A president in the final two years of an eight-year run in the White House. A US Congress held by an opposing party that loathes the occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. A staff that is depleted and exhausted by six-plus years of governing. That is the situation that US President Barack Obama faces in the final two years of his presidency, with the addition of — after last Tuesday’s election results — a Congress now controlled by Republicans in both houses.
However, that is not particularly uncommon. It has occurred three times in the past 30 years: with former US presidents Ronald Reagan in 1987 and 1988; Bill Clinton in 1999 and 2000; and George W. Bush in 2007 and 2008.
So what can we learn from this precedent about what Obama — and the US — is in for these next two years? The president has wide latitude to lead foreign policy, but in the domestic sphere, achievement generally means getting Congress to pass laws he is willing to sign. So is this destined to be a time of partisan rancor and little accomplishment? Or could there be room for some actual — gulp — lawmaking, in contrast with the past couple of years, in which no major legislation has found its way to the president’s desk?
Illustration: Yusha
The historical record actually points to some intriguing possibilities for pragmatic action if Obama is able to put aside his own ambitions and vision and find some less polarizing, below-the-radar issues where Republicans are more eager for change than his Democratic allies.
As you might guess, those historical episodes offer no reason to think that the president has any hope of signing major legislation of his own initiative and design. It is hard to imagine anyone would dare tackle something like immigration reform, which has attracted bipartisan support in the past, but is the subject of a deeply polarized political debate.
Instead, the kinds of legislation that are passed during the tail end of two-term presidencies usually fall into two buckets: Things that were forced upon Congress by emergency circumstances and things that were more eagerly supported by members of the opposition than the president’s own party.
When Democrats took charge of both houses of Congress after the 2006 elections, Bush’s popularity was already in a deep dive amid debacles around the Iraq War, Hurricane Katrina and an early second-term effort to add private accounts to social security.
However, even a domestic policy initiative that both the president and congressional Democrats were enthusiastic about — immigration reform — did not go anywhere. Republicans in Congress revolted and Bush no longer had the clout to bring them on board.
Even though the table, in theory, seemed nicely set for a bipartisan achievement that might have helped Bush’s standing in history, the actual realities of being an unpopular president in the back end of eight years in the Oval Office meant that it was not to be.
By contrast, the domestic legislation that did come out of Bush’s final two years was of the emergency response variety. The financial system and the economy began teetering in late 2007. The Bush administration pushed — and Democratic leaders agreed to with varying degrees of enthusiasm — a fiscal stimulus package in early 2008; a reform of the law overseeing housing finance companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that summer; and, most controversially, the US$700 billion bank bailout bill known as TARP in the fall.
There was little enthusiasm among Democrats for the enterprise, but there was a feeling that they had to act simply because the consequences of not doing so would be too grave.
We can all hope that the remainder of the Obama administration will not feature a global financial crisis or other emergency situation that might make Republicans willing to approve laws they would otherwise despise. So what kind of lawmaking is possible in more normal circumstances? A common thread is that the president embraced policies that the president’s party felt ambivalent about at best.
After the 106th Congress took office in January 1999, it moved to hold an impeachment trial of Clinton, hardly an auspicious beginning for a productive relationship. Yet there were a couple of significant bills that wound up becoming law during that time.
In November 1999, Congress passed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act to deregulate the financial industry, which among other things freed large banks from Depression-era rules preventing securities firms and commercial banks from being part of the same company.
The bill, which many view as a contributor to the deregulatory fervor that helped leave banks vulnerable to the financial crisis nine years later, was strongly supported by the banking industry and business groups. While it received overwhelming support from both parties, to the degree that there were objections, they were on the left, not the right. The bill, for example, received “yes” votes from all but five Republican members of the House and all but one Republican in the Senate, while 51 House Democrats and seven Senate Democrats voted against it.
The pattern was even more pronounced with another law of Clinton’s late second term that stands out for being consequential. In 2000, he signed a law that permanently normalized trade relations with China. It opened an era in which China has become more integrated into the global economy. At the time, business interests eagerly sought the deal to gain better access to the fast-growing Chinese market. Yet labor and human rights groups were opposed, since they thought it could mean opening US workers to more low-wage competition and leave the country with fewer levers to encourage the Chinese government to respect human rights.
It was an even more lopsided vote than the one for financial deregulation, with 70 percent of House Republicans voting “yes” and only 29 percent of House Democrats doing the same.
By the final two years of the Clinton presidency, dreams of a single-payer healthcare system were a distant memory, but the president was able to get things done by going along with policies that annoyed some allies, yet were supported by the more pro-business wing of the Democratic coalition.
A close analogue occurred near the end of Reagan’s presidency. With the Iran-Contra affair swirling and late administration fatigue setting in, there was little meaningful domestic policy in 1987 and 1988. One key exception was the McKinney-Vento Homeless Assistance Act, a broad law that included job training, food stamps, mental health treatment and more.
Activists had long sought something along these lines, while conservatives had urged local responses and expressed no desire to expand federal social welfare programs. Yet amid a spate of attention focused on homelessness nationwide, Reagan set aside ideology and signed the law in July 1987.
As Obama plots how he hopes to spend the remainder of his presidency, the lessons from these three periods carry one combined message: What will prove to be in the realm of possibility in domestic lawmaking depends less on what you might want to do and more on what circumstance puts in front of you that you are willing to sign your name to.
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