3.5 trillion or $5.77 trillion), while far fewer people were aware of proposals like reducing prescription drug costs.

This northern summer, after months of debate, just 23% of Americans supported Trump’s “beautiful” legislation and 42% opposed it - and 34% had no opinion, according to a Washington Post poll conducted last month.

Congress has lost its ability to focus on basic bills. Once one side thinks its party has full power, an overwhelming amount of attention goes into putting as much as it can into one bill and using parliamentary rules that allow a simple majority to approve some items in the Senate.

Thomas Wickham, a former House parliamentarian, compiled data that revealed a steady drop in congressional productivity in the opening months of the past four presidencies.

By July 1, 2009, congressional Democrats had sent 40 legislative bills to President Barack Obama’s desk that were signed into law.

By July 1, 2017, Republicans had sent 27 bills to Trump’s desk that became law.

By July 1, 2021, Democrats had delivered 21 bills for Biden’s signature.

As of Wednesday, Republicans had sent four pieces of legislation to the White House that Trump signed into law. Now, they have five.

If repeals of agency regulations under the Congressional Review Act are included, those numbers go up a bit. But even if those were included, Trump 2.0 has not been half as productive as Trump 1.0.

In baseball parlance, Congress now rarely hits singles or doubles, instead waiting to hit a big grand slam.

The results do not back up this strategy.

Graham said his private discussions in the past week or so with Murkowski involved many laments about how the size of Trump’s bill took the spotlight away from smaller pieces.

“Part of the frustration she had is what I had: The one big bill got hard to understand and manage,” he said.

Murkowski told reporters that Trump’s “artificial deadline” of signing it into law by July 4 created a “rushed” product that left negotiators not fully understanding the impact of the cuts to Medicaid and federal food programmes to offset the cost of making the 2017 tax cuts permanent.

“We do not have a perfect bill, by any stretch of the imagination,” she said.

On Wednesday, Representative Ralph Norman (Republican-South Carolina) felt betrayed by House GOP leaders who allowed the Senate to scale back their proposals for ending Biden-era tax credits for green energy programmes and adding close to US$1t in deficit spending.

“Bottom line, we should have had something in writing,” he said of the House’s proposal. “I wouldn’t dare buy a car, a house or, really, a toaster without seeing what’s in writing.”

By today, after a pressure campaign from GOP leaders, Norman caved and voted for legislation that was exactly the same one he declared a “non-starter” less than 48 hours earlier.

“We accepted the bill as is,” he acknowledged in a CNBC interview, saying Trump promised to take some undefined executive actions to “improve it”.

Representative Nick LaLota (Republican-New York) listed a bunch of good things in the legislation, including lower taxes for his wealthy suburban constituents based on a deal he helped cut.

“There’ll be an 18-month public relations campaign on all the positive aspects of the bill, and I think that favours Republicans,” LaLota said.

He sounded very much like Democrats four years ago, who said lots of individual items in the legislation were popular. That CBS News poll, for example, found 88% of Americans supported the effort to lower drug costs.

Yet only 40% of voters knew that lowering Medicare drug prices was even in the bill.

It almost proved Pelosi’s declaration, back in 2010 trying to pass the Affordable Care Act, when she said: “We have to pass the bill, so that you can find out what is in it”.

She also added an important proviso - “away from the fog of the controversy” - that was proved accurate over time, as the health law became more popular. But that did little to help Democrats ahead of a Midterm election in which they got blown out.

Graham and Senate Majority Leader John Thune (Republican-South Dakota) had pleaded with Trump and House Republicans to divvy up their agenda into two or more packages that could be moved over a year to 18 months.

By spacing things out, Graham argued, the public might more fully embrace the massive agenda. “You know, if you’d done border and defence and taxes in stages, it would’ve been easier,” he said.

Instead, trying to wrap it all into one massive bill, Republicans are left with an unpopular agenda, and even those casting the most important votes for the legislation do not like it.

“More process is needed to this bill,” Murkowski said, “because I would like to see a better outcome.”