June 2, 2025

Senators: It’s time to reclaim your relevance

Author: Steven Pearlstein

Program: Fixing Congress

Office: Penn Washington

Steven Pearlstein is a Senior Fellow at Penn Washington. He is also the Robinson Professor of Public Affairs at George Mason University and a former Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the Washington Post. The views expressed here are his own and do not reflect the views of Penn Washington or the University of Pennsylvania.

The plot is now so predictable and tiresome that it has long since passed into political farce.

After days of backroom bargaining, without serious hearings or debate or a single vote from the minority party, the House, by the narrowest of margins, passes a massive tax and spending budget reconciliation package that promises to reshape the American economy and deliver on the mandate won by the new president. Mostly, though, it just repeals the massive package passed by the narrowest of margins with little deliberation by the previous Congress at the behest of the previous president.

Raise taxes and lower taxes. Expand health insurance, food stamps and college loans, then contract them.  Open the door to immigrants and then slam it shut. Move boldly toward clean energy and then back to a future in oil and gas.  Less defense spending, more defense spending.

With each swing of the pendulum, one near-constant is that deficits and the debt keep getting bigger. (The notable exception is President Bill Clinton signing the 1993 reconciliation package.)

The other is that the party that muscles it through on a party-line vote winds up losing control in the next congressional election because it misread its mandate from the voters. (The notable exception here is George W. Bush and the GOP in 2002, the first big post-9/11 election.) 

And so it was last month with House passage, by a vote of 215-214, of HR 1, “The One Big Beautiful Bill Act,” with all the usual self-congratulatory huzzahs without a hint of awareness of the historical irony.

“Today, the House passed generational, nation-shaping legislation that reduces spending, permanently lowers taxes for families and job creators, secures the border, unleashes American energy dominance, restores peace through strength, and makes government work more efficiently and effectively for all Americans,” declared Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., in an echo of similar claims by predecessors of both parties. 

Never mind that the bill will actually increase government spending and balloon the debt while relying on temporary tax cuts. Or that it will strip 13 million Americans of their health insurance, steer the country away from the cheapest and fastest-growing sources of energy and launch an expensive new arms race. As these packages go, this one is a real stinkeroo. 

In the weeks ahead, Senate Republicans will come under intense pressure to rubber-stamp the House’s handiwork, from President Donald Trump and the MAGA mob, who will dredge up the all the same shopworn arguments:  

1. “This is what the president was elected on.” Not exactly. There is no question voters signed up to secure the border, deport illegal immigrants, impose tariffs and put an end to end “diversity, equity and inclusion.” They were also bribed with promises of no taxes on tips and Social Security payments and extending the “Trump” tax cuts. But let’s recall that Trump also proposed a higher tax bracket for those making more than $5 million and forcing drug companies to lower their prices, neither of which make any appearance in the House’s 1,100-page package. Nor is there any evidence that most Trump voters wanted to cut funding for Medicare and Obamacare subsidies and medical research, or deny food stamps and school lunches for poor kids, or eliminate federal disaster relief, to say nothing of lavishing $175 billion on an unproven missile defense shield. Just as the mandate of President Joe Biden was hijacked by progressives, Trump’s has been hijacked by right-wing zealots.
2. “Party unity and message discipline are the key to keeping the majority in the next election.” It is hard to imagine a caucus less unified than the House Republican Conference during the last session of Congress, with its repeated fights over who would be speaker and near constant revolt by the right-wing Freedom Caucus. Democrats, meanwhile, lashed themselves to the twin masts of progressive orthodoxy and loyalty to Biden. The result? The divided Republicans swept the table on the united Democrats.  
3. You will lose your seat in a primary challenge if you dare to defy Trump.” Maybe, maybe not. For starters, a senator with all the advantages of incumbency probably doesn’t deserve to get reelected if he or she can’t defend holding the line on deficit spending, letting working-class families keep their health insurance and refusing to line the pockets of billionaires and defense contractors. You also have to wonder what’s the point of being a senator if you can’t exercise a little independent judgment and do the right thing for country and constituents?

Getting a better package out of the Senate will require a handful of Republicans to show courage and imagination. But it will also require a handful of Democrats willing to offer their votes to get a few things they want and eliminate a few things they can’t abide. In the toxic partisanship of the Capitol, that kind of bipartisan horse-trading is considered so risky and treasonous that nobody even thinks to try.  But this time may be different.

For starters, acquiescing to a package as partisan and extreme as the one that passed the House will only embolden Trump and House conservatives to reach for more, which will inevitably create the same dilemma for independent-minded Republicans again and again. Better for them, and the country, to stand up to the MAGA bullying now.
It is also dawning on Democrats that the lasting damage Trump and House Republicans can do in the next two years — to the government, the economy and America’s standing in the world — is so great that just sitting back and letting Republicans screw up is unacceptable. 

Happily, there are now senators from both parties with political ambitions who have figured out that opposing the worst aspects of House package offers them an opportunity to gain visibility and leadership cred. And don’t forget the five senators — one Republican and four Democrats — who have announced they won’t be running for reelection or any other office and have the political freedom to work across the aisle to come up with something better.
The Senate has already failed two tests of its power and independence in dealing with Trump.
The first was failing to convict him on impeachment charges for summoning the mob to attack the chamber on Jan. 6, 2021.

The second was confirming unqualified nominees to some of the most sensitive jobs in government.

A third would certify the Senate’s irrelevance in the constitutional order.