“You’re like, ‘Oh, my God, what the hell happened to us?’” said Jean Becker, who served as Bush’s post-presidency chief of staff for 25 years and now speaks across the country about the need for civil dialogue.
This is the story of what happened: Why that session was so bipartisan. Why Congress became so divided. Why, even today, there are so many efforts to reverse much of what was accomplished.
In recent months, the legacy of the session ending in 1990 has been on trial. The Trump administration is undoing key parts of the Clean Air Act. President Donald Trump has declared that he wants to end the temporary protected status currently granted to 1.5 million people, most of whom now face deportation. In many cases, these efforts are not debated in Congress but instead are carried out by executive action. Trump signed more executive orders in the first year of his second term than in his entire first four years as president, including 54 on the economy and trade and 22 on energy and the environment, a Washington Post analysis found.
All of that makes the 1990 session seem like an alternative universe. Yet it holds many lessons for today.
President Barack Obama could not understand how Republicans could fight against the concept of trading pollution credits — which they had once so vociferously backed. He wrote in his memoir that “the mere fact that Republicans had once supported a policy idea championed by one of their own did not mean they’d support the exact same idea coming from a Democratic president.”
With little chance of congressional action on clean air, presidents more recently have used executive actions to change policy.
Trump has exempted dozens of power plants from having to comply with parts of the Clean Air Act. In addition, the Trump administration announced in a news release what it called the “Single Largest Deregulatory Action in U.S. History,” dismantling an Obama administration rule that had regulated global warming emissions as a public health threat. That means the health benefit cannot be calculated when determining the cost of climate change rules. The EPA said that dismantling the rule will save consumers more than $1.3 trillion.
The result is that last year, the coal emissions that cause acid rain rose 18 percent, the second-largest increase over the past 30 years, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.
Chapter 2: The civil rights battle
Jennifer Keelan-Chaffins, an 8-year-old with cerebral palsy, joined about 1,000 other people with disabilities who crawled up the steps of the U.S. Capitol on March 12, 1990, to advocate for passage of the Americans With Disabilities Act. (Jeff Markowitz/AP)
Chapter 3: ‘There was give and take’
The birth of the immigration program known as “temporary protected status,” or TPS, began with the murder of six Jesuit priests during the civil war in El Salvador in 1989. Jim McGovern, a legislative aide to Rep. Joe Moakley (D-Massachusetts) who later was elected to the House, had visited the priests shortly before they were pulled out of their beds and executed by the Salvadoran army, which had received support from the Reagan administration.
The caskets of six Jesuit priests are carried to a graveyard in San Salvador, on Nov. 19, 1989. The Jesuits were murdered and mutilated, along with their housekeeper and her daughter, by the Salvadoran army. (AP)
Chapter 4: A broken promise, a party torn apart
Bush had won election in part because of one unequivocal vow at his party’s nominating convention: “Read my lips: No new taxes.” But shortly after taking office, he made a confession in his diary. He was convinced that the country would face disaster unless he balanced the budget, and that probably meant breaking his word. He rationalized his conclusion: Solving the budget crisis “could mean a one-term Presidency, but it’s that important for the country.”
Epilogue: A growing divide
Republican lawmakers stand and applaud during President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address in February. On the other side of the room, Democrats stay seated. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
But after a brief spell of bipartisanship that included passage of an initial tax cut package, Bush’s son, President George W. Bush, ushered in a new chapter in partisanship by signing a second tax cut bill, in 2003 that was supported by only two Democrats in the Senate and seven in the House. President Obama, meanwhile, joined the tax-cutting fray, lowering taxes for 97 percent of Americans under a 2009 stimulus bill, among other measures, according to the Tax Policy Center.
The government, meanwhile, has gone deeply into debt, precisely the situation the senior Bush sought to avoid when he put his reelection at stake in the budget deal. The federal government ran a $1.8 trillion deficit in 2025. And, because of the long-term accumulation of money owed by the government, future generations will have to deal with a compilation of debt that had reached nearly $39 trillion as of April 7, amounting to $114,217 for every person in the United States, according to the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.
The midterm elections could further the divide as candidates in primaries seek to present themselves as most loyal to their party — and thus even more unlikely to bargain with the other side. It is also possible, however, that if Democrats control one of the chambers of Congress, Trump, who changed party registration seven times before running for president, might shape-shift and be more inclined to make deals.
Gingrich said he worries that things have gone too far. Citing his work with Clinton on welfare reform, he lamented that there is not enough effort anymore to focus even on legislation supported by most of the country. So, he said, he recently formed America’s New Majority Project, a polling and research group that searches for issues with broad support. His hope is that the public, in turn, pushes Congress to vote for the ideas favored by Republicans.
Asked if he was working with Democrats on the initiative, he responded: “No. No. The trick is to find the issues that drive the other party to be for you.”
Iran fell for the same trick as Hezbollah’s Nasrallah.
