Even as the newly minted Republican majority celebrates their election victory, its far-right faction — some of its members backed by the Tea Party — are sending out warning flares that they don’t plan on being ignored by the mainstream GOP.
They are threatening swift and aggressive action to block big Democratic initiatives like the healthcare reform law and so-called amnesty for illegal immigrants.
“Not one single candidate ran as a moderate Republican,” conservative activist and ForAmerica chairman Brent Bozell said on Wednesday. “And the voters who voted for these candidates are not going to stand for ‘business as usual’ from Republicans campaigning as conservatives and then governing as moderates. That is simply dishonest.”
Conservatives want GOP Senate leaders in the new Congress to immediately vote to repeal the healthcare law and if necessary, use a controversial budget process requiring just 51 votes to approve such a repeal measure.
They argue that every GOP candidate who ran in the House and Senate promised to get rid of Obamacare, including the incoming Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who said it needed to be removed “root and branch.”
The right flank of Congress is also demanding Republicans move to block imminent executive action by Obama that would stop deportations and allow thousands more relatives of illegal immigrants to enter the country.
The charge to block Obama is likely to be led by Sen. Ted Cruz, a Tea Party favorite and a far-right thorn in the side of the Senate leadership.
The Texas lawmaker on Wednesday penned a letter to Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., the current majority leader, threatening to “use all procedural means necessary to return the Senate’s focus during the lame duck session to resolving the constitutional crisis created by President Obama’s lawless amnesty.”
Specifically, Cruz and other Republicans want to use the must-pass government spending bill Congress will take up in the coming weeks to strip the president of the financial ability to carry out an executive action that blocks deportations.
While the GOP leadership is also eager to take action on Obama’s executive action and the healthcare law, they are plotting a path that is likely to be far less aggressive and won’t involve holding up spending bills.
For example, Republican leaders have not committed to using the 51-vote threshold to pass a bill that repeals the healthcare law and are instead planning smaller bills that eliminate provisions in the Obamacare law, such as the medical device tax.
GOP leaders are particularly wary of using the the fiscal 2015 spending bill to curb the president because such a move could lead to congressional gridlock and a government shutdown if the two sides can’t strike a deal.
In fact, McConnell on Wednesday ruled out allowing gridlock to stop government spending bills or derail legislation to increase the nation’s debt limit.
“Let me make it clear,” McConnell said. “There will be no government shutdown and no default on the national debt.”
But McConnell will likely be forced to contend in some way with conservatives like Cruz, who want to make a move quickly to stop executive action on immigration and to put an end to Obamacare, and feel the power of the purse is the only way to achieve it.
The Cruz letter to Reid was signed by five other GOP senators, including Pat Roberts of Kansas, who survived a brutal re-election fight on Tuesday.
It’s not clear, however, how wedded Senate newcomers are to the Tea Party principles or whether they’ll join Cruz’s effort to stop repeal of the healthcare law and stop executive actions on immigration.
While many of them were backed and supported by Tea Party groups, they operate more like political hybrids.
Joni Ernst, for example, was fully backed by the Tea Party in her successful bid to win Iowa’s open Senate seat, but she was also backed by Iowa’s business community and is considered a mainstream, conservative Republican.
And in North Carolina, Republican Thom Tillis, who defeated incumbent Democratic Senator Kay Hagan, was labeled too moderate for many state Tea Party groups. Yet the Tea Party Patriots, which supports candidates nationwide, made calls on behalf of Tillis, and they consider him a Tea Party candidate.
“I think the important thing to note is how many of the people who won in both chambers won because they were supporting Tea Party issues,” Jenny Beth Martin, who heads the Tea Party Patriots, told the Washington Examiner.
McConnell on Wednesday suggested far-right discontent in the Senate will be tempered by the influx of new Republican senators.
“The vast majority of them don’t feel they were sent to Washington to just fight all the time,” McConnell said. “Divided government is not a reason to do nothing.”
