http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=11F587CC-6659-4343-AB3E-80070CF550DF Top Republicans: Get ready to make deals
By: Jake Sherman and Manu Raju
November 6, 2014 12:23 AM EST
LOUISVILLE, Ky. — Congressional Republican leaders are sending subtle warnings to the right wing of their party: The days of crisis-dominated Washington are over.
House Speaker John Boehner’s allies are quietly telling members he wants to be a “responsible leader.” Incoming Majority Leader Mitch McConnell expressed little willingness to use the debt ceiling as leverage for spending cuts. And top Republicans in both chambers have even showed a new eagerness to cut deals with the White House and allow Democratic proposals to come before the Senate.
Emboldened by sweeping midterm election victories, Republican leaders are vowing not to repeat the errors of past years, when messy fiscal fights eroded public confidence in Washington and became the hallmark of the GOP-controlled House.
“There will be no government shutdown, and there will be no national default,” said McConnell, speaking here at a news conference at the University of Louisville.
Asked whether he would insist on spending cuts as part of a debt ceiling increase, something House and Senate conservatives have demanded in past years, McConnell signaled he would pursue other avenues instead.
“I think we have other mechanisms that were unavailable to us with the previous configuration of the government,” McConnell said.
Much is on the line for the GOP. In 2016, Republicans will once again have a shot at retaking the White House, and they could lose control of the Senate after spending hundreds of millions of dollars to win it back in Tuesday’s elections. They want to be confrontational with the president, but not to overreach, which might mean taking a more moderate approach than many on the right would like. Only time will tell whether they can overcome the influence of their activist base.
In seeking support for reelection as House speaker, Boehner is telling colleagues that Congress is on the brink of achieving big things, and the party needs to stick together to take advantage of the political climate. His allies are privately spreading the message that Boehner will be a “responsible” leader, according to sources familiar with the message.
Whether that approach will last remains to be seen — and conservatives are dubious that GOP leaders can work with the White House as they have vowed to do.
“President [Barack] Obama is not ’90s-era Bill Clinton,” said Dan Holler, spokesman for the conservative group Heritage Action for America.
Still, Republican leaders may have reason to feel more free to stand up to conservatives in their party. In Tuesday’s elections, Republicans won their biggest House majority since the Truman era, while taking back the Senate for the first time since 2006. Their Senate victories were powered by pushing establishment-backed candidates in places like North Carolina, Georgia and Colorado, a far cry from 2010 and 2012 when the GOP’s intraparty civil war cost it a chance at the Senate majority and forced Republicans to shift markedly to the right.
“I’m pretty familiar with our conference including the new members who are coming in,” McConnell said Wednesday . “The vast majority of them don’t feel they were sent to Washington to fight all the time.”
Same goes for the House. The National Republican Congressional Committee — led by Chairman Greg Walden of Oregon and recruitment chairman Patrick McHenry of North Carolina — thinks it fielded a group of middle-of-the-road candidates who claim they are more interested in getting things done than in battling one another. McHenry said candidates campaigned on the “right message, and now they’ve gotta carry it out in the next two years.” Unlike elections past, House Republicans will include lawmakers from the moderate suburbs of Chicago as well as from New Hampshire and upstate New York.
“What this election did is give us a working majority where we have at least 218 votes to pass a Republican agenda, and what I think will be a responsible Republican agenda,” said Rep. Steve Stivers (R-Ohio), a close ally of Boehner. “We’re not veering hard right, we’re playing it straight down the fairway, to use a Boehner-ism.”
And even the one man who has caused the most problems for McConnell — tea party favorite Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas — called up the GOP leader to congratulate him on his resounding win over Democrat Alison Lundergan Grimes.
“Let me just make a prediction for you: A week from tomorrow, I will be elected majority leader of the Senate,” McConnell said confidently when asked about Cruz withholding support for him so far.
Still, it’s not clear what, beyond enacting new trade deals, the GOP leaders and Obama can agree upon. In a phone call on Wednesday, McConnell and Obama discussed reforming the Tax Code, a tremendous undertaking and one that would require significant compromises. The White House has long insisted raising tax revenues, but that is off limits for virtually all House and Senate Republicans.
“Yes,” Sen. John Hoeven (R-N.D.) said Wednesday when asked whether the White House needs to abandon higher revenue as part of a tax reform deal. He said it was up to Obama to moderate now. “That’s exactly what the Clinton administration did.”
McConnell, too, suggested that there would be plenty of ways to confront the White House. He said the Senate would use the appropriations process to put riders that rein in regulations Republicans have long attacked. He said the Senate Banking Committee would begin to look at ways to weaken the reach of the Dodd-Frank financial services law. He said the GOP would move on new energy legislation and seek to build the Keystone pipeline.
And he expressed a renewed willingness to pare back Obamacare, something his party may try to achieve through the budget reconciliation process, which cannot be filibustered in the Senate. Even though winning enough support for a full repeal is doubtful in the new Congress, McConnell signaled other provisions of the law could be gutted, such as the medical device tax that is unpopular with both parties.
“It’s reasonable to assume that we will use the power of the purse to try to push back against this overactive bureaucracy,” he said.
McConnell is preparing to showcase a leadership style that will allow more votes on amendments on the Senate floor — even Democratic proposals — something he says would foster deal making and bipartisanship in the Senate. It’s unclear, however, how long that will last.
Republicans face a brutal map in Senate races in 2016 — with a number of GOP senators up for reelection in blue and purple states, like Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Illinois. Senators facing tough races rarely want to cast tough votes, especially ones that put them out of step with their electorate. That could put McConnell in a bind between conservatives pushing a harder-line agenda and blue-state Republicans seeking to moderate.
“I think we will have to keep expectations realistic of what we can accomplish, knowing it will be a very narrow majority and we will have to manage that dynamic in the Senate,” said Sen. John Thune of South Dakota, No. 3 in Senate GOP leadership. “But I do think there will be more of an incentive for the House and Senate to work together because our fortunes are going to rise and fall. Right now, the dynamic is very different between the House and Senate.”
Part of the GOP’s problem is that it doesn’t have a clear governing mandate because it lacked a national agenda this campaign season. Its huge gains in Congress had more to do with Obama’s deep unpopularity than anything else. The challenges now facing McConnell and Boehner underscore the brutal reality in Washington: Enacting legislation is much harder than making promises on the campaign trail.
“We need to take our obligation to govern very seriously,” Stivers said. “We need to be smart about what we do.”
