WASHINGTON -- After last year's successful drive to cut taxes, Republicans controlling Capitol Hill are opting for a scaled-back, controversy-free agenda.
For sure, Republicans in Washington feel good about the effect their overhaul of the nation's tax code is having on the economy, and recent polling suggests it's getting more popular as the midterm elections draw closer. But looking ahead to other potential legislation to boast about in hopes of boosting GOP chances of retaining control of the House and Senate, the agenda is pretty thin.
Trump's trillion-dollar-plus plan to boost infrastructure has landed with a thud. Hopes in the House of overhauling welfare are fizzling. And issues like immigration and now even gun control invite internal GOP divisions at the height of primary season. Repealing and replacing former President Barack Obama's health care law is off the table.
Instead, the GOP-controlled Congress is looking ahead to a year of abbreviated workweeks and low-profile initiatives. The House is spending more time on the obscure and the arcane; the Senate is being turned over for weeks at a time to routine nominations.
On Monday, for example, the House was voting on seven bills to rename post offices.
Instead of repealing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, lawmakers are promising bipartisan legislation to free smaller and mid-sized banks from stricter regulations passed in 2010, fund the fight against opioids, and implement the party's promise for a military buildup.
"We're going to have the largest defense buildup since Ronald Reagan. Most Republicans, they'd consider that a pretty big accomplishment. We're going to clearly do more on opioids than we've ever done," said Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla. "They may be secondary issues to most people, but if you can pick off three or four big things like that, I think you've got something to run on."
Opioid funding and the Pentagon increases are on track to pass this month as part of a $1.3 trillion catchall spending bill, a follow-on measure to a long-sought bipartisan budget outline that passed in February.
But for now, the Capitol Hill agenda is light.
The Senate spent last week on a series of confirmation votes, continuing a pattern since Trump took office of devoting one out of every three weeks, on average, solely to voting on Trump nominees.
At other times, Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., steers clear of contentious legislation and avoids Democratic filibusters. Every bill that passed the Senate last year either advanced under filibuster-proof rules or with the support of Democrats.
The result was that the Senate floor became, for weeks at a stretch, a legislative dead zone.
For its part, the House had a two-day workweek on noncontentious legislation last week after GOP leaders canceled votes for Wednesday and Thursday, citing the decision to have Rev. Billy Graham lie in honor in the Capitol Rotunda.
But some Democrats weren't buying it, noting that the supposed precedent cited by GOP leaders to cancel votes wasn't an ironclad tradition. They suggested the real reason was that the House had nothing to do and that lawmakers wanted to stay out of town to avoid political pressure on guns.
Rep. Bill Pascrell, D-N.J., said they should have spent last week working on legislation to reduce gun violence.
Instead, the House passed legislation aimed at cracking down on sex trafficking on the Internet, which is part of a low-profile but widely backed Capitol Hill effort to combat human trafficking.
This week, though, it's back to the Blocking Regulatory Interference from Closing Kilns Act, which would delay new Environmental Protection Agency rules for brick makers.
Bigger issues like a renewal of farm programs are a possibility, but a fight over House GOP demands to cut food stamps threatens to stall it.
In the Senate, Republicans are looking ahead to scaling back the 2010 Dodd-Frank law. Rather than an outright repeal, Republicans appear set to embrace a Senate effort that's focused more on providing regulatory relief to smaller banks. A number of Senate Democrats have signed on, especially those from rural states won by Trump.
A Section on 03/06/2018