Are We Better Off With a Democrat President . . . and a Republican Congress That Suddenly Remembers It Hates Big Government?

Would a second Donald Trump term have been preferable to a Joe Biden term? Of course, for a whole host of reasons.

But there are strange dynamics in politics that often give us what we want from combinations we wouldn’t have expected to deliver. Can you name the year when we had 4.75 percent economic growth and a balanced budget? And who was president at the time?

No, it wasn’t during the Reagan years, when we had solid growth but never came close to balancing the budget. It was 1999, when Bill Clinton was president.

Now, you may ask, how can that be? Clinton raised taxes and spent like a drunken sailor, right?

Clinton raised taxes in his first year, and the result was a red wave election in 1994 that made Newt Gingrich the Speaker of the House. That’s when things got interesting. The Gingrich House Republicans were serious about restraining federal spending. Perhaps that was only the case because they didn’t want to let a Democrat president buy votes, but whatever the motivation, Gingrich held firm.

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And Clinton was a smart politician. He recognized the lay of the land and saw that he wasn’t going to be able to spend the way Democrats normally like to. So he made a deal with Gingrich to cut the capital gains tax, and took credit for the resulting booming economy and budget surplus.

The public had no objection. It was a rare case of good policy under a Democrat president, even though the Democrat president would surely have produced different policies given the freedom to do so.

Could we see a repeat of this dynamic under Joe Biden?

Probably not in Biden’s first two years, because Nancy Pelosi will still run the Democrat-controlled House, and Republicans will only have a small Senate majority even under the best of circumstances (which is two wins in the January 5 Georgia runoffs). The best Mitch McConnell’s crew can probably do in 2021 and 2022 is restraint Biden’s worst impulses.

But the second half of Biden’s first (and presumably only) term could be a different story. With the gains Republicans made in the House this year, they’re in an excellent position to win back control of the House in 2022. It’s customary for the party out of power to gain congressional seats in off-year elections, and Republicans will likely only need to flip six or seven seats to take over. Indeed, holding the Senate in 2022 might actually be tougher for Republicans than taking the House, because they will have 22 seats to defend. But if the public is in a mood to issue a restraining order against Biden and Harris, Republicans could not only defend all those seats but also gain new ones.

Then things could get very interesting in 2023.

The Republican Party is supposed to be the party that opposes big government spending. It tends to forget about that principle when it gains power, because spending the taxpayers’ money is fun! And you can always convince yourself that when you do it, you’ll be doing it wisely. That’s how we ended up with a national debt of $25 trillion.

If Biden faces a Congress in 2023 that is entirely Republican-controlled, it could coincide with a greater national sense of urgency to do something about the debt. Usually when a Democrat president wants to browbeat a Republican Congress into spending money, he tells heart-rendering tales of the old and the lame and the sick dying in the streets, and the Republicans quickly buckle as the media dutifully amplify these themes.

But the public could be in the mood for a little restraint with the national debt starting to creep toward $30 trillion. Could Joe Biden, assuming he is still president in 2023, show the same kind of political savvy as Bill Clinton and actually work with a Republican Congress to bring spending down?

There are reasons to be skeptical. The left is much more radical than it was in 1999, and by 2023 Biden is probably laying the groundwork for a Kamala Harris campaign in 2024. Harris has no interest in spending restraint of any kind.

Still, it remains true that Republican Congresses are often more spendthrifty when a Democrat is in the White House. Strange things happen. And sometimes they’re strange in good ways.