Trump needs GOP to dump ‘Hastert Rule’ to move agenda

As the post-mortems continue to roll in from the conservative commentariat attempting to explain the debacle that was the American Health Care Act (AHCA), few seem to grasp the essential lesson of the GOP leadership’s legislative failure: Namely, that President Trump cannot rely exclusively on the votes of the Republican caucus if he wants his agenda to move forward.

As is often the case, the one politician who seems to grasp this intuitively is Trump himself. Since Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) convinced him last Friday that pulling the ill-fated AHCA off the floor before an embarrassing vote was the wisest course of action, Trump has been targeting the inaptly named Freedom Caucus in a series of tweets.

His tone toward recalcitrant Republicans was unmistakably menacing: “The Freedom Caucus will hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don’t get on the team, & fast. We must fight them, & Dems, in 2018!”

The Freedom Caucus will hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don’t get on the team, & fast. We must fight them, & Dems, in 2018!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 30, 2017

The plain fact is that the noisy group that goes by the blandly inane moniker of the Freedom Caucus was never on the team to begin with — neither Team GOP, nor Team Trump — and it’s becoming more and more apparent that it’s a fool’s errand to get caucus members to join. Repeatedly, the group has shown itself incapable of coming to an agreement on moving any significant piece of legislation.

{mosads}For this faction, there is no downside — and a lot of financial and political benefit — to voting “no” on any and every bill, obstructing enactment of legislation by any means, and running against their own president and party’s leaders.

They are clearly uninterested in putting together a credible agenda for governing, because governing necessarily entails compromise at the end of the day in order to come closer to implementing a vision of the common good. They’re more interested in purging the ideologically impure from their own ranks than they are in moving the ball down the field to achieve systemic reform, and they essentially view any cooperation in the legislative process (which, by definition, entails horse-trading and compromise) as a betrayal in and of itself.

The president has said that he wants to make “deals,” and it can’t be any clearer that they will attempt to thwart all such deals.

That the Speaker didn’t gather this from bitter past experience is perplexing — assurances to the White House that he had the votes within the caucus would seem to presume a good faith in negotiations that, patently, did not exist as the hard-liners continued to move the goal posts.

While it may arguably be true that the failure of what Freedom Caucus critics derisively called “RyanCare” saved the administration from being tied to an unpopular and ill-conceived bill and having its agenda hijacked by a congressional leadership that does not share Trump’s policy priorities, the narrative that this result was achieved by a band of members loyal to the president and his vision is pure fiction.

Not one prominent member of the Freedom Caucus supported Trump in the primaries (the vast majority endorsed Republican Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas), and the caucus’s ideologically rigid agenda is almost wholly incompatible with the president’s.

A huge part of the dilemma for Ryan is that he is constrained by the antiquated “Hastert Rule,” named after former Republican Speaker Dennis Hastert (Ill.), which maintains that no Republican Speaker should bring a bill to the floor for a vote that does not have majority support within the GOP caucus.

But Trump is operating under no such constraints, and if he wants to get his agenda moving again after the healthcare diversion, he should throw the obstructionists out of the driver’s seat. If the Hastert Rule ever made any sense to begin with, it certainly makes no sense under a president whose core agenda on central matters like immigration, trade, and infrastructure renewal is such a significant departure from post-Reagan conservative orthodoxy.

The prominence of the Freedom Caucus and its ilk is only guaranteed by adherence to this very rule. Trump doesn’t need to govern as a Republican, or even as a conservative: The flipping of Rust Belt states long regarded as Democratic strongholds demonstrates a coalition extending far beyond the traditional GOP base is ready to support his initiatives.

The conventional wisdom holds that any efforts the president makes to reach across the aisle to get support for important initiatives like tax reform or infrastructure renewal are sure to be rebuffed by Democrats disinclined to deal and hardened in their opposition to Trump. But given the tough electoral map that Democrats face in less than two years, it’s quite likely that the conventional wisdom is completely wrong.

President Trump should jettison the obstructionists and ideological purists and put his efforts into forging a new nationalist coalition that transcends the old fault lines. But first he, and Speaker Ryan, have to stop looking for votes where they don’t exist.

Robert Wasinger served in senior advisory and liaison roles in President Trump’s campaign and transition team. He previously served as chief of staff for Sen. Sam Brownback (R-Kan.) and managed Brownback’s presidential campaign.

The views of contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.