Bruce Bartlett began working on Capitol Hill in 1976 and later worked at the Treasury Department and in the White House Office of Policy Development. He is working on a book about how to tell what a fact is in a fact-free world.

Back when I was in high school in the 1960s, we all studied something called civics, which told us how our government worked. One part was about how our laws are made. It started with a congressman or senator introducing a bill, having it considered by a subcommittee and then a full committee, where hearings would be held and the bill would be “marked up.” This meant that members of the committee would discuss its merits, the staff would prepare analyses and amendments would be offered.

Only after a bill had been exhaustively examined would it be placed on the House calendar for full debate. If anyone tried to short-circuit this process and bring up a bill that had not had hearings or a full markup, one of the senior members would inquire of the bill’s manager whether these things had been done. If the answer was no, that would usually be sufficient to kill a piece of legislation, regardless of merit.


In those days, presidents were much more active in the legislative process than they have been in recent years. The president’s budget was a powerful document because it was literally the only source of budget data before the creation of the Congressional Budget Office in 1974. On the bulk of line items, the president’s proposals tended to be rubber-stamped by the appropriations committees.

On issues such as tax reform or health reform, presidents would often have the relevant department study them at great length and then develop a proposal that was sent to Capitol Hill for consideration. By the time these legislative initiatives began, the president and everyone else involved from the administration side was thoroughly familiar with the issues, understood the trade-offs, and knew where deals could be made and where the line had to be held lest the proposal collapse like a house of cards.

Obviously, this was not the case on health reform. President Donald Trump did not send a proposal to Capitol Hill based on his campaign promise of universal coverage—as he told “60 Minutes” in 2015: “I am going to take care of everybody.” Instead, he embraced a jury-rigged House Republican plan that would lead to 24 million fewer people with health insurance, according to the Congressional Budget Office. And despite the embarrassing collapse of the Republican pledge to abolish Obamacare as their first order of business, Trump and his congressional allies seem to be making the same mistake on tax reform—rushing ahead with a sketchy proposal before clearly understanding their own objectives and constraints, or the necessary trade-offs, either politically or substantively.



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One of the things presidents used to understood was the problem of salami-slicing—making a small deal to get the legislation moving, then another deal, then another deal and so on. Unless someone was very carefully keeping their eye on the ball, it was easy to end up with legislation that bore no resemblance to the original proposal.

I remember a banking reform bill we worked on at the Treasury Department, where I was deputy assistant secretary for economic policy, during the George H.W. Bush administration. We got input from all the industry people, made some trade-offs, and got their promise to support the package. But once the bill got to Congress, these groups refused to support the package deal and instead tried to cut better deals with the subcommittees, then the full committees and then on the House floor. And then they started all over again in the Senate without regard to any deals they had previously made with us or in the House. Eventually, the salami had been sliced so thin there was nothing left of the original proposal and we killed it even though it was, theoretically, our own proposal.

A more positive example of how the system worked is the Tax Reform Act of 1986. It started with a study of the tax system by the Treasury Department, which President Ronald Reagan requested in his 1984 State of the Union address. Treasury completed this study and a three-volume report was published by the U.S. Government Printing Office. The White House studied this report for some months and developed a specific legislative proposal that was sent to Capitol Hill in May 1985.

The Constitution requires that all revenue bills originate in the House of Representatives, so the House Ways and Means Committee took first crack. At the time, the House was under Democratic control and the committee was led by an old-time Chicago pol named Dan Rostenkowski. He was all in favor of tax reform, but wanted to make sure that his party’s interests were protected. Ways and Means held a lot of hearings and many days of markup, during which important issues were publicly discussed, with think tanks and industry groups issuing studies of the potential impact of this or that tax change.

The long story of how the Tax Reform Act of 1986 was ultimately enacted has been thoroughly documented in a highly readable book, “Showdown at Gucci Gulch” by then-Wall Street Journal reporters Alan Murray and Jeffrey Birnbaum. Since in most people’s minds, TRA86, as it is called, was highly popular legislation that breezed through Congress, rereading this book is sobering. It details many, many points along the legislative trail where it almost died. Only the determination of Rostenkowski and his Senate counterpart Bob Packwood, the persistence of Treasury Secretary James Baker and the excellent Treasury tax staff, as well as the constant prodding of President Reagan kept the process on track. But it still took more than two years, with Reagan signing the law in October 1986.

Historically, major legislative initiatives were all multiyear exercises—Social Security, Medicare, welfare reform et al.—and that doesn’t even count the many years before the legislative process began, in which scholars and other policy entrepreneurs plowed the ground to get to the point where legislation was feasible.

In the case of TRA86, there had been agitation for tax reform for a good 25 years, dating back to the Kennedy administration, which saw the creation of the tax expenditures budget and led to the passage of tax reform bills in 1969 and 1976—both passed by Democratic Congresses and signed into law by Republican presidents. There were also tax reform efforts in Congress that laid the groundwork before the Reagan effort began.

Two Republicans, Rep. Jack Kemp of New York, my former boss, and Senator Bob Kasten of Wisconsin, had been working on a tax reform bill for a couple of years that would lower statutory rates and pay for it with the elimination of tax loopholes in a revenue-neutral manner. (Concern about the deficit ensured that revenue-neutrality was honestly maintained.) Two Democrats, Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey and Rep. Dick Gephardt of Missouri, were working simultaneously on their own version of tax reform along similar lines.

When people compared the Kemp-Kasten and Bradley-Gephardt bills, it was obvious there was a great deal of overlap, enough to convince people there was a sufficient community of interest to make the bipartisan enactment of tax reform viable.

So many of the specific provisions that constituted TRA86 and its various versions along the way were familiar to policymakers long before markups began. Most members of Congress knew exactly how, say, the proposed elimination of the deduction for state and local taxes would affect their constituents or how the elimination of the investment tax credit would affect various industries. There were no surprises in the final legislation. People understood the trade-offs and they either accepted them or they didn’t. Partisanship played little to no role because each side got things they wanted and it was a genuinely bipartisan exercise.

Republicans got a sharp reduction in the top personal income tax rate to just 28 percent—virtually a flat tax. The top rate had been 70 percent as recently as 1980. Democrats got full taxation of capital gains as ordinary income, something they thought was essential for fairness. Neither side got 100 percent of what it wanted, but everyone felt they got enough of what they wanted, a classic compromise.

This sort of traditional legislating came to an end in 1994 when Republicans got control of both the House and Senate for the first time since 1954. Republicans elected Newt Gingrich as speaker of the House and most believed that they owed him personally for having devised the strategy that led them to this unexpected outcome. After spending so long in the minority, Republicans had a large, pent-up demand for things they wanted to do as soon as they got control. But Gingrich had his own ideas. Chief among them was the dismantling of the traditional legislating process based on the committees. He was in too much of a hurry for hearings and markups on the things he wanted to do. Nor did he have any interest in being challenged by a bunch of “experts” telling him that his ideas wouldn’t work.

So Gingrich slashed several thousand staff positions from the congressional committees and abolished the Office of Technology Assessment and the Advisory Commission on Intergovernmental Relations—agencies of Congress that brought scientific expertise to various issues and studied the impact of federal policies on state and local governments. He probably would have abolished the CBO and the Congressional Research Service if he could have. All legislative power was centralized in the speaker’s office, which used the House Rules Committee to bypass the committees of jurisdiction.

Faced with a flurry of activity in the House, the Senate tended to adopt many of its methods. The number of hearings sharply declined, and bills were brought up quickly with little time to analyze them. While the Senate still played its traditional role of slowing down the legislative locomotive, legislation nevertheless began moving more quickly even in that body. The only real constraint on Gingrich was President Bill Clinton, whose signature was needed to turn his ideas into law.

George W. Bush was of course much more malleable, allowing Congress to write his tax cuts from scratch with virtually no White House or Treasury input. He issued a tax reform report that he promptly forgot about and busied himself with a quixotic effort to privatize Social Security that never went anywhere. As is traditionally the case, Congress defers to the president on war and foreign affairs.

During the Obama years, Republicans made no effort whatsoever to pass any of their initiatives. That would have required meeting some of the president’s demands, which were assumed to be unacceptable, regardless of what they were. All Republican legislative efforts went into one thing: stopping whatever Obama wanted to do, no matter the merit or the possibility they could get something for themselves with a small amount of compromise. To the GOP base, compromise equaled capitulation and therefore was forbidden.

Now, Republicans in Congress have what they always hoped to have—a president with few ideas of his own, who won’t try to ram his own ideas down their throat and will passively sign whatever legislation is sent to him. The problem is that the legislative machinery has atrophied from lack of use for so many years on the Republican side. Republicans have forgotten how to properly draft a bill, vet it, built coalitions, make deals and put a major piece of legislation across the finish line. The president can’t help because he knows nothing whatsoever about the legislative process, not to mention the larger policymaking process that includes lobbyists, trade associations, citizen groups, think tanks and the news media.

The health reform farce is proof that the legislative Republican emperor was wearing no clothes. The Republicans had systematically lied to themselves and their base for 8 years about having an Obamacare replacement ready to go the minute a Republican president took office. Even President Trump was taken in by this lie because, it appears, the White House’s policymaking muscles are as weak as those in Congress.

As yet, Republicans show no sign of returning to the old methods of slowly building a major legislative proposal that would actually work and get enacted into law. They seem to have learned nothing from the health debacle and are plunging ahead with tax reform despite lacking any consensus even on their own side. Their plan, as it was with health, seems to be to rush something through before anyone realizes what a piece of crap it is. It’s highly unlikely this will work.

Meanwhile, no effort is being made to involve Democrats in any way, even though their involvement was essential to enactment of TRA86 and the 1996 welfare reform law, both of which Republicans take great pride in. Trump may slowly be awakening to the need to deal with Democrats, but he spurned them on health and is stonewalling any investigation into Russia’s role in the election, so future cooperation will require enormous effort on his part that is unlikely to be forthcoming. And Speaker Paul Ryan is apparently so worried about his right flank that he explicitly ruled out the idea of cooperating with Democrats on Wednesday, telling an interviewer, “If this Republican Congress allows the perfect to become the enemy of the good, I worry we’ll push the president to working with Democrats. He’s been suggesting that much.”

Of course, one can imagine scenarios in which some major legislation can slide through Congress using reconciliation, or tied to a debt-limit increase or whatever. But the sands of the hourglass are pouring quickly because the 2018 elections are very likely to erode the thin Republican margins in both the House and Senate. For Republicans, it’s do or die right now if they hope to enact major legislation. Which path will they choose?