THE NEXT TIME DEMOCRATS HAVE FULL CONTROL OF WASHINGTON, MAYBE THEY SHOULD TRY TO DO THE "SMALL" STUFF

Politico's Michael Schaffer notes that many of the reforms proposed during Donald Trump's presidency haven't been enacted, even though Trump may return to power:

Two months before the 2020 elections, Jack Goldsmith and Bob Bauer published After Trump, a volume of proposals designed to protect the nation from future rogue chief executives.

The book’s 423 pages are chock full of wonky, granular measures: A reporting requirement for campaign contacts with foreign governments. A ban on presidential participation in a business interest. Mandatory release of candidates’ tax returns. Rules governing revocation of White House press passes. A prohibition against presidential self-pardons. New specificity about what constitutes a forbidden emolument. Laws spelling out how presidents can or can’t sack special counsels and inspectors general. Measures to isolate federal prosecutions from political interference....

And now, as polls suggest that “after Trump” may be turning into “between Trump,” almost none of those reform ideas have become reality....

Trump isn't the only potential 2024 winner we should be worried about. Remember what Ron DeSantis did after he won his first gubernatorial election:

Early in the Tallahassee transition, DeSantis burrowed into some essential reading material: a binder enumerating the powers of the office. “He was soaking that up,” Scott Parkinson, the transition’s deputy executive director, told me. DeSantis’s aim, he has said, was to understand all the “pressure points” within the system: what required legislative cooperation, what he could do unilaterally, which appointments needed which approvals.

If he's elected, DeSantis will push the limit of what a president is allowed to do -- and Republican-dominated federal courts will undoubtedly back him up. There's probably quite a bit overlap between his 2025 agenda and Trump's: Both, for instance, would probably fire thousands of career employees and replace them with loyalist hacks, because gutting "the administrative state" is all the rage on the right.

To some extent, I understand why Democrats didn't do much in President Biden's first two years in office to Trump-proof the federal government (or make it authoritarian-proof in a larger sense): They had a small majority in the House and controlled the Senate only through the vice president. They couldn't eliminate or modify the filibuster because Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema, and the GOP caucus wouldn't allow it.

But some of the Trump-proofing proposals might have had reasonably broad support. One reason Democrats didn't pursue them is that they had bigger priorities.

Democratic presidents who take office with Democratic-controlled Congresses invariably have bigger priorities. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama had healthcare reform. Obama and Biden needed to pass economic recovery packages. Biden had the many proposals of Build Back Better.

Oliver Willis says that Democrats suffer from "West Wing brain" -- they don't realize they're in a no-rules back-alley fight with Republicans, so they believe that lofty principles and common decency will make them popular with voters. I agree, but I also think they have "FDR brain," or possibly "LBJ brain": They also believe that using all their political capital on massive social programs will lead to widespread popularity and the kind of landslide victories Democrats experienced in 1936 and 1964.

If you tell them this doesn't work anymore, they point out that Clinton and Obama won re-election (and, therefore, Biden will too). The problem is, Clinton and Obama won despite their big healthcare efforts -- Clinton failed, and the Affordable Care Act was never popular during Obama's presidency.

Most Democrats seem to assume that the spending in Biden's Inflation Reduction Act will soon be popular even with blue-collar white voters -- it's infrastructure! -- but I have my doubts. I keep thinking about this 2016 New York Times story.

ELKHART, Ind. — Seven years ago President Obama came to this northern Indiana city, where unemployment was heading past 20 percent, for his first trip as president. Ed Neufeldt, the jobless man picked to introduce him, afterward donned three green rubber bracelets, each to be removed in turn as joblessness fell to 5 percent in the county, the state and the nation.

It took years — in 2012, Mr. Neufeldt lamented to a local reporter that he might wear his wristbands “to my casket” — but by last year they had all come off. Elkhart’s unemployment rate, at 3.8 percent, is among the country’s lowest, so low that employers here in the self-described R.V. capital of the world are advertising elsewhere for workers, offering sign-up bonuses, even hiring from a local homeless shelter.

Mr. Obama, whose four trips here during 2008 and 2009 tracked the area’s decline, is expected to return for the first time in coming weeks, both to showcase its recovery and to warn against going back to Republican economic policies. Yet where is Mr. Neufeldt leaning in this presidential election year? ... he is considering Donald J. Trump.

“I like the way he just won’t take nothing off of nobody,” Mr. Neufeldt said....

Few people here are thanking [Obama] for their recovery....

Big Democratic bills haven't been electoral winners in decades, so maybe the next time Democrats have full control of Washington -- assuming we still have elections after the next period of full Republican control -- the Dems should avoid moonshot legislation and do some of the "small" stuff instead. Much of it isn't small at all -- don't you wish Democrats in previous periods of full control had codified Roe v. Wade or made raising the debt ceiling automatic? I know that it would have been almost as hard to pass these bills as to pass big ones, but maybe they wouldn't consume the greater part of two years, and a few of them could get through Congress with enough of a push. It's worth thinking about.