GOP Congress adjourns for summer recess with skimpy record to boast about

After Labor Day conservative lawmakers are likely to forgo more healthcare debate to take up tax reform and two legislative housekeeping musts

Seven months after Republicans were handed control of Congress and the White House, Donald Trump and the Congressional GOP left Washington this week without yet achieving a single major legislative victory.

It wasn’t supposed to be this hard.

Trump boasted that he would repeal Barack Obama’s 2010 healthcare law “immediately” after taking office as president. After seven years of Republican promises to repeal Obamacare, GOP lawmakers, too, believed the effort would be seamless and planned to spend only a few weeks on repealing the statute before turning to tax reform and an infrastructure package.

But the Republicans’ repeal effort turned into a messy, months-long slog with several fits and starts, overwhelming their party’s legislative agenda before it ultimately collapsed last week on the Senate floor. This failure leaves GOP lawmakers with no obvious accomplishments to showcase to constituents over their August recess.

Asked last month how the GOP would justify a failure to repeal the Affordable Care Act, an issue that helped fuel its electoral successes, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell offered: “Well, we have a new Supreme Court justice.”

He added that Republicans have unwound more than a dozen regulations enacted during the Obama era, using an obscure process called the Congressional Review Act.

The Supreme Court confirmation of Neil Gorsuch, a staunch conservative and ideological heir to Antonin Scalia, was especially sweet for McConnell. The Kentucky Republican had gambled during the presidential campaign that an open seat on the high court would motivate GOP voters, and it worked.

For nearly a year McConnell had refused to hold hearings on Obama’s nominee, Merrick Garland. Democrats saw the seat as “stolen” and withheld support from Gorsuch. So to enable his confirmation, McConnell had to eliminate a Senate rule requiring a 60-vote threshold on high-court nominees.

But there has been no success for the GOP on the legislative priorities its candidates promised to achieve if elected.

“We’ll be moving onto tax reform, infrastructure – there’s much work left to be done for the American people,” McConnell told reporters after a false start on the healthcare bill last month. But those plans have yet to materialize.

Meanwhile, the relationship between Trump and Republican lawmakers has only worsened.

After the healthcare bill failed, Trump insulted Republicans, saying they looked “like fools” and warning them they would be “total quitters” if they didn’t try again to repeal the law.

Yet Trump has been an inconsistent advocate of the repeal effort. He has offered contradictory commentary on Twitter in his usual stream of consciousness style but did little to promote the healthcare bill and never outlined core policy objectives.

“This issue was outsourced to Congress,” said Charlie Dent, a Pennsylvania Republican in the House, told reporters last week. “It was never really sold. I think that was part of the reason why it was a failure.”

The GOP legislative agenda has often been overshadowed by unhelpful drama at the White House. And a stream of discoveries related to the investigations of Russian interference in the 2016 US presidential election has raised questions about Trump’s conduct and the possibility of collusion between his team and Moscow.

In one of its latest acts, Congress overwhelmingly approved sweeping sanctions against Russia and limits to the president’s authority to reverse or relax them. Trump, who has doubted the conclusion of American intelligence agencies that Russia meddled in the US presidential election, called the bill “seriously flawed” but reluctantly signed it.

The next day Trump lashed out at Congress, blaming it for escalating tension between Russia and the US – and for failing to repeal Obamacare. “Our relationship with Russia is at an all-time & very dangerous low. You can thank Congress, the same people that can’t even give us HCare!”

John McCain, the Republican senator whose vote derailed the healthcare repeal effort last week, shot back on Twitter: “You can thank Putin for attacking our democracy, invading neighbors & threatening our allies.”

On Thursday Republicans joined Democrats to introduce a pair of bills aimed at protecting special counsel Robert Mueller from being fired by Trump. Meanwhile, John Cornyn, the second highest ranking Senate Republican, joined his GOP colleagues in rolling out a border security plan without funding for a wall – Trump’s core campaign promise. And the lack of progress on that front was highlighted this week in an embarrassing leak.

At a rally on Thursday night Trump again attacked his party, saying it was “incredible” that Republicans had failed to repeal the sweeping healthcare law enacted during his predecessor’s term.

“Congress must do its job, keep its promise, live up to its word and repeal and replace Obamacare,” Trump told a rapt crowd in Huntington, West Virginia. “You have to do it.”

“Nothing in life is easy,” he continued. “Congress must not give in. They must not give up.”

McConnell said this week that Republicans will take up tax reform when they return to Washington after Labor Day – a sign that he is eager to move on from deliberating on healthcare.

“It’s pretty obvious that our problem on healthcare was not the Democrats,” McConnell told reporters this week. “We didn’t have 50 Republicans.”

But the path to tax reform has its own set of hurdles. When Congress returns in September, lawmakers face two urgent deadlines that will likely consume the legislative calendar. They must pass a bill to raise the nation’s borrowing limit, known as the debt ceiling, or risk defaulting on the country’s debt. And before the start of the fiscal year on 1 October, they must pass a series of spending bills if they want to keep the federal government operating.

That leaves little time to focus on tax reform before the end of the year. And McConnell said this week that he plans to overhaul tax policy without Democrats’ help, setting the stage for another partisan battle.

Democrats, who have largely been sidelined during this year’s major legislative debates, have urged Republicans to not repeat the process they attempted to use for healthcare reform: trying to pass legislation with a simple majority of votes.

“We saw the trouble of going at it alone with healthcare,” Chuck Schumer, the minority leader, told reporters this week. “If they decide to cut Democrats out of the process and do it by themselves, the same thing is likely to await them.”

McConnell is optimistic the Republicans will be more productive in the months ahead and has expressed confidence that his party will rack up legislative victories ahead of the consequential midterm elections next year.

“We’re only six months into it,” he told reporters last month. “Last time I looked, Congress goes on for two years.”