http://thehill.com/homenews/house/239291-gop-congress-moves-into-deal-making-mode By Scott Wong - 04/18/15 06:00 AM EDT
What ever happened to the do-nothing Congress?
Capitol Hill has seen a burst of bipartisan deal-making and legislating in recent days as newly empowered Republicans try to show voters they can govern responsibly when they’re in charge.
After a bumpy start, GOP leaders seem to have found their footing — passing a historic $200 billion Medicare reform package, striking big, bipartisan deals on Iran, education and trade, and preparing to pass a GOP budget for the first time in a decade.
Now comes the hard part: keeping the momentum.
Deadlines to reauthorize the Export-Import Bank’s charter, raise the federal borrowing limit, renew the Patriot Act and replenish the highway fund are fast-approaching, and none of the issues will be simple to sort out.
For now, GOP leaders are in a hopeful mood.
“There will be places we’re able to [come together]. There will be places that will divide us as well. But that’s part of the process of governing. Ideas flow,” House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) told The Hill in a brief interview.
“There’s been some ups and there’s been some downs, and there’s been some very big successes,” he added.
Republicans entered the year under enormous pressure to show they can govern. For the first time in nearly a decade, the party hascontrol of the House and Senate. That gives them more ownership over Washington, and the party is eager to convince voters that their party should be given the keys to the White House in 2016.
In the Senate, Republicans and Democrats are close to a deal to confirm Loretta Lynch, the languishing nominee for attorney general, after weeks of squabbling over abortion language in a separate human-trafficking bill.
And the upper chamber next week is expected to take up legislation giving Congress a chance to review and vote on a deal to curb Iran’s nuclear weapons program.
“The committee process is working,” said Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), who negotiated the deal with the panel's top Democrats.
It’s a sentiment that is also being expressed at the other end of the Capitol.
House GOP leaders will bring to the floor a pair of cybersecurity measures designed to encourage better information sharing between the private sector and government agencies. Like, the Senate’s Iran bill, the cybersecurity bills were the products of bipartisan talks in two House committees.
“The honeymoon was a little shaky because both sides were mistrustful of each other. And even within our own caucus, we weren’t sure where we were headed,” said Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-Fla.), who serves on the Intelligence Committee that negotiated one of the cybersecurity bills. “Now, we’ve got our feet firmly planted on the ground and we’re marching in lockstep, and the Democrats are trusting us, and we’re bringing up good bills.”
There’s progress on other legislative fronts as well. This week, Senate Finance Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and the panel’s top Democrat, Sen. Ron Wyden (Ore.), struck a deal to make it easier for Obama to complete a massive trade deal in the Asia-Pacific region — a legacy issue for the president, but one that is opposed by liberal Democrats on Capitol Hill.
Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), the former Education secretary, and Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) successfully shepherded a bill through their education committee that would fix the No Child Left Behind law, granting states more power to evaluate school and student performance. The vote was 22-0.
Meanwhile, House appropriators have begun marking up two spending bills, the earliest that has been done in four decades, said Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.).
Those developments followed what’s perhaps the largest legislative achievement since Republicans took control of both chambersin January: The permanent repeal of automatic cuts to payments for Medicare physicians that had bedeviled Congress for the past two decades. Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) had spent months working on the deal to resolve the flawed “doc fix” issue, and they heaped praise on each other in a rare bipartisan bill-signing ceremony in the Capitol on Thursday.
“We’ve actually seen some outbreaks of bipartisanship and common sense in Congress over the last couple of weeks,” Obama said at a news conference Friday before ripping into Republicans for delaying the confirmation of his pick for attorney general.
Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.) expressed optimism that recent developments could set the tone for the rest of the 114th Congress after the acrimony of the first few months.
“It's getting better,” Cole said. “Maybe the ice is breaking a little bit around here.”
In addition to tough battles ahead on the Ex-Im Bank, debt ceiling and Highway Trust Fund, House GOP leaders have pledged to bring back three bills — a border security bill, abortion bill and education bill — that were pulled from the schedule after the whip team realized they didn’t have enough Republican votes to pass.
The bill banning abortions after 20 weeks ran into opposition from GOP women lawmakers, who objected to language allowing exemptions for rape victims but only if they reported the crime to police.
Ethics problems are still dogging Republicans and causing unwanted distractions for leadership.
Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.), a senior member of the House GOP vote-counting operation, resigned late last month over a spending scandal. And Transportation and Infrastructure Committee Chairman Bill Shuster (R-Pa.), a close Boehner ally, is under fire for his relationship with a top airlines lobbyist; he’s a key player in negotiations to both overhaul the Federal Aviation Administration and find a way to fill the depleted coffers that fund the nation’s highways.
“At the end of the day, I think this is the beginning of some good things,” said Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.). “It still will probably be a frustrating year and a half, but hopefully a little less so.”
Democrats too said they were “heartened” by the new bipartisan spirit exhibited on Capitol Hill. But they said they hadn’t forgotten that Republicans, holding the majority of both chambers, had nearly shut down the Homeland Security Department over objections to Obama’s executive actions on immigration.
“It’s too early to celebrate, but the events of the week ... were really positive,” said Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee. “I won’t make a prediction but I hope [it’s a sign of things to come.]
“We sure have a lot of big issues on the table.”
