Here comes the GOP

Since the Tea Party reshaped the GOP and gained a portion of power four years ago, Republicans have not really had to answer these questions.

With Obama and his veto pen in the White House, and the pugilistic Harry Reid running the Democratic majority in the Senate, conservative legislation had no chance of becoming law. Even the Republican majority in the House had few weapons with which to fight Obama and stop the expansion of the federal government.

Most of the time, the GOP had to play the role of opposition, fighting (mostly ineffectively) rather than governing. That’s the way it is when you control only half of one branch of the federal government.

That is about to change. Control of Capitol Hill gives Republicans a new opportunity, if they care to seize it.

They will have healthy majorities of 54 seats in the Senate and 247 in the House. For the first time in the Obama era, the GOP has a real chance of turning its agenda into law. Republicans can force the president to debate them and maybe even negotiate with them.

But this will require them to shed the defensive mindset they’ve had since Obama came to power in 2009.

Obama’s extensive use of executive fiat has applied constant pressure on the GOP. His unilateral decision to give legal status to an estimated 5 million illegal immigrants is only the latest example. He is sure to take additional actions in his final two years in office that would ordinarily prompt the GOP to drop everything and fight. The GOP’s biggest challenge, especially for its rebellious conservative wing, may be to avoid that temptation and stay focused on enacting its policies.

Even Tea Party Republicans, who supported a quixotic government shutdown in a doomed effort to block Obamacare, acknowledge that reflexive opposition poses risks.

“With a president with whom we disagree as much as we disagree with him, there’s always going to be a place for, and a need for, opposing the things that he does that we’re against,” Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, told the Washington Examiner. “Because of that reality, we need to be conscious and constantly working against the impulse to remain stuck in that mode. Those things are important and we can’t neglect them. But we’ve also got to be focused on pushing our own agenda.”

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House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and new Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., along with a majority of the rank-and-file members of Congress they lead, want to prove to voters that they can govern responsibly.

That means avoiding government shutdowns and winning significant if unspectacular legislative victories on such issues as job creation and economic growth that nudge America in a conservative direction even while Obama is president. They may have to ignore distracting shiny objects such as Obama’s constitutionally questionable executive orders.

That cannot be done with disunity. There is often tension between House and Senate majorities of the same party. That was so when the GOP ran both chambers up until 2006, and was true again when the Democrats supplanted them and Reid and Nancy Pelosi took over.

Boehner, McConnell and their staffs have built a close professional bond during eight years of parallel leadership. And they are committed to avoiding this pitfall. They began sketching an agenda for government last year even before it was clear that Republicans would win the Senate. To keep things cosy, the House GOP’s policy retreat in Hershey, Pa., this year will be a joint affair held with Senate colleagues.

“It’s going to be important for us to bring forward some common sense legislation out of the gate that maybe the Senate will agree with us on,” said Rep. Richard Hudson, R-N.C.

The party’s 2015 agenda probably won’t be set until Republicans return from Hershey. But the game plan is already in place. It includes using “regular order” to process legislation. Boehner has largely been running the House this way since 2011. In the Senate, however, almost all decisions were made in the majority leader’s office, as Reid deemed fit.

McConnell intends to restore power to committee chairmen to steer legislation, and will allow consideration of amendments to bills during debates. This is central to the larger Boehner-McConnell strategy of having Congress pass a budget for the first time since 2009 and approve all 12 agency spending bills, also a rare occurrence. They want to get away from the past several years of crisis-management government, which has involved massive omnibus spending bills or continuing resolutions to keep the government running.

They believe this will show voters that Republicans can govern effectively, and that it also provides an means of conservative policy reform.

In passing a budget and moving individual appropriations bills, Republicans can do more than than simply reduce spending. Each bill gives them a chance to reform regulations and pass other policy changes. McConnell believes an open, vigorous legislative process will help Republicans get the 60 votes they need to overcome filibusters, which nearly every bill will face in the Senate.

“What the speaker and I are bound and determined to do is to demonstrate to the American people that the Congress is no longer dysfunctional; that we are going to try to make progress for the country,” McConnell said in an interview. “I think the single best way we have to influence policy is through the spending process.”

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The new Congress faces several early legislative deadlines.

Senior House and Senate Republicans say addressing these responsibilities constructively and on time will determine whether they govern effectively and accomplish more ambitious goals such as overhauling the tax code. “It will be a huge foreshadowing of our success,” said Rep. Peter Roskam, R-Ill. The Republican decision not to shut down the government last month, despite uproar over Obama’s immigration order, has left many in the GOP cautiously optimistic.

Homeland Security Department funding expires Feb. 27. A few weeks later, the federal government might reach its legal debt limit, requiring Republicans to decide whether they will raise the ceiling. Then, on March 31, they will need to approve or reject “doc fix” legislation to maintain payment levels for doctors who treat patients on Medicare. Two weeks after that, House and Senate Republicans are supposed to agree on a fiscal 2016 budget resolution, the centerpiece of their plan to target Obamacare.

Homeland Security funding could be particularly revealing. Republicans left this out of the omnibus bill that passed in December and instead financed it with a short-term continuing resolution to maintain leverage to fight Obama’s “executive amnesty.” Homeland Security oversees immigration. The GOP’s approach here could shed light on how focused they are on fighting versus governing.

There are other deadlines: Reauthorizing a transportation funding bill before it expires May 31; extending the Export-Import Bank before it shutters automatically June 30; disposing of the 12 appropriations bills by July 30, when Congress will be heading home for summer recess; completing government funding by Sept. 30, the last day of fiscal 2015.

The new Congress’ calendar also includes business left over from last year: reauthorizing the Terrorism Risk Insurance Act, which provides federal backing to private insurance policies that underwrite business exposure to terrorism. Legislation passed the House last month with broad bipartisan support but died in the Senate. It will probably come up again this month.

Legislating will also be complicated by the 2016 presidential race, which will get into high gear early in 2015.

Likely candidates include at least three Republican senators: Ted Cruz of Texas, Rand Paul of Kentucky, and Marco Rubio of Florida. High-profile current and former GOP governors also are running. That gives congressional Republicans only three to six months to pass big bills before the 2016 primary season sucks all the political oxygen out of the Capitol.

“We have a very limited time frame in 2015 to consolidate, shore up the brand, so to speak, of who Republicans are going into 2016,” said Cory Gardner of Colorado, who enters the Senate this month after serving two House terms, “So, January, February, March, April, May, June are precious resources to use to develop that identity of who we are as a governing majority. If we waste that opportunity, then we’ll be defined by somebody else other than us.”

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Republicans have not controlled Congress in eight years and haven’t run a branch of government for six. Contrary to what they expected after winning the House in 2010, the past four years have been unproductive and frustrating. Hundreds of bills passed by the House died in the Senate, and Reid allowed few floor votes on amendments. As a consequence, a long wish list has built up among Republican lawmakers who hope their bills will be considered now that their party is in charge.

To accommodate this glut of legislation could take months, so Boehner and McConnell have scheduled longer Washington work periods than usual. Senate Republicans plan to join the effort begun by their House colleagues four years ago and launch aggressive committee oversight hearings and investigations of the Obama administration.

House and Senate Republicans also are synchronized on policy, at least for now.

First will come a bill to approve construction of the Keystone XL pipeline, which would transport crude oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. The House already passed a bill with bipartisan support, and now that Reid and the Democratic majority are out of the way, such a bill should be able to garner 60 votes with little difficulty.

Leading with Keystone serves three purposes.

It’s a long-standing GOP priority stymied by Obama and Reid that Republicans campaigned on in the 2014 midterm elections. Several Democrats in the House and Senate are on record supporting Keystone, and putting it on the floor allows Republicans to test the new minority’s appetite for bipartisan cooperation. If it passes, it also helps gauge Obama’s interest in compromise.

“If the first thing that goes to his desk has got bipartisan support and he vetoes it, I think that sends a very powerful message as to whether we can do the bigger things,” Rep. said Mick Mulvaney, R-S.C.

Republicans plan to put early “wins on the board” by reviving several bills that passed the House with bipartisan support in the past two years. GOP leaders calculate that this could signal to voters that the party is serious about governing, and might also soften Democratic opposition in the Senate, where 60 votes are required to pass almost anything.

They also believe that this approach is important for winning the debate when the two sides inevitably disagree, as they will when the Republicans attempt to gut Obamacare using a tool called “reconciliation” that protects budget resolutions from filibusters.

Senate Democrats used reconciliation to sidestep a GOP filibuster and pass Obamacare in 2010. Only measures that relate to taxes and spending can be attached to budget resolutions and passed under reconciliation rules. This means Republicans cannot use it to repeal Obamacare entirely. But they can use it to pass legislation rescinding enough of the law’s provisions to render it inoperable.

Reconciliation is not a grab bag. It is available to use only with the annual budget.

Using reconciliation on Obamacare means it won’t be available this year for other big legislation that might face Democratic filibuster. But Obama would probably veto policies that need reconciliation to clear the Senate. That, and the hunger of Republican members and the party base to force a confrontation with Obama on the Affordable Care Act, is why McConnell is likely to use reconciliation here rather than on another policy priority.

After Obama vetoes their attempt to strike a deathblow against his signature legislative achievement, congressional Republicans are hoping more modest achievements to reduce the impact of the law are possible.

They are readying legislation to repeal the tax on revenue earned by medical device manufacturers. The proposal has bipartisan support, even passing the Democratic Senate in a nonbinding vote. Republicans also plan bills to eliminate the mandate forcing individuals to buy health insurance or face fines, and to restore the 40-hour workweek. Obamacare defines full time as 30 hours to discourage businesses from hiring part-time workers to avoid requirements of the law.

“We want to do big things, use the majority to maximum advantage to do good things for the country, but recognize that we’re going to have to [work] within the limits that we have to do deal with, and knowing that we have a Democrat president for the next two years who in most cases is going to be opposed to what we want to do and will probably veto what we want to send him,” said Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, the No. 3 GOP leader in the Senate.

If there is one big item Republicans hope they can pass as a bipartisan achievement with Obama, it is tax reform. It will get more attention than any other measure from interest groups, labor unions and corporations that flood Washington with lobbyists and pay millions of dollars each year to influence lawmakers.

Tax reform has gone nowhere because there is no common ground between House Republicans, Senate Democrats, and the president. Members of both parties have hesitated to commit to controversial bills absent assurances that they could become law.

Republicans want a less complex, flatter tax code that cuts rates across the board for individuals and businesses. They say this would create jobs, spur economic growth and increase revenue. Obama and most congressional Democrats demand that taxes be raised on the wealthy, and they say this and closing corporate loopholes are a precondition for any other fiscal reforms. They say the tax code is already stacked in favor of the rich and big business.

Despite these long-standing differences, Republicans plan to move forward. New House Ways and Means Chairman Paul Ryan, R-Wis., and Senate Finance Chairman Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, have been meeting to discuss tax reform since November.

“We want to advance a pro-growth agenda to create jobs, and a critical component of economic growth is tax reform,” Ryan said in an interview. “So we are planning on taking the issue up and taking it as far as it goes, and we don’t know how far that is. I really don’t.”

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Strikingly, Tea Party Republicans also talk about incremental progress in 2015 and their desire to show voters that the GOP can turn the country around and get things done. The fatalism they displayed last year, seeing every fight as the last chance to save America from Obama and ruin, has evaporated.

This development, and a new willingness to think about long-term strategy, was evident in their approach to the “Cromnibus” spending bill that kept the government open through the Christmas and New Year’s break. Almost six dozen House Republicans and 18 Senate Republicans voted against the funding measure, believing the GOP should have fought harder and faster to try to roll back Obama’s executive order on immigration. And yet, none of them campaigned hard to defeat it — not, at least, like they did when they shut down the government in 2013.

Passage of the Cromnibus was never in doubt, except briefly when Democrats seemed ready to sink a deal negotiated between Republican leaders in the House and Democratic leaders in the Senate and had the backing of the White House.

But the GOP Senate takeover is raising expectations among conservatives. Tea Partiers and influential conservative advocacy groups that score congressional votes believe Republicans can and should accomplish more conservative policy victories now.

“Over the past two terms, the House has been sending things to the Senate that members of the House don’t actually believe in because they were always worried that the Senate would kill it. I think now is our chance to send over things that we believe in,” said Rep. Justin Amash, a libertarian-leaning Michigan Republican.

Republican leaders are working hard to tamp down expectations. Getting legislation through the Senate still requires 60 votes. The GOP might occasionally have to pay a steep price for the six Democratic votes the party will need — and that’s if the majority stays unified, which is hardly guaranteed. The outgoing Democratic majority only needed five Republican votes to get to 60, a political lift that often proved difficult for Reid.

The 2016 Senate electorate map favors Democrats. Among the Republicans facing re-election, six are in Democratic blue states or swing states that Obama won in 2012 but were swept to the GOP by the 2010 wave. Democrats need only flip five of them to reclaim the majority, and the atmospherics in the next election are likely to be very different than they were five years ago. Senate Republicans are going to want to show soft partisans and independent voters that they’re getting things done, not just fighting Obama.

A Republican senator, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said his colleagues must choose between governing and messaging. Do they want to craft legislation that Obama feels pressured to sign, which means necessarily that it’s going to require Democratic support in the Senate? Or do they want to issue political messaging documents that garner unanimous GOP support but never become law?

This could set up a confrontation.

Some of the more conservative groups and Tea Party activists want the new Republican Congress to contrast sharply with the Democratic presidential nominee, probably Hillary Clinton. If the GOP can pass some bills, all the better. But that’s not their goal. How much sway conservative insurgents have with congressional Republicans could dictate what happens in Washington this year.

“They’re determined to govern. We think they should put forward a governing agenda,” said Dan Holler, a spokesman for Heritage Action for America, the political arm of the Heritage Foundation think tank.

“The next election cycle for House and Senate Republicans is putting forward an agenda that demonstrates what we will do with this country if we win the White House, as opposed to seeking some mushy middle ground with a liberal president,” said Jon Fleischman, publisher of FlashReport.org, a conservative website that covers California politics.

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How much help Republicans can count on from Democrats and Obama remains unclear.

Senate Democrats are split and bickering in the aftermath of November’s electoral rout. The few centrists remaining are angry at Reid for keeping all power in the majority leader’s office. In his only Senate term, Alaska Democrat Mark Begich received not a single floor vote on an amendment. He was ousted in November by Republican Dan Sullivan.

Resentment lingers over how the party’s Senate campaign committee abandoned Mary Landrieu of Louisiana in her blowout runoff loss to Republican Bill Cassidy, even though she was a reliable left-wing vote on almost every issue other than energy and climate change.

Democrats of all stripes ended 2014 disappointed in Obama. His personal intervention to save the Cromnibus barely picked up the necessary votes over the objections of Pelosi and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., the darling of the Left, although his immigration order helped repair relations with some.

Centrist Sen. Joe Manchin predicted that there would be a mix of Democrats willing to negotiate with Republicans and help them get to 60 votes if McConnell is serious about returning the Senate to regular order and opening bills for amendment in committee and on the floor. Manchin, who was governor of West Virginia before being elected to the Senate, has not ruled out running for his old job in 2016.

“That would we mean so much,” the Democrat said. “If [McConnell] truly goes through the committee, amendment processing, let the bill be vetted. We’ve only seen that happen a couple times in four years.”

But Reid won’t get rolled. And Obama is unlikely to emerge this year as a version of 1990s Bill Clinton. The president and McConnell have suggested they might reach common ground on trade, tax reform and infrastructure funding. Obama’s decision to make good on his pre-election promise to pursue “executive amnesty,” however, made clear that he is not about to reinvent himself as a centrist triangulator.

This is Reid’s second stint as Senate minority leader. The first time, he proved a master at holding his caucus together and using Senate rules to the minority’s advantage. Jim Manley, a former senior aide to Reid, said the Nevadan would have to make allowances from time to time for Democrats who want to cut deals with the Republican majority.

Still, despite internal grumbling that Manley concedes has yet to recede, Reid has not lost control of his caucus. Most Senate Democrats are adamant that the party has put its election woes behind it. Yes, Democrats expect to compromise with Republicans on some issues, but they won’t back down on Obamacare and the president’s executive order on immigration.

Democrats don’t expect any change in approach from the Oval Office. Obama doesn’t have to worry anymore about how his actions might affect the hometown politics of vulnerable Democrats. Their griping and need to distance themselves from the president and his agenda frustrated him as much as the GOP intransigence he so often lambasted.

Obama is optimistic that the next two years will turn out better for him than the last two. Some compromise will be necessary and might serve his agenda. Does that mean Obama expects a grand bargain with Republicans, or will meet them in what they would consider the middle? Not likely.

“If the starting point is to repeal the Affordable Care Act, no amount of amendments or debate is going to solve the underlying problem,” said Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, the Democratic whip who is close to Obama. “When you’re in the minority your role is to play defense and stop the worst from happening. That’s what we’re determined to do and hope that maybe in one shining moment we might enact a good, bipartisan bill.”