Power Grab

by Jason Chaffetz

  American Action Forum also published a study estimating the cost of the Green New Deal at $94 trillion. This organization, run by economist and former director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office Douglas Holtz-Eakin, concludes, “The Green New Deal is clearly very expensive. Its further expansion of the federal government’s role in some of the most basic decisions of daily life, however, would likely have a more lasting and damaging impact than its enormous price tag.”

  Those are just the beginning. Pelosi’s rules package contains another provision to drive spending higher by allowing amendments on spending bills, even if those amendments increase net spending. Previously, on appropriations bills, all members could introduce an amendment but they had to offset the spending by cutting something else. The way the process is meant to happen, the House considers twelve separate spending bills individually and members can amend each bill as it is considered.

  When the system works properly, any member at any point can offer an amendment, but it’s only ruled in order if the overall spending is offset or reduced. When I added an amendment to a spending bill to fund roads on the Navajo reservation in my district, I had to offset that $2 million in spending with cuts elsewhere in the Interior Appropriations bill. With school buses unable to navigate dirt roads on the reservation, kids were missing school every time it rained. I felt this was a high enough priority to justify cuts elsewhere in the bill.

  Democrats, however, hate this rule—as they hate any and all restraints on government spending and growth. So they nixed it. The new rule will allow Democrats to lard up spending bills with pet projects at the last minute and to pass the bill with a simple majority. Their members will be able to attempt to shirk responsibility for these votes by claiming the last-minute spending wasn’t in the bill when they read it. How much restraint do you think they’ll exercise when there is no limit to how much they can spend?

  5. Changing the Way We Forecast the Real Impact of Legislation

  Meanwhile, Speaker Pelosi is paving the way to hit voters where it hurts at tax time. In a transparent bid to control the narrative on tax increases, Democrats are also changing the way tax legislation is scored. Ultimately, this move helps stack the deck by producing incomplete data that obscures the negative economic impact of tax increases while overplaying the cost of tax cuts. Here’s how it works.

  Scoring is the process of forecasting the ten-year economic impact of legislation. The conventional scoring system is fundamentally flawed because it measures only the direct impact of tax policy changes. Republicans modernized the scoring process when they ran the House to estimate indirect impacts and give members of Congress a more complete fiscal picture. Dynamic scoring uses forecasts that take into consideration the inevitable behavioral changes that result when taxes go up or down. This reveals the part of the picture Democrats prefer to keep hidden from the public.

  Conventional scoring methods that Democrats favor assume tax policy does not impact behavior. That’s why the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) scoring for Obamacare was so inaccurate. The number of people who buy private policies did not remain steady when the cost of insurance on the exchanges multiplied. But CBO missed that dynamic because they only looked at direct impacts—how many people would qualify to buy private plans on the exchange. CBO projected 21 million people would pay for these plans. But only 12 million did, because of an indirect impact—the rising cost of plans on the exchange—which CBO did not account for.

  Even more significant was the CBO’s estimate of the number of people who would enroll in Medicaid. Their estimates assumed all fifty states would expand Medicaid, as the law required prior to a Supreme Court decision allowing states to opt out. But with only thirty-one states expanding, the number of people enrolling was still 50 percent higher than CBO estimated, according to research reported by the Mercatus Center. Once again, CBO was only measuring the direct impact—how many people were eligible at that moment and how much were states spending for Medicaid enrollees at the time? In reality, the incentive to enroll in the best insurance that money can’t buy (truly—you cannot buy insurance as rich as Medicaid at any price in the private market) caused many more people to enroll or to adjust their income downward slightly in order to become eligible to enroll.

  Furthermore, the cost per newly eligible enrollee was much higher than the scoring estimated, largely because states and medical providers were responding to perverse incentives in the bill that encouraged them to set higher payment rates than they had previously used. Mercatus’s Brian Blase reports:

  Medicaid expansion is proving much more expensive than CBO expected, largely because the agency failed to anticipate how states would respond to the elevated reimbursement rate for ACA Medicaid expansion enrollees. Many states have set very high payment rates to insurers for the expansion population with the cost dispersed to federal taxpayers.

  The scoring method used to project the cost of the Democrats’ health-care policy misled many states to enter into expansions that are proving unsustainable. This flawed projection model is the one Nancy Pelosi’s rules package dictates we use going forward.

  Democrats don’t like seeing the economic trade-offs of tax increases—and they certainly don’t want you to see them. The new rules package removes dynamic scoring to create the illusion that tax increases are harmless to the economy and to hide the economic growth generated by tax cuts.

  Are Earmarks Next?

  Much to my surprise, Speaker Pelosi’s rules package did not contain language reinstating the corrupt federal earmarking practice. Watch closely. That debate is yet to come. We can expect to see supporters of earmarks marketing them as a solution to gridlock and government shutdowns. Young voters may not even remember what they are, as Speaker Boehner did away with the practice in 2011. Earmarks were lawmaker-requested spending provisions that bypassed the merit-based funding process. They were a treasured institution in their day.

  Earmarks enabled lawmakers to bring home federal dollars, take credit for generating jobs in their districts, pick winners and losers, and elicit campaign contributions. They included projects like $250,000 for a farmers’ market in Kentucky or $750,000 for the World Food Prize in Des Moines, Iowa. The Department of Defense was particularly plagued by companies lobbying their home-state senators and representatives for appropriations to buy products the military did not even want. In one notable example published by the Seattle Times, the Pentagon made a decision in 2003 to move away from using decontaminant powder and to instead use more effective lotion to protect soldiers from exposure to nerve agents.

  Although the Pentagon told Congress in 2005 of its plans to switch to the lotion, lawmakers who represent the powder producer used earmarks to force the Department of Defense to keep buying the less effective product. That year, after a powder company spent $830,000 on lobbyists, the Department of Defense stockpiled enough powder to last seven years.

  Daniel Kohn, president of a New York company involved in the powder production, told the Seattle Times, “In self defense, we’ve gone to our representative in Congress and we’ve said, ‘You know, let’s lay our cards on the table. We’re in business to provide a living and jobs in your district.’” Despite the large stockpiles already purchased, New York senators Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton added a $2 million earmark for more powder in the 2007 defense bill. In 2008, another $5.6 million was added. The military in 2010 had 2.2 million unwanted powder kits in stock. Meanwhile, manufacturers of the lotion did some defensive lobbying of their own, hiring lobbyists who got a $3.2 million earmark for the lotion in the 2009 defense bill.

  In the 2010 Department of Defense appropriations bill, 532 of the 1,083 House earmarks were requested on behalf of private companies within the requesting member’s home district. Although the total amount spent on earmarks was only slightly more than what we spend on foreign aid—about 1 percent of the federal budget—they became grease for the wheels of corruption. In one of many pitches to end the pr
actice, I wrote in the 2010 issue of the Hinckley Journal of Politics that lawmakers who wished to reform the practice had traditionally been left with two untenable choices: shortchange America by participating in a corrupt system, or shortchange constituents by refusing to request earmarked dollars that everyone else is receiving. Fortunately, the wave election that was the 2010 midterms drove the political will for congressional Republicans to end earmarks. Reversing that progress would be tragic. Voters should keep an eye out for candidates and representatives calling to restore earmark spending, as there are many in Congress who still deeply regret the loss of this spending tool.

  Pelosi Protects Her Power

  The selection of Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House gave Democrats in Congress a general to lead them in battle. Whereas Speaker Paul Ryan was a policy wonk, Speaker Pelosi is a political strategist. Ryan is the leader you choose when your priority is policy. Pelosi is the one you want when you’re going to war.

  Make no mistake. The Democrats have gone to war. For them, Donald Trump is an existential threat. The last thing they want to do is find common ground on public policy to drive solutions for which Trump can take credit. Only when their voters are angry and motivated do they donate large amounts of money to get Democrats back in power. You don’t accelerate the Trump Bump by passing budgets and growing the economy. To grab power in 2020, they need to create division, build damaging narratives, discredit the Trump administration, and convince Americans their lives are worse despite a booming economy. It’s a tall order. Pelosi is poised to use her new majority to deliver.

  One rule change that may surprise those who weren’t watching C-SPAN at the time is an insurance policy for Pelosi in case she once again proves to be a political liability to her caucus. While I oppose the change on the grounds that it is bad for the institution, it may offer some political advantages for Republicans, who would surely be happy to see Democrats stuck with a wildly unpopular Speaker who drives voters to Republican candidates on election day.

  In a move to cement her hold on power during a time when support for her speakership was weak, Pelosi changed the rules to make calling for a mid-session vote for Speaker more difficult. Republicans had used this particular vote process on Speaker Boehner in 2011, with Congressman Mark Meadows introducing a mid-session motion to vacate, which would declare the office of Speaker vacant and force a new vote. Although the bill was never passed, it was in the wake of that effort that Speaker Boehner stepped down. Pelosi will face no such threat.

  The new rule requires a majority of members of Congress to call for the motion to vacate, therefore making a threat nearly impossible to carry out successfully. This was a tool of the minority—even the minority within the party in power. It was rarely used, but an important step when leadership needed to change or a revote was needed to send a message. This change is bad news for Pelosi’s far-left flank. They want impeachment and they want it yesterday. But with no ability to introduce a motion to vacate, they pose little threat to her speakership.

  This may have a silver lining for Republicans, who rode anti-Pelosi sentiment to a crushing victory in 2010. It leaves little flexibility for Democrats if they once again see Pelosi driving their party over an electoral cliff.

  If there’s one bet you can never lose, it’s predicting that Nancy Pelosi will overreach. She cannot help herself. There are few lines she will not cross to get a political win. That trait sometimes serves her well, but also threatens to be her downfall. When she was serving as Speaker during my first term in the House, Pelosi overreached to such a degree that she helped spawn the Tea Party movement.

  Her policy prescriptions were so bad and her marketing of them was so deceptive that the resulting electoral backlash cost Democrats the House and Pelosi the speakership. Remember how her deceptively named Affordable Care Act actually did the opposite of what she marketed it to do? How she told Meet the Press in 2012 that “everybody will have lower rates”? How she told MSNBC in 2009 that “if you like what you have and you want to keep it, you have the choice to do that”?

  In a rare moment of candor, Pelosi did tell us we had to pass the bill before we could know what was in it. I applaud her for her honesty on that point; it was probably the most truthful statement I’d heard from any Democrat on Obamacare. Hundreds of times the bill said, “the secretary shall” or “the secretary may”—which gave so much power to the administration that no one could possibly know what implementation would look like. While Pelosi is a disaster on public policy, Democrats know she’ll be a rhetorical warrior in their battle against Donald Trump and she won’t let truth stand in her way. That’s what they think they need going into 2020.

  Did she learn any lessons from her downfall in 2010? If the first year of her return to the gavel is any indication, she did not. Apparently, neither did most of her caucus, who overwhelmingly voted to restore her to the gavel despite the disastrous results of her last performance. If anything, she is doubling down on the strategies that failed Americans less than a decade ago.

  In truth, one could fill a book with the many examples of Pelosi overreaching and power grabbing on her agenda, strategy, and tactics. But I predict the 2020 election cycle and her own severe case of Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) will drive her to new lows. Despite her party’s narrowly winning many tight races, she will attempt to lead as though Democrats had been given a mandate to destroy the Trump administration at all costs. Lawmaking will be a forgotten responsibility as Pelosi looks to convert every legislative shield into a political sword.

  The risk for Pelosi has always been that people might see through the act. This time, with social media even more ubiquitous than it was in 2010, she will need all the help she can get from her Silicon Valley allies to keep the deplorables from exposing the hypocrisy that will undergird the congressional investigations her new committee chairmen will undertake.

  Notwithstanding the steady weakening of legislative branch powers in recent decades, many powerful tools remain in the hands of the majority—the ability to set the agenda, make law, control the purse strings, subpoena documents and testimony, and block a president’s agenda. Those tools can and should be used to solve problems for the American people. That’s not how Democrats will use them. In their hands, every tool that can conceivably be weaponized in the battle for 2020 will be used in the pursuit of power—to destroy enemies, weaken the minority, raise money, and influence elections.

  We can expect Pelosi and House Democrats to overreach by completely neglecting to govern as they repurpose every available legislative tool toward the goal of destroying President Trump. How will they do it? In the coming chapters, we’ll explore how Democrats in the House are changing rules to facilitate their embrace of radical and unpopular taxes and spending, compromising transparency to shield themselves from accountability to their voters, violating long-standing bipartisan norms to enable wider fishing expeditions, suppressing documents that don’t fit their narrative, and abusing their oversight authority to politically target individuals and businesses over which they have no jurisdiction.

  In doing so, not only are they missing the opportunity to accomplish anything positive on behalf of the American people, but they are obstructing any efforts by the administration and the Republican Senate to do so. So keen on their agenda to hedge up Donald Trump’s way, Democrats are ultimately blocking policies they have long promised voters to support.

  The media is not calling them on it, of course. Recognizing the overreach for what it is requires us to pay attention.

  With Democrats now in control of the House of Representatives, they are doubling down on the false narratives they use to sell their agenda—and this time they have all the tools available to a majority party in Congress at their disposal.

  In the coming pages, we’ll look at the tools and tactics used by the Democrats to indelibly paint President Trump and his supporters as enemies of the state as they make their own pursuit of power in 2020 their highest prior
ity. How are the Democrats leveraging these tools? I know. I’ve been there.

  The tip of the spear for the Democratic resistance in the House of Representatives will be the House Oversight and Reform Committee—a committee I once chaired. The other will be the House Judiciary Committee, on which I once served. Most of the aggressive action from the House will occur via these two committees, but other committees will also engage in a coordinated charge against the president and his administration. Though Republicans still hold the majority in the Senate, the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings demonstrated just how far Democrats will be willing to go in the quest for political power.

  The newly won control of House committees, gavels, and formidable committee resources has opened new lines of attack. But those very benefits are creating new vulnerabilities for a party that just can’t help but go too far.

  Despite the legislative, financial, and cultural tools the left can wield, the right retains certain advantages—not the least of which is an American public that increasingly rejects identity politics, cultural manipulation, biased media, and the politics of personal destruction. Democrats can’t see outside the Beltway into the hearts of the American people. We want our nation to be strong. That’s why America elected a disruptive and unconventional president. Having tasted the fruits of a president who focuses on solutions, Americans prefer the thriving economy, favorable trade environment, dominant foreign policy, and America First agenda promised and delivered by Donald J. Trump.

  At what point does the political obstruction go so far that it undermines the very institutions that undergird our republic? Though Congress has always been a political battleground, there is a price to be paid for pursuing political agendas rather than doing the job voters elect representatives to do.