Comment on Maybe Congress Should Have Stayed Home

“GOP leaders are staring down two bad options to solve President-elect Donald Trump’s debt-limit problem, after failing to execute his demand to lift the federal borrowing cap in the last government funding bill,” Politico reports. “One path requires full buy-in from Republican lawmakers to address the issue via budget reconciliation — a huge challenge thanks to the party’s fierce fiscal hawks.

Gerald Seib: “Carter had been running a Georgia peanut farm just a few years before his improbable victory in 1976. At a time that the presidency had long been passed from one insider to another, he showed that an outsider could break through. In a sense, Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump both walked in his footsteps.” “Though the phenomenon now is associated with Republicans, Carter actually brought evangelical Christians into the political arena as an organized force.

On the campaign trail, Donald Trump promised to launch the “largest deportation” in American history. But actually getting that done will require billions of dollars to hire thousands of new federal workers and pay for new spaces to hold those waiting to be deported. But perhaps most daunting will be another obstacle: moving through a massive backlog in immigration court cases.

“If measured by the number of bills signed into law, the 118th Congress was by far the most unproductive since at least the 1980s,” Axios reports. “That is not the only metric of success, but the stunning stat is a marker of how difficult the chaos of the last two years made actual legislating.”

James Poniewozik: “Other presidents were more celebrated for their on-screen presences, but in 1979 he gave one of the White House’s most astonishing televised speeches.”

New York Times: “Mr. Carter had a hot-and-cold relationship with the fellow members of the exclusive club of presidents — more cold than hot, in fact. From his re-election defeat in 1980 until his death on Sunday, he was the odd man out, distant from the Republicans and Democrats who followed him and often getting on their nerves because of his outspokenness.” “He did not join his fellow presidents on the high-dollar speaking circuit, nor did he team up for many joint humanitarian missions.