Via the AP: Voters prioritize costs and Iran over investigating Trump for next Congress, AP-NORC poll finds
Regardless of the outcome of the Nov. 3 election, a new AP-NORC poll shows voters from both major political parties want the next Congress to focus on making life more affordable and ending the war in Iran, while fewer are looking for an emphasis on President Donald Trump — whether it’s investigating him or supporting his agenda.
Here are the results in question:
On the one hand, yes, that is what the polling shows.
But it seems worth noting that 60% of the party that is likely to win the majority of the House, and maybe the Senate, does want investigations of the Trump administration. So I expect we will get plenty of those.
When it comes to the headline notion that people want the cost of living lowered (who doesn’t?), for Congress to be able to do anything that might affect the cost of living, it would require legislation that Trump would veto.
Two obvious places are tariffs and the Iran War. Trump is not going to sign off on giving away his trade wars, nor will he acquiesce to any kind of legislative binds on his warmaking in Iran.
There also is the pesky problem that a lot of the economic damage is so deep that even an immediate and full opening of the Strait of Hormuz and the utter cessation of Trump’s trade wars will not snap the economy back into place.
Further, the best tools that Congress will have to put pressure on the Trump administration to do things like change policy on Iran (and other areas) will be investigations. Giving us all a better understanding of the damage that has been done in the region to US military capabilities will create pressure. Trying to hold people accountable will create pressure. Indeed, the only hope that Democrats have is to focus public attention on these failures in ways that heretofore have not been the case.
And even doing that will likely be insufficient, but it is their best avenue forward, with the real goal being gaining a trifecta in 2029 so that some real governing (and hopefully some actual democratic reforms) can be implemented.
I am in favor of passing legislation and forcing him to veto it, but the odds of any such vetoes being overridden are slim to none.
As I recently noted:
There is also the fact of the matter that the president can veto any legislation passed to constrain him (his own check on another branch). And while Congress can override such a veto with a two-thirds vote in both chambers, the reality is that getting that kind of consensus is nearly impossible. This fact means that even if the Democrats win both chambers in November, their ability to check the president via legislation is essentially nil.
Math is a harsh mistress, and Congress rarely has the votes to counter-check the president by overriding a veto.
Of course, there is the impeachment power, but that requires a two-thirds majority in the Senate. We have already seen that even after Trump was seen to have fomented an insurrection, the Republican-controlled Senate was unwilling to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial, which would have barred him from holding federal office ever again. His term was over, I would note, and there was clear hope he was done with politics. If under those circumstances the president’s party would not vote to convict in an impeachment trial, can anyone really take the impeachment power seriously as a check on the executive?
The partisan math is again clear.
Unfortunately, instead of voters (and headline writers, pollsters, and a lot of pundits) coming to see how the very mechanisms of government fail to create the pathways for voters to get what they want, we will likely go through yet another cycle of bemoaning that the politicians are ignoring the population, which will fuel populists and authoritarians who promise they alone can fix it.
What concerns me, and dovetails with ongoing conversations about democratic feedback loops, is that the voters want something done about affordability, and when nothing is done, they will then blame the Democrats for being unable to perform a miracle, and we get stuck in the wash/rinse/repeat of it all. I suppose the only good news is that the public tends to focus on the president, and so the lack of any changes (indeed, with the prospects of things getting worse) will redound to the Democrats’ advantage in 2028.
Ultimately, if the public really wants to be able to elect a government that will then actually do the things it wants, we need to make some serious changes to the way we govern ourselves. At the very least, it would be nice if we could start being honest with ourselves about how thing work (or, in fact, don’t).
