Befuddles his allies...

Trump befuddles his allies with ambitious legislative agenda

The White House wants to act in bold strokes after a claimed 'exoneration' in the Russia probe, but lawmakers are skeptical.

By ANDREW RESTUCCIA, HEATHER CAYGLE and ANITA KUMAR

An emboldened President Donald Trump wants to pump up his 2019 legislative agenda with a set of ambitious proposals for Congress. But lawmakers and even some Trump advisers doubt they’ll go anywhere.

Members of both parties are scratching their heads over how Trump can expect a House Democratic opposition to grant him victories ahead of the 2020 election, especially on some notoriously intractable issues like health care and immigration.

But Trump is undaunted. Days after his attorney general effectively cleared him in the Russia probe — providing what White House officials hope will be a boost to his political capital — Trump has been talking up agenda items that have stymied lawmakers for years.

On Wednesday, Trump promised to deliver a health care plan that’s “far better” than Obamacare — despite multiple GOP failures to do so over the past two years. He’s been telling friends that he sees new hope for a long-stalled infrastructure plan, and on Fox News Monday night his son, Donald Trump Jr., urged Democrats to support the idea.

Trump may even take another bite at one of Washington’s toughest issues: immigration. The White House tried and failed to push an immigration plan through Congress last year, and many members of Congress and Trump advisers consider the cause futile. But Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner has been soliciting feedback from outside groups on the subject. Administration officials have told outside groups that they could offer a revised proposal perhaps by early summer, according to three people familiar with the matter.

"We’ve done so much — and we have so much planned," Trump said in a Wednesday night interview with Fox News anchor Sean Hannity.

The only problem: most of these proposals are more likely to become 2020 campaign talking points than be enacted into law.

Democrats contend they’d be thrilled if Trump started seriously working to pass bipartisan legislation through Congress. But they say they’ve seen little evidence of a serious effort at a legislative reset.

“If they were smart, that’s what they’d do to show that they can actually do things for the American people,” Pramila Jayapal said. “I just haven’t seen any smartness from them so far.”

Jayapal cited Trump’s new move against Obamacare, which was vehemently opposed by Democrats, as evidence that the White House isn’t serious about cooperation with the opposition party. The elimination of Obamacare would require the passage of a new health care system in its place, something that can only happen with Democratic support.

Even as White House officials talk about working with Congress, Democrats—who are still angry over this winter’s bitter U.S.-Mexico border wall fight—show little appetite for working with him. Since Democrats took over the House in January, nearly every committee has launched investigations into the Trump administration.

Some Washington veterans say it’s too late for bipartisan collaboration.

“I think he had that opportunity, but that train has left the station,” said Leon Panetta, who as President Bill Clinton’s chief of staff strategized about how to pass legislation through a Congress controlled by the opposite party.

“The shutdown has set a tone for the relationship that has made it much more adversarial. That combined with all these presidential candidates who are already out there has made it pretty difficult for Democrats to decide they’re going to work closely with Trump,” added Panetta, who also served in former President Barack Obama’s cabinet.

But administration officials and others close to the White House insist there’s a political advantage to publicly advocating for ambitious legislation, like an infrastructure bill pumping billions into aging roads and bridges, even if it faces long odds. They argue Democrats will look partisan and petty if they reject the president’s proposals outright.

“He wins either way,” one former White House official said, arguing that Trump will either find a way to work with Democrats or paint them as obstructionists who are holding the country hostage because of their personal animosity toward the president.

Democrats who reject proposals with bipartisan appeal will appear to be acting “from a political perspective,” a senior administration official said.

One White House official said the president’s efforts to push for sweeping legislation will help counter criticism that the president is aimless and goofing off during his copious “executive time.”

“It’ll be hard to argue that we’re an idle White House,” the official said.

President Barack Obama faced a similar dynamic headed into the 2012 election, and positioned himself against a Republican Congress that repeatedly shot down a White House jobs plan. (“If they vote against these proposals again ... they're not going to have to answer to me. They're going to have to answer to you," Obama said in October 2011.)

White House aides insist that they’re making a good-faith effort to work with congressional Democrats, and have been convening meetings on Capitol Hill to discuss plans to lower prescription drug prices and push through the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade deal, Trump’s renegotiated version of NAFTA. Shahira Knight, the director of the White House’s legislative affairs office, now has a standing Monday meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s staff, according to a two people familiar with the matter.

But Democrats largely scoffed at the notion that special counsel Robert Mueller’s finding that the Trump campaign did not collude with the Russian government will kick off a new moment of bipartisan cooperation with Trump.

“Yes, on trade they’re trying. Yes, on prescription drugs they’re trying,” said a senior House Democratic aide. But the aide added that those efforts predated the end of Mueller’s probe, and were unlikely to become any easier as a result.

Trump’s ambitious policy plans are something of a departure from the policy agenda his administration had been previously pursuing. For several months, senior administration officials have been plotting a more modest legislative agenda.

Until Monday, when the Justice Department announced a surprise decision to support the full invalidation of Obamacare, senior Trump administration officials hadn’t been planning to make a major push on the issue, recognizing that they had little hope of repealing and replacing the Affordable Care Act in a divided Congress.

Even the president’s biggest defenders are worried about Trump’s healthcare gambit. The White House doesn’t have a replacement plan, and GOP lawmakers have long struggled to agree on one.

And though the administration had still been publicly advocating for the passage of an infrastructure bill, aides privately cast doubt on its prospects in interviews with POLITICO, noting that lawmakers strongly disagree on the specifics despite the broad bipartisan support for the concept.

Trump’s agenda for the next two years began to take shape in December, when the president gathered senior advisers in the Oval Office to map out his policy priorities. Newly appointed acting White House chief of staff Mick Mulvaney discussed a strategy for implementing the agenda during a January meeting with senior staff at Camp David, a White House official said.

Among Trump’s top priorities is convincing Congress to approve the new U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement. Senior administration officials have been organizing regular meetings with Democrats in a bid to ease their concerns about the deal, and they believe they’re making progress.

The administration also sees potential for reaching a bipartisan deal to lower drug prices. Officials have had early-stage conversations with Pelosi’s staff about the issue. The White House hopes it can cobble together a larger bill from some of the proposed pieces of legislation circulating around the Capitol, including the CREATES Act, which would make it harder for drug companies to block generic drug competition. One White House official said aides hope the Senate can move legislation on the subject in June or July.

Administration officials acknowledge that bigger agenda-items like infrastructure and immigration will be much harder.

“If anything is going to happen legislatively, it’s going to have to be on topics that people can agree on,” a White House official said in a recent interview.

At the same time, Kushner is weighing a possible effort to pass broader immigration legislation. Draft proposals are being circulated among various agencies, according to one of the people who is involved in the negotiations.

Multiple administration officials cautioned that the effort is still in its early stages. A person familiar with the matter pushed back on the idea that Kushner is preparing to release an immigration proposal, insisting that he has no current plans to do so and is still trying to gauge whether there’s enough room for a bipartisan compromise that could be passed into law.

Kushner, Trump’s point person on the issue, recently held six meetings with advocacy groups that both support and oppose the expansion of immigration, including those in religion, law enforcement and agriculture. At one of the meetings, Kushner told the group that the White House was working on a proposal, one participant told POLITICO. Two others say they were told by administration officials as recently as this week that they are working on a proposal.

In recent weeks, Kushner and his working group of Brooke Rollins, who works in the Office of American Innovation, and Theodore Wold and Ja'Ron Smith, both special assistants to the president for domestic policy, have held smaller more informal meetings with those who are focused solely on whether to expand employment-based programs with guest workers and green cards, the people familiar with the matter said. Kushner and his staff have not yet met with members of Congress on the issue, an administration official said.

Senior officials are also reaching out to lawmakers to advocate for passage of an infrastructure bill. The White House is largely leaving the specifics to Congress, and isn’t planning to put out a more specific infrastructure plan beyond the broad 55-page “legislative outline” released last year, one of the administration officials said.

House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Richie Neal (D-Mass.) said he spoke to Trump during the St. Patrick’s Day lunch in the Capitol about a $1.5 trillion infrastructure package. According to Neal, the president’s responded with vintage Trumpian bravado: “We can go bigger than that.”

But when asked what Trump or White House officials have done since then, Neal laughingly said, “That I don’t know.”

Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Peter DeFazio (D-Ore.) said he met with senior White House aides last week to talk about funding for the Highway Trust Fund and a broader infrastructure package.