WASHINGTON — Congress heads into a final week before a holiday break with a full plate of issues to deal with — and only one of them is impeachment.
On the schedule is a landmark North American trade deal, a defense spending bill and an overall spending package that would prevent a government shutdown before Christmas.
But the bipartisan accomplishments on trade and spending will likely be eclipsed by the highly partisan and historic vote on impeachment that is reported to take place Wednesday. That reality was on display this past week when impeachment developments overshadowed announcements on the House and Senate agreeing on a national defense spending bill to the cheers of President Donald Trump, and the White House and Democrats striking a deal on trade with Mexico and Canada and on the 2020 budget.
News media often gets the blame for steering public attention toward controversy. But both political parties fan the flames of conflict as an effective way to raise money and motivate their base supporters for the next election, experts say.
“It can be helpful for the parties in terms of moving the needle on the election, but it definitely overshadows and obscures all the legislative success that Congress does have every year,” observed Jim Curry, a University of Utah political science professor.
And divisiveness can also be used as an excuse for what’s not getting done.
“The idea that somehow impeachment is stopping Congress from doing things is a red herring,” said James Wallner, a senior fellow at the conservative and libertarian think tank R Street Institute. “It’s designed to shift or deflect blame to something else for what they haven’t done.”
Public and private posturing
Few issues can deepen a partisan divide more than the impeachment of a sitting president.
Republicans have leveraged that fact throughout the investigation that led to Friday’s party-line vote in the House Judiciary Committee to send articles of impeachment to the full House charging Trump with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.
Among the attacks during the impeachment hearings from Republicans and the White House was that the “do-nothing Democrats” were wasting time trying to undo the 2016 election, rather than working together to solve problems that impact Americans.
But, as this week’s agenda shows, other work was getting done.
While members attacked each other in front of the cameras, their staffs toiled behind the scenes working out differences between their bosses and the White House on trade, defense and spending, explained Curry, a former legislative staffer in the House.
“What’s interesting is that people don’t expect that these things can be getting done at the same time because the parties are so good at presenting their differences as being so personal,” he said.
The multi-tasking has happened before in past impeachments. During the Watergate hearings that forced the resignation of President Richard Nixon, Democrats controlled both the House and Senate, passing the Endangered Species Act and the War Powers Resolution, among other major pieces of legislation.
And the same year the House impeached President Bill Clinton in 1998, a Republican-controlled Congress passed a $200 billion transportation infrastructure bill, and the International Religious Freedom Act.
Shifting blame
That’s not to say that the expected impeachment of the president by the House this week hasn’t taken a toll on governing.
As of Dec. 5, 78 bills and resolutions have been enacted during the 116th Congress, according to Congress.gov, That’s less than a third of the total legislation enacted during the last period of divided government, between 2013 and 2014, according to an analysis by PolitiFact.
“House members have passed or agreed to 389 bills and 151 resolutions since January, when Democrats took control. But (Senate Majority Leader Mitch) McConnell has left many untouched in the GOP-led Senate, having vowed to block their progressive policies as the “grim reaper” to their bills on issues such as election security and background checks,” PolitiFact’s Bill McCarthy wrote.
“The Senate hasn’t done anything and impeachment hasn’t even gotten there,” Wallner said.
If the House votes to impeach, as expected, the Senate must hold a trial, which could take up to two weeks or more in January. But some Republican senators, such as Utah’s Mike Lee, have already been working with White House attorneys preparing Trump’s defense.
But even an impeachment trial doesn’t let the Senate completely off the hook from legislating, Wallner wrote in the blog Legislative Procedure.
“The Senate may adjourn the trial from day to day to consider legislative and executive business,” he wrote. “However, the rules stipulate that the trial will resume every day (Sundays excepted) at 12 p.m., unless otherwise ordered by the Senate, until a final verdict is reached.”
But Wallner doesn’t hold out hope that the Senate will use that time outside of the trial to get much done. He explained that waiting until the final hours to get something done is intentional and routine, and this year they will blame impeachment for the delays.