The trend dates back to Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich.
Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris are running on policies that would push budget deficits toward $4 trillion a decade from now—and hoping for a same-party Congress that rubber stamps their expensive agendas. For voters who still worry about unsustainable government debt (all eight of us), navigating various election outcomes is not always straightforward. In recent decades, however, combining a Democratic president with a Republican Congress has produced the most fiscally restrained outcomes.
When a Republican Congress is paired with a Democratic president, both the GOP’s natural deficit-hawk rhetoric and its partisan aspirations of curbing the president’s ambitions point in the same direction. After House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the Republican Congress took power in 1995, they declared war on President Bill Clinton’s business-as-usual spending, shut down the government twice for a total of 26 days, and later negotiated the 1997 budget deal that contributed to budget surpluses in 1998. Clinton and Gingrich also negotiated a historic deal to fix Social Security that was mere days away from an announcement when the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke and blew up their bipartisan collaboration.
Similarly, a backlash against President Barack Obama’s spending contributed to the “Tea Party GOP” winning control of the House in 2011. The subsequent fight over raising the debt limit induced months of bipartisan “grand deal” deficit negotiations that resulted in the 2011 Budget Control Act. Although some of the BCA’s spending caps were later relaxed, the 2011-2016 period saw net spending cuts relative to the baseline cost of continuing current policies (and saw Republicans win a Senate majority in 2014). Opposing a Democratic president’s spending ambitions is easy politics for a GOP Congress—achieving partisan ends while condemning “big government.”
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Brian M. Riedl is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Follow him on Twitter here.
Photo by PAUL J. RICHARDS/AFP via Getty Images
