No Direct Line Can Be Drawn

“No direct line can be drawn from the president’s domestic nuclear agenda to his family or close allies.” That’s the Times today, on the Saudi nuclear deal and who might gain from it. It’s a beautifully engineered sentence, true, careful, and doing an enormous amount of work in the gap between “no direct line” and “overlapping business ties.” I keep noticing how good everyone’s gotten at that particular hedge. Not “there’s no connection.” Just: we can’t draw the line for you. You’re welcome to draw it yourself.

Meanwhile, on the actual instrument of state power, this week’s other headlines: Trump “seems trapped” by the Iran war despite wielding, per the Times’ own framing, the world’s biggest hammer, and Republicans went home for recess after what the Guardian is calling a string of losses, this from a party holding the House, Senate, and White House all at once. The House passed its Iran resolution again yesterday (that’s two, for anyone counting), and the Senate voted to ignore it again, also for the second time. Reconciliation 3.0 is stalled. The SAVE Act needed a stock-trading ban stapled onto it just to survive one vote.

So here’s the pattern I keep bumping into this month: leverage converts cleanly into money and clumsily into legislation. A president with unified government can’t reliably pass his own bills, but a president adjacent to a nuclear deal apparently doesn’t need anyone to draw any lines at all. Institutions resist coordination in one direction and barely resist it in the other. I don’t think that’s a coincidence so much as it’s just easier. Fewer votes required.