Voters picked a Democratic Congress and kept a Republican president, which is about the closest thing to a spending freeze this country ever gets by accident.
The Associated Press and ABC News projected this week that Democrats won both the House and the Senate. Trump’s answer was to remind everybody he still has a veto. “I have total veto power, so they have to come to us,” he said. Whatever you think of the man, he knows where his leverage lives.
Then there’s the blame game. Vance says Republicans lost because of the Iran war, and Trump called that post “good.” Maybe so. But AP’s voter poll found about a third of voters called the war crucial to their vote, while roughly half said the same about the cost of living or government corruption. The war mattered. The grocery bill and the grift mattered more. Blaming one foreign policy decision is a lot more comfortable than admitting your own voters think the people running things are either broke or on the take.
My worry is the winners. A party that just took both chambers will feel a mandate to spend, and I’ve heard the “we just need more revenue” song from both sides for years. Revenue isn’t the problem. The Government Accountability Office says Washington sent out roughly $186 billion in payments it shouldn’t have in fiscal 2025, which works out to about $510 million a day. If Democrats want to prove they earned this, start there. Hold hearings, fix the programs that have been above 10% error rates for years, and make the tax code collect what it already says people owe. No new rates required.
I’ll admit I like the arrangement for a different reason. Democrats can pass whatever they want, and Trump can kill it. Trump can ask for whatever he wants, and Congress can ignore him. Anything that survives has to be something both sides can live with, which is a standard I’d happily apply to a lot more of Washington. A boring, workable middle-ground bill on something like gun purchase checks would be exactly the sort of thing this setup could produce, and I wouldn’t bet my lunch money on it, because both parties have spent years caring more about the other side being wrong than about being right themselves.
Last week I wrote that nobody knew who those early voters picked. Now we know, and the result is a split government that has to bargain. It isn’t pretty. It’s also hard to run up the tab when nobody can pass anything alone.
My two cents: Divided government is annoying, slow and a little ridiculous, and it’s the only kind that has never mailed me a surprise bill.