How Trump Must Cook with the Senate

Wilson’s century-old lesson is more applicable than ever now for President Trump as he navigates the United States Senate in order to pass his big beautiful bill. Navigate them correctly and legislation can fly through. Antagonize or ignore them and watch legislation die a slow death. Welcome to the wild, weird, wonderful world of the Senate.

To understand this world, let’s pretend we are preparing a meal for our friends. Like for any meal, you would have the Kitchen, the Chefs, the Mashgiach, and finally, the Menu.

The Kitchen  ̶  What is the Senate? In order to prepare a meal, you need to know how many ovens you have and ingredients with which to cook. The legislative kitchen was a massive debate during the founding of America.  The House of Representatives was easy. It was proportional representation. This is why California has 52 members of the House and Alaska only has one. The Senate was also supposed to have representational government, but a giant fight broke out over the unfairness to smaller states. A compromise was reached called the “Connecticut Compromise,” which apportioned two seats apiece to every state in the Union. This is why California has two senators and Alaska has two senators. Alaska has far less power in the House than it does in the Senate. This type of representation led to the makeup of 100 senators compared to the 435 members of the House.

Trump’s Challenge: The challenge for Trump’s bill is that he has a Republican majority of only six seats, all of which require their place in the kitchen during the discussion and debate of this bill.