There is one all-important fact that has inexplicably gotten lost in much of the arguing over how Republicans should respond to President Obama’s unilateral edict on immigration: The GOP doesn’t control the Senate yet.
Democrats will run the Senate, and Harry Reid will be majority leader, until Jan. 3, 2015. So when Republicans, or conservatives, or anyone else, announce what they think Mitch McConnell and John Boehner should do in the next few weeks, they should remember that right now Republicans have the same strength and numbers they had in October 2013, when they lost the government shutdown fight.
And yet there are voices in the conservative world that want Republicans to fight to defund Obama’s executive action now, rather than wait until January. And they accuse Boehner, McConnell, and other Republican leaders of caving to the president on immigration even before a fight has begun.
“I think we should fund virtually the entire federal government,” Texas Republican Sen. Ted Cruz, a leader in the last shutdown fight, said at a Capitol Hill rally Wednesday. “We should, however, not be funding illegal amnesty.” As he did in the Obamacare fight, Cruz wants to see the House attach a rider defunding the immigration action to a spending bill — a measure that has to be passed by Dec. 11 for the government to stay open — and send it to the Democratic Senate. What happens after that, after Majority Leader Reid rejects it, is not clear.
Cruz advocates action now, he says, because GOP leaders can’t be trusted to fight on immigration next year. “Even with a Republican House and Senate, the same folks who are saying ‘Gosh, we can’t do anything now’ in January are going to say ‘Gosh, we don’t have 60 votes in the Senate,’ ” Cruz continued. “It’s like Charlie Brown and Lucy.”
A headline by Breitbart News — “Boehner Crafts Surrender Plan on Obama Executive Amnesty” — echoes the idea that GOP leaders will back down even when they have full control of Congress. It’s a view that is shared by many conservatives, from Twitter devotees to radio talk-show hosts.
Underneath it all is a toxic distrust among Hill Republicans. In conversations and email exchanges in the past few days — none of it for attribution and some of it completely off the record — GOP aides on both sides of the issue have expressed deep suspicion of the other side’s motives.
“Conservative Republicans believe leadership will cave to Obama because conservative Republicans are not stupid,” said one GOP aide. “Leadership is bound and determined to never have a funding fight on executive amnesty.”
“Ask them what their backup plan is after the government shuts down,” said another GOP aide, referring to the forces who want action now. “They don’t have one. They know their plan is a dead-end strategy, but they don’t care. All they care about is making themselves look good to the Heritage Action/purity-for-profit crowd.”
And so on. And this is after McConnell’s promise that the new Senate majority will take action. “We’re considering a variety of options,” McConnell said Nov. 20. “But make no mistake. When the newly elected representatives of the people take their seats, they will act.”
Boehner, for his part, has vowed to “fight the president tooth and nail if he continues down this path.”
But for the speaker and the incoming majority leader, there is no way to act until the GOP has what yet another aide calls “ball control.”
“We think it’s best to put off the moment of decision to January, when we will have the majority and thus the ability to pass a legislative remedy to the president’s actions,” says still another GOP aide. “Certain elements within our coalition evidently aren’t satisfied with that delay, however, and would rather join the fight now, when we have no leverage.”
There is no doubt Republicans will be stronger next year; the difference between having 54 votes in the Senate, as they will then, and having 45, as they do now, is all the difference in the world. And most conservatives would probably approve of Boehner and McConnell waiting until January or February — if only the conservatives trusted the leadership to act.
That is where the distrust comes in. In the past few years there has been so much bad blood between the GOP’s conservative, Tea Party wing and the party Establishment that, now that they’re all in power, they might be ill-prepared, and perhaps even unable, to work together.
