President Donald Trump again demonstrated his dominance of congressional Republicans as he convinced many of them to ignore legitimate concerns about the size of our national debt and pass his “One Big Beautiful Bill.” That bill makes significant changes to our nation’s tax and spending policies and will probably add significantly to the $36 trillion we already owe our creditors.
Beyond the fiscal implications, compassionate Americans may find the human cost of pushing millions of people off Medicaid hard to watch. The president claims that the debt projections are wrong, and that accelerated economic growth will compensate for the government’s loss of revenue. He may be right, but the fact that the executive orders and legislation he signed into law during his first term were responsible for adding more than $8 trillion to the federal debt doesn’t bode well for his predictions.
The passage of the president’s tax and spending bill is significant, but two actions he took as the bill worked its way through Congress may have implications as large as the bill itself. First, he called on Republicans to ignore the Senate parliamentarian when she decided that portions of the bill as written couldn’t avoid the filibuster. Senate Majority Leader John Thune deserves credit for amending the bill rather than heeding the president’s call, but it was the call itself that was most significant. Equally consequential was the president lashing out at North Carolina Republican Senator Thom Tillis for not supporting the bill, and his threat to back a primary challenge to Tillis surely played a role in his decision not to seek re-election.
Republicans aren’t alone in calling for changes to longstanding traditions or in criticizing members of their party who don’t walk a narrow ideological line. In the past, Democrats made similar arguments about carving out exceptions to the filibuster and increasing the number of justices on the Supreme Court. Both proposals were rooted in the party’s frustration about not being able to pass parts of its agenda under current rules. That was exactly what drove President Trump to make his call to ignore the parliamentarian, even though Thune’s changes ultimately made ignoring her ruling unnecessary.
Large segments of both parties are now inclined to play by the rules only until they stand in the way of their agenda. That’s no way to run a government and leads inevitably to significant swings in policy as both parties maneuver to force through their agenda by any means necessary. Senator Tillis’ retirement next year compounds the problem, since it’s been the moderates in both parties who have so far resisted changes to longstanding rules.
There’s a fair chance that by pushing Tillis out of next year’s North Carolina Senate race, President Trump hands the seat to a Democrat. North Carolina is a swing state and one of the few places in the country with truly competitive races. It’s unlikely in that environment that a candidate better aligned with MAGA would do better than Tillis. But even if the Democrats regain the North Carolina Senate seat, our country may lose. In the long run, it takes two functional parties who are willing to compromise for our system to work, and a Republican party without Tillis is less receptive to compromise.
The purge of moderates has so far been more pronounced in the Republican Party. It started during President Trump’s first term with efforts to force the retirement of senators like Jeff Flake and Bob Corker, both of whom left under pressure from the MAGA wing of the party. But the quest for ideological purity is present with Democrats as well, something illustrated by critiques of Senator John Fetterman and efforts by former co-vice chair of the Democratic Party David Hogg to support left-wing candidates in primary challenges against moderates.
Calls by both parties during the last few years to either change or ignore the rules have undermined the trust that’s necessary for bipartisan cooperation. Moderates, who value that type of cooperation, have so far resisted these changes and prevented the worst possible outcomes. Tillis’ departure will mean one less moderate in the Senate, just as former Democratic Senator John Tester’s departure last year meant the same. Tester was replaced by a Republican senator closely aligned with the president’s agenda, and it’s likely that whoever replaces Tillis next year would move in lockstep with the president if he or she is a Republican. The best hope for that seat remaining in moderate hands is a Democratic victory, since moderate Democrats still have a chance to win a primary in relatively conservative North Carolina and it’s unlikely that a moderate Republican in that primary could do the same.
Moderates, or at least traditionalists like John Thune, have been the bulwark against efforts to pack the Supreme Court, ignore the Senate parliamentarian, or change the filibuster. Whatever their political affiliation, our country needs North Carolina voters next year to choose the candidate most committed to centrism and least beholden to either of the political extremes.
Colin Pascal (colinjpascal@outlook.com) is a retired Army lieutenant colonel and a graduate student in the School of Public Affairs at American University in Washington, D.C. He lives in Annapolis.
