You have no experience with party politics, and so you can perhaps be forgiven for misinterpreting the data you are citing (or rather, it's more likely that you googled data that you thought would undergird your argument). Yes, the party ends up voting with the President, but not because he is exerting all of this influence on them. In fact, Trump has been battling the leaders of his own party since before his election. The party overwhelmingly supported Cruz, and Trump only won because a massive amount of new voters registered as Republicans in order to support him. Most party members follow the Senate and House leadership because if they don't, they won't get the juicy committee assignments. Then, with the legislators all in the pocket of leadership, they go to the President and haggle until there is some kind of compromise that they can all agree on. If the President is strong, he will get more of his stuff passed. If he is weak, he caves to Congress more. The pressure is always to appear unified and pass a budget, so crazy spending items from various special interests are almost always in there, whether the President wanted it or not. I do blame Presidents for signing the final legislation, but it doesn't mean it was their idea, or even that they influenced any of it.StevensTechU wrote:
It gets what it deserves.
If my kids do what I want them to do 75% of the time, then you must be of the mind that I have no influence on them since they don't do what I want 100% of the time.
Here's your relevant information. Save for less than a handful, it's routinely 90%+ for Republican senators, not 75% used for illustration. https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/co ... ump-score/ Further evidence that this is a power entrenched in the presidency, https://www.rollcall.com/2014/02/03/sen ... dies-show/
What facts did you give? The above are facts. What you shared is what you remember from Civics class with some 'ad' thrown in for Latin flavor. Credit for memory but zero credit for explanation for current events. So I'm sorry that your Civics course didn't teach you that the President is also a head of a party and, in being so, has an outsized influence on members of his party regardless of their branch of government.
One interesting data point in your link was that Rand Paul, a libertarian-leaning deficit hawk, votes with the President less than 70% of the time, one of the lowest percentages among Republicans. As a comparison, Mitt Romney can't stand Trump and even voted to impeach him, but still votes with the President 81.6% of the time. Yet Paul and Trump have a pretty strong relationship and Trump picked him to be one of his RNC endorsement speakers (Romney didn't make the list for some reason). I think that gives us a hint about Trump's personal politics vs. how he ends up voting on spending bills.
Another example was the appointment of John Ratcliffe as Director of National Intelligence. Ratcliffe has been a huge advocate for Trump during the FISA-gate stuff, as well as the impeachment hearings, etc. So Trump was quick to reward him with the appointment, but the Senate Republicans, particularly Committee leaders like Richard Burr (Senate Intelligence) refused to confirm him because his pro-Trump agenda conflicted with theirs. They knew, for instance, that Ratcliffe would begin de-classifying a bunch of FISA documents showing the anti-Trump bias in the intelligence community. So, Ratcliffe was forced to withdraw from consideration. Trump's response was to make Ric Grenell the interim DNI, and Grenell proceeded to de-classify en masse until Burr and others concluded that they could work with Ratcliffe after all. Grenell also gave a nice speech at the RNC. If you looked at your data, all you would see is that everyone voted for Ratcliffe and gave the President what he wanted. That wasn't how it happened though.