President Obama’s recent pledge to invest more time this year cutting legislative deals with the new Republican majority in Congress and less time issuing executive actions may seem like a peace offering of sorts.
But it also carries the added benefit of exposing deep internal GOP divisions at a pivotal time — when a spotlight is shining on Republican leaders in Congress and their ability to get things done, and as the party gears up for the 2016 presidential campaign.
White House officials in recent days have pledged that 2015 will bring about a new focus for Obama on trying to advance shared policy goals with Republicans, specifically mentioning trade, taxes and infrastructure as areas of common ground.
“The president has been clear that there will be some actions by Congress that he won’t support, just like some in Congress will oppose steps that we take on our own,” White House spokesman Eric Schultz told the Washington Examiner Monday. “But those disagreements should not interfere with the many areas of bipartisan interest where we can work together to get things done for the American people.”
Obama will continue to strongly oppose Republicans on many issues and is already laying the groundwork to veto an early GOP effort in Congress to approve the creation of the Keystone XL pipeline.
But the president also is highlighting efforts to work with Republicans to advance some key policy priorities. In the process, Senate Republicans may find more flexibility with Obama than with the House, where the conservative wing of the GOP conference is already giving Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, serious headaches.
The differences between House and Senate Republicans were on vivid display as Congress returned to work this week. Key conservative House members were vocally opposing Boehner for speaker while Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky urged members of the new Republican majority not to be “scary” but show they can legislate in a functional, reasonable way.
That comment came after House conservatives late last year pushed McConnell and Boehner to agree to limit funding for the Department of Homeland Security for a few months into the year. The move pushes a fight to unravel Obama’s immigration executive action until the end of February, when the funding runs out.
The Senate tends to compromise far more than the House, and Senate Republicans have far more at stake than their House counterparts in the next two years. They face a daunting re-election map in 2016, when the GOP will defend 24 seats to the Democrats’ 10.
The only way Obama is going to get anything done legislatively is by working with the Senate, said Jim Manley, a longtime Senate communications strategist who now works in the private sector, dubbing the House “a lost cause.”
“The most important relationship in Washington for the next two years is between McConnell and Boehner, and there will inevitably be speed bumps — division in the ranks that the White House can seize on,” he said.
If McConnell is too willing to haggle on issues like tax reform and infrastructure spending, he risks alienating House conservatives.
Tea Party leaders also have taken aim at the Export-Import Bank and say ending it is a moral imperative for conservatives this Congress. The bank will shut down June 30 unless Congress votes to reauthorize it, and most Senate Republicans and Obama support its renewal while many House Republicans ardently oppose it.
“There’s going to be a tug of war between the Republican Party and the Ted Cruz Tea-Partiers who don’t want to work with Obama on anything,” said Doug Thornell, a Democratic strategist and vice president of SKDKnickerbocker, a public affairs firm. “But the pressure is on the new Republican majority to put forward an agenda and pass legislation the president can sign.”
Thornell pointed to a December “Beyond the Beltway” poll produced by the Benenson Strategy Group and SKDKnickerbocker that found strong support for a new middle-class tax cut, closing corporate loopholes and corporate tax reform.
The poll also showed broad backing for Congress passing a comprehensive immigration reform bill instead of efforts to try to defund Obama’s executive action on immigration, regardless of how respondents felt about it.
Overall, the immigration issue packs the most divisive GOP punch, with the Chamber of Commerce and business groups supporting comprehensive reform and the Tea Party and many on the right wary of any changes to the law without strengthening the border first.
House and Senate Republicans will inevitably struggle early in the year on how far to take their efforts to defund the president’s so-called amnesty. The crowded campaign for the GOP presidential nomination will only exacerbate the party’s immigration tensions as Jeb Bush and Sens. Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and others likely to face off for months over the issue.
“I think the bigger dissonance [for Obama] to exploit is between congressional GOP and the presidential candidates,” said Erik Smith, a longtime Democratic operative who served as a media strategist for Obama in 2012. “More innovative and outside-the-box thinking happens when a candidate is trying to distinguish themselves against the status quo and their rivals.”
