GOP leader forgets Republicans controlled Congress for Trump's first two years

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy complained that House Democrats were providing a check on Donald Trump and suggested that things would be much better if the GOP had total control.

In a Fox News interview on Friday, Rep. McCarthy (R-CA) noted that Trump has recently talked about Middle East peace, signed the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, and agreed to a deal with China, despite being tried in the Senate on two articles of impeachment.

“What if he had a Congress that would work with him?” McCarthy said. “Instead of blaming America first, actually working for America first. That would be a fundamental difference.”

But the reason the House has a Democratic majority is that Americans saw firsthand what having Trump and a totally Republican Congress looked like, from 2017 to 2018.

A Pew Research Center examination found that while 442 public laws were enacted over the 115th Congress, just 69% were substantive. Pew wrote that the Congress “notably, ended without funding large chunks of the federal government for the current fiscal year” which led to a partial government shutdown — the longest in U.S. history.

McCarthy was the House majority leader over that time and helped push two major pieces of legislation through the House.

One was the so-called Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which cut taxes for the very wealthy and corporations, and raised them for millions of families. That law has massively increased the annual budget deficit and helped cause the largest national debt in American history.

The other was the American Health Care Act (commonly known as “Trumpcare”), which failed in the U.S. Senate by one vote. It would have repealed Obamacare and replaced it with a system that left an estimated 23 million Americans uninsured.

Trump enthusiastically backed both bills, but the American public did not approve of either.

The American public’s verdict: In the November 2018 midterms, the House Democrats gained 41 seats and regained the majority for the first time since 2010.

And Trump remains one of the nation’s least popular presidents, with majorities consistently disapproving of his job performance.

Published with permission of The American Independent Foundation.