The New Congress and Its Fitful Start

Conservatives have hoped that the newly installed Republican majorities in both chambers of Congress will be like the cavalry coming to the rescue in one of those old John Ford westerns, but the session is off to a start more reminiscent of the old “F Troop” series.

The first official act of the new congress was to elect the same old Republican leadership, which conservatives had long found too timid in their confrontations with the president even before they ended the last session with a whimpering acquiescence to a “Cromnibus” budget deal that did little to limit the president’s hated executive order granting amnesty to millions of illegal aliens and was otherwise so pleasing to the president that he actually phoned some of his party’s legislators to lobby on its behalf. Kentucky’s Sen. Mitch McConnell was elevated from minority leader to majority leader in routine fashion, but Ohio’s Speaker of the House John Boehner had to endure a bit of drama in order to retain his post. He only lost 25 Republicans votes to a variety of candidates that were never serious contenders, but that was enough for The Washington Post to describe it as “the biggest revolt against a House speaker in more than 150 years” and feed a popular press narrative about those crazy conservatives and their wacky war within the Republican party. The party leadership enjoys the good guy role in this tale, with The New York Times touting Boehner’s pledge to “restore function and civility to a body that has become a symbol of disorder for most Americans.”

Within hours such narrative-spinners as Politico were gleefully reporting that Boehner’s desire for “function and civility” had compelled him to punish a few of the dissenting voters by stripping them of desirable committee assignments. This is a common and longstanding practice by the leaders of both parties in order maintain a necessary unity, but in this case it is more likely to exacerbate the party’s divisions. The conservative activists who are largely responsible for the Republicans holding a majority in the House of Representatives will understandably be less enthusiastic about toeing the party line, and no more intimated by the results. Among those voting against Boehner was Rep. Tim Huelskamp of Kansas’s First District, who had already been stripped of a coveted seat on the Agriculture Committee for his past confrontations with Boehner but survived a primary challenge and a general election by candidates who tried to make an issue of it and survived to cast another vote against Boehner, and we don’t expect that he or any of the other rebels will be more compliant in the future.

Nor does it help for the party leadership to corroborate the media depiction of the conservative faction as a bunch of crazies. If the Republicans don’t confront the president on illegal immigration and become even more aggressively tight-fisted on budget they will eventually face a full revolt from the party’s most important voters, and when tit comes down to the inevitable confrontation with the the president the media won’t be giving them any more good guy roles. Plans to get a veto-proof vote on the XL Keystone Pipeline as the start of a busy schedule of other poll-tested bills that president will hate are a good strategy, and a reminder that McConnell and Boehner and the rest of the leadership didn’t get their establishment credentials without some of the political strategy that their more ideological and less pragmatic challengers too often lack, but the bigger battles won’t be won without the conservative’s support and sound ideas.

— Bud Norman

The Next Two Years of Nothing to Do

With Republicans firmly in control of both chambers of congress and a Democrat still wielding a veto pen in the White House there is little chance of the federal government getting anything done during the next two years, which is fine by us. Inaction will be much preferable to all the things the Democrats got done when they controlled everything, and it should provide a political advantage to the Republicans.

The newly-elected Republican majority should be able to quickly pass a number of bills that the four-year-old Republican majority in the House has already approved, all of them with enough poll-tested popularity to make a veto politically problematic for the president, and the even the most dutifully partisan scribes will be hard-pressed to explain how the party that just racked up the impressive wins in the mid-term elections is thwarting the will of the people. There’s talk that a first volley will be a green light for the XL Keystone Pipeline, which everyone except for a few extreme environmentalists thinks is a good idea and long overdue, and even if the president is forced to sign it he’ll endure the resentment and reduced fund-raising of those few extreme environmentalists and get little credit from the rest of the country in exchange. An all-out repeal of Obamacare would be a futile if satisfyingly symbolic gesture without the 61 votes required to override a veto, and would stir up an unnecessary fuss over the one two items within the law’s thousands of pages that enjoy popularity among the more misinformed portions of the population, but piecemeal repeal of he law’s most troublesome and obviously stupid provisions should knock a few points off the president’s approval ratings every time he vetoes one of them. There are enough of those troublesome and obviously stupid provisions that the Republicans should have him down to zero in short order, but we’d urge that they continue the practice nonetheless. A much needed overhaul of the tax system would also be futile and afford an opportunity to bamboozle the uniformed, but the tax laws include enough obvious and undeniable trouble and stupidity that the Republicans should be able to score similar points with a series of slight reforms, with a corporate tax rate that imposes a competitive disadvantage on every American business in global markets an excellent place to start, and relief from the carbon regulations championed by the aforementioned few environmental extremists are just of many pro-growth proposals that will at least draw attention to the president’s unpopular positions.

A steady stream of obligatory news stories about these bills would quickly dispute the president’s cliches of a “do-nothing congress” and a “party of no,” but the Republicans could also benefit from what they don’t do and when they say “no.” Voting for budgets small than the presidents inevitably lavish proposals won’t cost any popular support, and we can’t think of any pending Democratic proposals that cannot be opposed without offending anyone other minimum-wage workers and ineligible voters and a few environmental extremists. More aggressive joint committee investigations into the scandals surrounding Benghazi, the Internal Revenue Service, just about everything in the Department and Justice, and numerous other overlooked stories is also a good idea, not just for an easily forgivable spite but because the serious nature of these matters demands investigation and public attention. The Democrats who survived Tuesday’s mid-terms owe no favors to the president, whose insistence on making the election a referendum on his own unpopular policies was a godsend to the Republicans, and the congressionally-passed will in many cases even have a claim to bipartisanship.

Meanwhile, the president will get things done by executive action. Amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants and economically damaging regulations intended to prevent the climate from changing will prove unpopular, and the extra-constitutional way they are imposed will also prove unpopular, but at this point the very lame president seems quite unconcerned about public opinion or his party’s political fortunes. Any congressional efforts to thwart such actions by withholding funding or anything else at hand will please a large majority of the public, even if the resulting court battles stretch out long past the president’s final term, and will leave the next Democratic presidential with some difficult explaining to do. If the president finds it too bothersome to deal with an oppositional congress he might choose to focus his attention on foreign policy, where the constitution does allow him some leeway, but that’s likely to redound to the Republicans’ benefit as well.

The inevitable gridlock will delay for two years the tax cuts and deregulation and downsizing of everything except a military that desperately needs some additional funding, but if the Republicans continue their recent uncharacteristic savviness it might make all those things possible after one more election cycle. Tuesday’s election produced a strong slate of Republican candidates, the likely Democratic candidate is an aging and increasingly unpopular woman who is insuperable from the previous administration’s disastrous foreign policy and redistributionist economic theories, and if the government doesn’t do anything in the next two years it won’t do anything to change the minds that voted for solid Republican majorities in the House and Senate. Leap years always bring in the uniformed voters gullible to scare stories about wars on women and lynch mobs and cuts to Social Security, and demographic trends and an entrenched liberal news and entertainment media establishment and a growing number of people dependent on government support all make presidential elections difficult for Republicans, but the next two years of inaction could level the playing field.

— Bud Norman