Republicans for a Social Security Tax Hike?

 Many posts have discussed Social Security and Medicare.

Steve Thompson at WP:

For decades, Washington has replayed the same fight over taming the soaring national debt: Democrats cite a need for more taxes. Republicans refuse. And anyone who suggests cutting the biggest source of spending — federal retirement benefits — gets attacked.

But a coming crisis in Social Security appears to be pushing at least a few Republicans off the GOP’s long-standing pledge never to raise taxes.

This summer, Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) joined Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Massachusetts) in proposing to raise the payroll tax cap so people with higher incomes pay more into the program. Now the idea is emerging as an acceptable fix among other GOP lawmakers, including Rep. Tom Cole (Oklahoma), the influential chair of the House Appropriations Committee.

“We’ve got too many people who say, ‘Well, we have to stay within the current income level or stay at the current tax rate,’” Cole said in an interview. “I’m willing to look at the tax rate. I am willing to raise the amount of income through tax.”

The rare GOP concessions on taxes come as lawmakers begin to confront a Social Security shortfall so large and so imminent that the party’s traditional demand for curtailing benefits is unlikely to suffice. In just six years, millions of Social Security recipients will absorb a 22 percent cut in benefits unless lawmakers provide an immediate infusion of nearly $500 billion.

“Twenty or thirty years ago,” when the shortfall was far in the future, “you could come up with a straight-faced solution” that solved the problem entirely by cutting future benefits, said Charles Blahous, a senior research strategist at George Mason University’s Mercatus Center who served from 2010 to 2015 as the Republican public trustee for Social Security.

Now the problem is so big and urgent, Blahous said, “I don’t think you can look at it with a straight face and not do all of the above.”

Grover Norquist, founder of Americans for Tax Reform and the longtime enforcer of Republican anti-tax orthodoxy, dismissed the crack in party discipline, arguing that Republicans should stick to demanding spending cuts. Otherwise, he said, they risk infuriating voters already angry about the high cost of living.

“When Republicans say no to tax increases, they win. When they say yes to tax increases, they lose,” Norquist said. “They don’t get spending cuts — at all. And, they get smeared in the next election.”

The Constitution and Election Law

Previous posts have discussed authoritarian moves by the executive branch.

U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, found the new Postal Service rule on mail-in ballots is likely unlawful and unconstitutional,

The Elections Clause of the Constitution provides: 

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of ch[oo]sing Senators. U.S. CONST. art. I, § 4, cl. 1. 

“[T]hese comprehensive words embrace authority to provide a complete code for congressional elections, not only as to times and places, but in relation to notices, registration, supervision of voting, protection of voters, prevention of fraud and corrupt practices, [and] counting of votes[.]” Smiley v. Holm, 285 U.S. 355, 366 (1932). “In practice, the Clause functions as ‘a default provision; it invests the States with responsibility for the mechanics of congressional elections, but only so far as Congress declines to pre-empt state legislative choices.’” Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, Inc., 570 U.S. 1, 9 (2013) (quoting Foster v. Love, 522 U.S. 67, 69 (1997)). “Because the power the Elections Clause confers is none other than the power to pre-empt, the reasonable assumption is that the statutory text accurately communicates the scope of Congress’s preemptive intent. . . . Unlike the States’ historic police powers, the States’ role in regulating congressional elections . . . has always existed subject to the express qualification that it terminates according to federal law.” Id. at 1415 (citation modified).  

 Accordingly, as to the time, place, and manner of federal elections, the Elections Clause “grants Congress ‘the power to override state regulations’ by establishing uniform rules for federal elections, binding on the States.” Foster, 522 U.S. at 69 (quoting U.S. Term Limits, Inc. v. Thornton, 514 U.S. 779, 832–33 (1995)).13  

...

The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections.14 Broadly, the Constitution vests the President with “executive Power” and commands him to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed[.]” U.S. CONST. art. II, §§ 1, 3. The President “plays no direct role in the process” of appointing electors, “nor does he have authority to control the state officials who do.” Trump v. United States, 603 U.S. 593, 627 (2024). As the Supreme Court has observed, “the President’s power to see that the laws are faithfully executed refutes the idea that he is to be a lawmaker.” Medellín v. Texas, 552 U.S. 491, 526–27 (2008) (quoting Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579, 587 (1952)). 

Disappearing Town Halls

Kate Santaliz at Axios:

The congressional town hall is becoming an endangered species.

Why it matters: August recess once meant lawmakers returning home to face constituents — sometimes friendly, sometimes furious. After a wave of explosive confrontations last year, many lawmakers have stopped them altogether.

Rep. Mike Flood (R-Neb.) is among the dwindling number of lawmakers who still regularly subject themselves to the traditional, open town hall.

"You've got to show up in the town square and answer the questions. I told people I'd do it when I ran, and I kept my promise," Flood told Axios.

Flood holds three in-person town halls a year. He said his forums last year each drew about 750 people, while attendance this year has ranged from 235 to 315.

Zoom in: Only 11 lawmakers have town halls scheduled for the rest of August, according to LegiStorm's town hall tracker.For a ritual once synonymous with August recess, that's a remarkably thin showing.

Flashback: Republicans got screamed at — a lot — at town halls last year, as constituents vented over DOGE, federal layoffs and the Trump administration's spending cuts.Rep. Chuck Edwards (R-N.C.) was booed, heckled and repeatedly interrupted at a March 2025 town hall in Asheville as he defended Trump and Elon Musk's DOGE cuts.

During an August 2025 town hall, constituents shouted at Flood, "Liar!" and "You don't care about us!"

The angry confrontations prompted NRCC chair Richard Hudson (R-N.C.) to tell Republicans to stop holding in-person town halls.

In summer 2009, Democrats faced angry voters at their town hall meetings across the country as constituents protested the Affordable Care Act. (As of January 2026, public approval of the ACA was 61%, according to KFF.)Democrats suffered historic losses in the 2010 midterm election.

Saving Social Security: Lotsa Luck

 Many posts have discussed Social Security and Medicare.

Jeff Stein at NOTUS:

A group of eight centrist senators is attempting to compel Congress to revamp Social Security, in what many in Washington see as the first real effort at overhauling the government’s biggest program in more than a decade.

The push, led by retiring Sens. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) and Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), sets the stage for a major confrontation later this year with potential consequences for the 59 million seniors who currently receive benefits.

Their bill, the PROMISE Act, does not directly cut Social Security benefits or raise taxes to avert the program’s approaching budget shortfall. Rather, it would task a bipartisan board with writing a plan to keep the pension system funded for another 50 years, likely through trillions of dollars in tax hikes and benefit cuts. The legislation would also establish parliamentary rules aimed at pushing Congress to act on the board’s proposal.

...

AARP — the roughly 40-million-members-strong seniors’ organization — has begun urging lawmakers to reject the bill, highlighting polling that suggests 85% of Americans support maintaining or increasing benefits. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) has begun calling for Senate Democrats to reject benefit cuts and instead stand behind financing Social Security by repealing the existing limit on payroll taxes for those earning more than $184,500 per year, arguing “the Democratic Party is ever to regain the faith of ordinary Americans it must stand firm on the issue of Social Security.”

Even conservatives who have long called for Social Security reform are mobilizing against it. Grover Norquist, the antitax crusader who leads the conservative Americans for Tax Reform, said in an interview that he has begun lobbying congressional Republican leadership to oppose the bill. Norquist called the legislation a “very real effort by the left” to convince Republicans to support tax hikes.

One Senate Democratic aide, granted anonymity to candidly assess legislative dynamics, said, “I will eat my shoe” if the bill passes this year.

Durbin acknowledged those odds: “Miracles do occur,” he said.

In another potential sign of the legislation’s radioactivity, half of its original sponsors — Cassidy, Durbin, Tillis and Republican John Cornyn of Texas — are leaving the Senate at the end of this year. (Cassidy and Cornyn lost their primaries against Trump-backed challengers.)

Boomers Cling to Wealth and Power

Many posts have discussed demographic trends, especially the decline of births and the aging of the population.

Bruce Mehlman:

The first of the Baby Boomer generation turns 80 this year, with the fourth and likely last of the Baby Boomer Presidents well-into his second term. Leadership will eventually pass to younger generations. But Boomers still hold much of the wealth and many of the offices, and they appear in no hurry to hand things over. A brief look at generational inheritance.

...

Decades of rising earnings and asset values left Baby Boomers and older Americans holding nearly two-thirds of assets. And the wealth has outlasted the traditional handoff: Americans are living and working longer, while judges, Senators, House members and CEOs are markedly older than they were a generation ago.

Older generations are also sticking around longer in government & business… the average age of judges, Senators, House members & CEOs climbed for four decades and remains at or near record highs.

The Paradox of Competition in House Elections

Many posts have discussed the state of Congress.

 Bruce Mehlman:

While overall House control is highly competitive, most individual House seats are not. Three straight Houses have seen single digit majorities, the first such run since the 1790s — even as the number of genuinely balanced districts has collapsed. (David Wasserman, Cook Political)

Trust Over Time

 Many posts have discussed confidence in institutions.

Bruce Mehlman:

Aging Congress

Many posts have discussed the state of Congress.

Elena Shao at NYT:

The sudden death of Senator Lindsey Graham, the 71-year-old Republican of South Carolina, has renewed criticism of an increasingly aging Congress and the systems and norms that continue to reward seniority and tenure.

More than a third of U.S. senators are 70 or older. In the Senate and the House, that age cohort has grown markedly over the past few decades, and now makes up a quarter of membership across both chambers.

 

Nonbelievers on Capitol Hill

Many posts have discussed the role of religion in American life.

Mark Z. Barabak at LAT:

[California Democratic House Member Jared] Huffman is the rare American — one of only about 10% or so — who flatly state they do not believe in God, or any higher power for that matter. What makes him rarer still is his place in Congress. Huffman, who represents a sprawling slice of Northern California, reaching from the Bay Area to the Oregon border, is one of just four members (out of more than 500) who are openly agnostic or religiously unaffiliated.

He is, by far, the most outspoken.

Huffman, who publicly revealed his nonreligious status in 2017, helped form the Congressional Freethought Caucus, which consists of about three dozen members of various religious stripe, each dedicated to the proposition that church and state should be distinct. He’s written a book, due out next month, raising an alarm and summoning Americans to fight the rising tide of Christian nationalism roiling our divided land.

An overwhelming favorite to win an eighth congressional term in November, Huffman, a Democrat, calls himself a humanist and described it this way:

“To me, it means good without God. It means you don’t need the inducement or fear of an afterlife to have a moral framework and to know your place in the universe. You’re sort of at peace with the reality that, as far as we know, this is it. You get one time around.

...

Ignoring the counsel of family, friends and political advisors who, to a person, warned against it, Huffman revealed his religious disbelief in a series of statements and interviews in November 2017. At the time, the only member of Congress to ever publicly come out as an atheist was Rep. Pete Stark, who announced his sentiments in 2007; though the Fremont Democrat was reelected twice, he was eventually defeated by a Democratic rival who turned his lack of faith against him.

That rival was Eric Swalwell; make of it what you will.

Huffman braced for political blowback. There was none, though he’s gotten death threats and plenty of admonishments he’s bound for Hell.

(Meantime, the congressional ranks of the religiously unaffiliated have grown to include Democratic Reps. Yassamin Ansari of Arizona and Emily Randall of Washington and Republican Rep. Abraham Hamadeh of Arizona.)

Gallup January 26, 2024:

Take these numbers with some skepticism.  In the poll, 70% said they would not vote for a convicted felon, but on Election Day, nearly half of voters did so. 

The Districts Are Too Damn Big

Many posts have discussed reapportionment and redistricting.  There have long been proposals to enlarge the House, thereby creating less populous districts.

Bruce Mehlman:

At the Constitutional Convention, George Washington spoke only once — to urge that representation remain close to the people, with a ratio of one representative for every 30,000. For more than a century, Congress followed that blueprint, with the House growing steadily from 65 members in 1789 to 435 by 1913. And then it stopped. Today, the actual ratio is roughly one representative for every 760,000 Americans. Is there any population at which a House district becomes too big to represent?

Constraints on Presidential War Power

Many posts have discussed war powers and the US military.

Matt Glassman:

My view, as discussed last week, is that presidential warmaking is an almost wholly political issue, rather than a legal one. No court is going to stop a war.

That said, I think may people hear "wholly political" and just assume that the president has a free hand to do whatever he/she wants. I completely disagree. In fact, presidents are incredibly constrained by politics when it comes to war.

Take Trump and Iran. What are some of the major political constraints:

1. Military capacity
2. Cooperation of allies
3. Reaction of foreign adversaries
4. Reaction of markets
5. Congressional opinion
6. American public opinion
7. Partisan/base opinion

The first two---military capacity and ally cooperation---are straightforward; they are essentially supply-side constraints. Presidents can only go to war with the military Congress provides. Ditto with allies; absent the ability to use airspace and foreign bases, some operations become impossible. And it's always better to have a coalition of nations fighting the war than going it alone.

The third and fourth items on the list---foreign and market reactions---are constraints because they create immediate negative feedback, political and economic. Trump can't just nuke Tehran because that could easily trigger an escalation to global war, and WW3 with China is a bad outcome. Similarly, now that Iran has closed the strait and oil prices are spiking, the economic costs of the war may soon exceed the benefits, encouraging the president to seek a diplomatic off-ramp.

The final three items---opinions in Congress, the public, and the president's party---are the most purely political. These matter because the president has goals other than the objectives of the war, and negative opinions about the war will inevitably spill over to future political goals, whether they are policy, electoral, or egoist.

Decline of Elite-Educated Republican Lawmakers

Many posts have discussed the politics of colleges and universities in the United States.

Volden C, Wai J, Wiseman AE. On the Decline of Elite-Educated Republicans in Congress. Perspectives on Politics. 2026;24(1):256-268. doi:10.1017/S1537592725102260

We identify a rise in educational polarization among members of the US Congress mirroring the educational polarization in the American mass public. Over the past half-century, the percentage of Republican representatives who attended elite educational institutions declined from 40% to 15%, and the percentage of similarly educated Republican senators declined from 55% to 35%, while the ranks of elite-educated Democrats rose in both chambers. These changes across the parties have mapped into observable differences in behavior and approaches toward lawmaking. We find that elite-educated legislators are much more liberal in their voting patterns, suggesting a link between the decline in elite-educated Republicans and ideological polarization in Congress. We also demonstrate that, in the House, elite-educated Democrats are especially effective lawmakers, but not so for elite-educated Republicans. In the Senate, we establish a link between the decline of elite-educated Republicans and the rise of partisan warrior “Gingrich Senators.” Overall, these patterns offer initial glimpses into how political elites are being drawn from different educational cohorts, representing an important transition in American governance.