The Senate is working away this week, even after House members opted to get nothing done in their home districts instead of doing the same in Washington. When the upper chamber eventually packs up, though, it will likely be without major action on the No. 1 issue on voters’ minds this fall: affordability. If it does, it will mark the end of a period of political and legislative malpractice that has left millions of Americans in the lurch financially to appease the ego of President Donald Trump.
The warning signs have been there for months.
The warning signs have been there for months. As far back as December, polls showed that Trump’s own voters were beginning to blame him for rising costs. Since then, medical costs have risen and are poised to soar even higher by early next year. Electric bills have gone up thanks, in part, to a wave of data centers powering the artificial intelligence boom. And the cost of almost everything else has skyrocketed after the Iranian government closed the Strait of Hormuz, a vital shipping lane, in response to Trump starting a war he promised would be over in weeks. The flow of oil from the Middle East has been heavily stanched for months, leaving analysts worried that another major leap in gasoline and diesel prices could drive up costs even further.
Despite this clear signal that something is amiss, there has been little action from the GOP-controlled Congress to address those concerns. Credit where it’s due, though: Congress got the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act over the line this summer. The bill was designed to tackle housing costs over the long term, even if Trump shunned the new law after its passage. But one victory does not an economic legislative package make, and while last year’s “Big Beautiful Bill” may have been a boon for America’s wealthiest, it has done nothing to ease the collective pinch in most voters’ wallets.
There’s also been no effort to fix the tariff debacle Trump championed, and it has only grown worse in recent weeks. An escalating trade war with Canada has done little to boost the hopes of GOP Senate candidates, who now must deal with the fallout. (To wit, as Punchbowl News reported: “A Republican senator on the ballot this year told us that the White House is ‘putting a noose around all of our necks’ by escalating a trade war this close to the election.”) Yet Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., will make no effort to even consider a bill from his counterpart, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., to block the new levies against Canada, and other tariffs.
The House at least spent its last days scrambling to get something done to ease prices. As MS NOW’s Jack Fitzpatrick and Syedah Asghar reported last week, ahead of the GOP leadership’s decision to pack it in, there was a push from the House Freedom Caucus to enact a three-month pause on the federal gas tax. Even if it had passed, like other gas tax holidays before it, the proposal would have offered relatively little relief and at the cost of needed federal revenue.
The evergreen lack of consensus among the GOP caucus’ narrow majority has left Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., forced to stall, while admitting to reporters that the price of gas was a major problem:
“I don’t know that we have consensus around what that would look like,” Johnson said of efforts to curb those costs. “There was about five or six different ideas on it. There’ll be a number of measures in the days ahead, working to lower gas prices as much as possible. Of course, there’s many factors in why gas prices are so high.”
In almost any other year that would be true, but the overriding reason for higher energy costs right now is the Iran war. Thune himself admitted last week that the best way to address many of the affordability concerns dragging his party down was to “open up the strait.” Of course, the strait was open before Trump started the war that he can’t figure out how to end.
The House, before it skipped town this week, did also overwhelmingly pass the Ratepayer Protection Act, which is intended to curb how much average consumers are footing the bill for data centers. But an attempt from Sen. Jon Husted, R-Ohio, to fast-track that bill in the Senate stalled out over concerns that most of its provisions were voluntary or came as recommendations to states.
The problem they have faced is that any fix they could have proposed would have involved standing up to the man who put them in this position to begin with.
Instead, the Senate will be spending its time during these last few weeks confirming nominations and trying to pass a college sports bill from Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas. It’s not exactly the stuff that political comebacks are built on — and boy, could the GOP have used a more compelling narrative than fearmongering about communism right about now. If only ensuring that food was affordable and medicine available had been a bigger priority than trying to push through a pro-cryptocurrency industry bill that failed to advance.
Again, Republicans have known for months that the odds were good that the economy would be a problem come fall. The problem they have faced is that any fix they could have proposed would have involved standing up to the man who put them in this position to begin with. The shooting war with Iran and the trade war with the rest of the world were both within the GOP’s power to end long before a single ballot was cast. But now, with the first rounds of early voting set to begin, it’s too late for congressional Republicans to do much else other than see their inaction come back to haunt them.
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