Charles Krauthammer says “the real reason winning the Senate matters” has more to do with positioning the GOP for 2016 than stopping President Obama.
It’s not an end in itself. Nor will it change the trajectory of Obama’s presidency. His agenda died on Nov. 2, 2010, when he lost the House. It won’t be any deader on Nov. 4, 2014, if he loses the Senate.
But regaining the Senate would finally give the GOP the opportunity, going into 2016, to demonstrate its capacity to govern.
You can’t govern the country from one house of Congress. Republicans learned that hard, yet obvious, lesson with the disastrous shutdowns of 1995 and 2013. But controlling both houses would allow the GOP to produce a compelling legislative agenda.
The Democratic line is that the Republican House does nothing but block and oppose. In fact, it has passed hundreds of bills only to have them die upon reaching the desk of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. He has rendered the Senate inert by simply ensuring that any bill that might present a politically difficult vote for his Democratic colleagues never even comes to the floor.
Winning control of the Senate would allow Republicans to pass a whole range of measures now being held up by Reid, often at the behest of the White House. Make it a major reform agenda. The centerpiece might be tax reform, both corporate and individual. It is needed, popular and doable. Then go for the low-hanging fruit enjoying wide bipartisan support, such as the Keystone XL pipeline and natural gas exports, most especially to Eastern Europe. One could then add border security, energy deregulation and health-care reform that repeals the more onerous Obamacare mandates.
If the president signs any of it, good. If he vetoes, it will be clarifying. Who then will be the party of no? The vetoed legislation would become the framework for a 2016 GOP platform. Let the debate begin.
This is right but likely won’t have the results Krauthammer envisions.
After the shocking and historic Republican wins in the 1994 midterms, taking back both the House and Senate for the first time in decades, they were able to enact a lot of legislation, much of which President Clinton was willing to sign. Partly because of the excesses of Newt Gingrich and company and partly because Clinton shrewdly triangulated between the GOP and the less moderate elements of his own party, Clinton went from a shellacking in 1994 to easy re-election in 1996.
It’s not obvious why things would be better two decades later. While neither Speaker of the House John Boehner nor Senate Republican Leader Mitch McConnell are anywhere near as polarizing as Gingrich, neither has anything like his vision for the future, either. It’s not at all clear that the GOP has anything to offer to fix the problems of today’s world, much less programs that the public wants. More likely, we’d just get more shenanigans on Obamacare.
Sadly, the Republican Party still acts as if it’s running against Jimmy Carter. They don’t understand that they’ve won on taxes and lost on most of the social issues. As such, they’re stuck in a time warp.
Krauthammer may be right that having the opposition party in charge of both Houses of Congress is a preferable governing dynamic to having it control only the House, since that’s just a recipe for a negative agenda of stopping the president’s party from enacting their policy preferences. A party that controls Congress has the ability and thus the duty to pass legislation (albeit one that’s difficult to carry out without a filibuster-proof supermajority). I’m inclined to wish the GOP gets the chance to show what they’d do. But I’m not the least bit optimistic they’ll carry out a positive agenda.
