A lame duck president is usually one who is waiting for the inauguration of a newly elected president within a few months. The idea is that the sitting president’s term has effectively come to an end. A lame duck president’s role is limited to that of caretaker until the newly elected leader is sworn-in.
In recent times, the term lame-duck has sometimes been stretched to include a president’s time after a congressional mid-term election in which his party loses control of both chambers of Congress. The logic employed by users of this definition is that a sharply partisan Congress will block any progress on the president’s agenda. Essentially, the opposing party’s congressional majorities will work to actively obstruct the president’s legislative agenda and render his remaining two years in office ineffective. This is why president Clinton worked tirelessly to pass his budget plan in 1993 while he still had a Democratic majority in both houses. Both majorities disappeared a year later after the Republicans won back the House and Senate in what was dubbed as the ‘Republican Revolution’. The same applied to president Obama, who also got his health care plan passed while his party controlled both chambers of Congress. The Democrats lost control of the House a mere 8-months after Obama signed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) into law.
President Trump came into office with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress. However, after nearly a year in office, the president has no substantive legislative accomplishments to speak of. The failure to repeal and replace Obamacare is a particularly notable failure for a president who promised to do so “on day one” of his term.
It is true that each chamber of Congress recently passed their own version of a tax reform bill. However, this did not come easy. The vote in the Senate was 51 to 49. Republican Senator Bob Corker of Tennessee voted against the bill along with all 48 Democrats. Yet, if this razor-thin voting pattern holds up, the Republicans could still hand president Trump the first major legislative victory of his presidency.
A Divided Republican Senate
Apart from the fact that it will be challenging enough to reconcile two different versions of the tax reform bill in the Conference Committee, there are a few other problems that can disrupt passage of this bill. First, there are at least four Republican Senators, who are difficult to keep within the party-line. Arizona Senator John McCain was instrumental in ending the effort to repeal Obamacare. McCain has also been vocal critic of the Trump administration. Second, Senator Susan Collins of Maine has proven to be fiercely independent. She too voted against several attempts to repeal and replace Obamacare and forced some changes to the tax reform bill before granting her approval. Lastly, two Senators, Bob Corker of Tennessee and Jeff Flake of Arizona, have been very critical of President Trump. Corker famously said that the White House was being run like “an adult daycare center” while Flake bemoaned the “reckless, outrageous and undignified behaviour” of the Trump administration. Additionally, both Corker and Flake have announced they will not seek reelection, thereby removing any campaign pressures before casting their votes. It is not outside the realm of possibility that one or more of the aforementioned Senators will vote against a newer version of the tax reform bill coming out of the Conference Committee.
The Alabama Senate Seat
Which brings us to the special Senate election in Alabama for the previous seat of Attorney General Jeff Sessions. A loss of this reliably red-state seat would shrink the Republican majority to one seat. With at least one likely defection in the rank of Republican Senators, the Republican control of the Senate is effectively gone. True, a 50/50 split would still be tilted in the favor of Republicans because Vice President Pense would be the tie-breaker. However, in the era of a combative president who employs threats and coercion instead of consensus-building, relying on the Vice President as a tie-breaker is far from a wise legislative strategy.
This is why, despite all the harrowing accusations of wrong-doing against candidate Roy Moore, president Trump is lending his support to the beleaguered candidate. A Democratic senator in Alabama can be instrumental in derailing Trump’s legislative agenda, which would not fare too well for the president or his party before the 2018 mid-term elections. This is why Trump and the Republican party are calculating that their window for achieving any meaningful legislative accomplishments can possibly come to a complete shutdown on December 12th (less than 1-year in office) if Democratic candidate Dough Jones wins the coveted Senate seat.
Basically, a loss of the Senate seat in Alabama, coupled with a group Republican Senators who are not hesitant to go against the party line, can trigger a situation in which president Trump finds himself without much real power to enact his agenda through the 2018 mid-term elections and beyond.