Beware the Trifecta: History Shows Full Control of Government Is Fleeting

Congressional Memo

Beware the Trifecta: History Shows Full Control of Government Is Fleeting

The last five presidents have all had periods where both the House and the Senate were in friendly hands — but most lasted just two years before the backlash set in.

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By Carl Hulse

Reporting from the Capitol

After Republicans did better than expected in winning the White House, the House and the Senate in 2004, President George W. Bush famously claimed a mandate.

“I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and I intend to spend it,” Mr. Bush declared in boastful remarks as the favorable results were tallied that November.

Two years later, after Mr. Bush’s bid to privatize Social Security imploded without ever even coming up in Congress and exhaustion with the Iraq war set in, it was instead the president who was spent. Democrats took back Congress, and the governing trifecta Mr. Bush had trumpeted was gone.

The same thing then happened to Barack Obama, Donald J. Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. as they gained supremacy in Washington only to see it slip away after two years of aggressively pressing their agenda, with mixed results.

As they prepare for their latest stint in power, congressional Republicans are fully aware from recent history that they may have only two years to accomplish what they want without interference from pesky Democrats before facing a political reckoning. And even those two years could be perilous, with party divisions and small majorities complicating their work and voters expecting big things given their unified control in Washington.

“We’ve got a two-year window of opportunity,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas. “It’s going to be hard.”

The fleeting nature of the trifecta has been a regular topic of discussion among Republicans in their private meetings in recent days as they returned to Washington after their election triumph.

Trifectas can be great for the ruling party and provide an opening in often-gridlocked Washington to push through its top priorities. Mr. Obama was able to put in place a sweeping economic stimulus package in 2009 and the Affordable Care Act in 2010. Mr. Trump secured a trillion-dollar-plus tax cut. And Mr. Biden pushed through huge pandemic relief bills and major infrastructure legislation. Two years can produce a lot of change.

Trifectas can also seem daunting and demoralizing to the party out of power, as Republicans experienced in January 2009 when Congress convened with Democrats approaching a filibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate and holding a huge majority in the House. Republicans feared they might never see power again.

But trifectas can also be transitory, with the legislative efforts done largely along partisan lines and the cycles of politics prompting an inevitable backlash the next time voters weigh in on Congress.

That seeming insurmountable Democratic wall that Republicans confronted in early 2009 was demolished in 2010 when House Republicans gained more than 60 seats in Mr. Obama’s first midterm election and Senate Republicans began their climb back to the majority, though they would not recapture it until 2014.

“The American way is don’t give absolute power to anyone,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal, Democrat of Connecticut. “Don’t give it all to one party or person. We are the checks-and-balances nation. That’s the core of what the founders believed and is in our DNA.”

Trifectas used to be more common when Democrats had an extended streak of control of both the Senate and the House after the Great Depression. But political fortunes began to shift more regularly beginning in the 1990s.

President Bill Clinton had a trifecta during his first two years in office, but it collapsed under the weight of a failed effort to overhaul health care policy and Democratic arrogance in the House, leading Republicans to win a takeover of the House in 1994 after 40 years in the wilderness. In the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, Mr. Bush actually had four years of a trifecta from 2003 to 2007, but it has been two-year intervals since then.

One explanation is that holding unified power in Washington tends to spur a drive by the party in control to push the policy envelope as far as possible and make it difficult, if not impossible, for those in the other party to back the resulting legislation.

That was the case in the fight over the Affordable Care Act in 2009 and 2010, when Republicans capitalized on public unease over the legislation to attack Democrats, even though the policy approach had been built on ideas that originated with the G.O.P. They were able to make the case that Democrats were steamrolling them and imposing a new health care regime on the public along party lines.

Then, when Republicans assembled their own trifecta during the first two years of the Trump administration, they invested much of their time and energy in trying to undo the health care law. They ultimately failed, wasting much of their precious time in full control of the government and drawing a rebuke in 2018 from voters who now liked the health care law.

Republicans say they learned plenty from their last experience with unified power and plan to get out of the gate quickly with a torrent of legislation and nominees to take advantage of what could be a brief moment in political time.

And with Republicans all over Washington tossing around the word “mandate” very freely in the wake of the election, it is pretty clear that their big plans do not include trying to win Democratic support.

“We do have the mandate,” Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters this week, saying he anticipated “the most consequential Congress in the modern era, the most consequential administration in the modern era.”

To Democrats still licking their wounds, that sounds like overreach in the making that could ultimately accrue to their political benefit in two years — though of course there is always the possibility that Republicans could do such a good job that voters opt to keep the trifecta going.

Democrats doubt that.

“Restraint is one of the more difficult leadership qualities to exercise, and I have seen very little appetite for it on the Trump side,” said Senator Peter Welch, Democrat of Vermont.

Even as they get ready for a fast start, Republicans accept that their trifecta is tenuous, particularly with what is certain to be a very small majority in the House. That gives Democrats an excellent shot of knocking them out of power in 2026, a point in the political cycle that historically favors the party on the outs.

“It is pretty fragile,” Senator Kevin Cramer, Republican of North Dakota, conceded of his party’s total hold on things.

With the clock already ticking, Republicans know they have to plunge ahead and notch whatever victories they can, recognizing the reality that two years in full control is about as much as they should expect.

“It means,” Mr. Cramer said, “that we just have to do our thing.”

Trump Builds His Administration

As his team ramps up the transition process, President-elect Donald Trump says his administration will radically reshape the federal government.

• Health and Human Services: Trump said he would nominate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to lead the Department of Health and Human Services. Kennedy’s vaccine skepticism and unorthodox views about medicine, including about fluoride in water, make public health officials uneasy.
• Immigration: Trump’s plans to expel noncitizens on a mass scale are likely to raise prices on goods and services and lower employment rates for U.S. workers, many economists say.
• Middle East: Trump’s emerging team in the Middle East appears poised to push U.S. foreign policy into even tighter accord with Israel’s far-right government.
• Skirting the Senate: Trump’s demand that Senate Republicans surrender their role in vetting his nominees poses an early test of whether his second term will be more radical than his first.
• Slashing Government: Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy have been tapped to lead what Trump called the Department of Government Efficiency, which he said would seek “drastic change.”