Jan 6th 2011 | WASHINGTON, DC | from PRINT EDITION
Take another of the Republicans’ first acts: the scheduling of a vote on January 12th to repeal the health-care reforms passed by the previous, Democrat-controlled Congress. The measure is all but certain to pass, given the Republicans’ healthy majority of 242-193, and may even attract the votes of a few Democrats. But it is also all but certain to run aground in the Senate, which remains tilted 53-47 in the Democrats’ favour. A further obstacle to the ambitions of the House Republicans is the president’s power to veto any bill he dislikes. As their recent primer on the constitution will have reminded them, it takes a two-thirds vote of both chambers—something far beyond the Republicans’ reach—to overturn a presidential veto.
Thus most of the measures with which the Republicans are marking their ascendancy are symbolic. In another sop to the tea-partiers, they have drawn up new rules requiring every bill to specify the precise passage of the constitution that empowers Congress to act on the matter at hand. In a jab at the unions, they have changed the name of what used to be the Committee on Education and Labour to the Committee on Education and the Workforce. And to embarrass the president, Darrell Issa, the new chairman of the Committee on Oversight, has announced no fewer than six investigations he plans to conduct, into suspected incompetence at various government agencies and the like.
In a show of their determination to cut spending, the Republicans plan to vote in their first week to trim the House’s own budget by 5%. They have also changed House rules to ensure that all increases in spending are offset by commensurate cuts, rather than increases in tax. In fact, it is in fiscal matters that the Republicans will have the most leverage. Their support will be needed in the coming months both to pass a budget and to raise the legal limit on America’s debt. The stakes are high: failure to agree on the former would prompt the government to suspend all but its most basic functions; neglecting the latter would entail defaulting on America’s debts.
Republican leaders say they want to avoid any such cataclysms, but are also insisting on cuts. Paul Ryan, the new chairman of the House Budget Committee, maintains that he will pare back non-security spending in what remains of the current fiscal year to the level of 2008. That would mean a cut of roughly 20% or about $50 billion, a drop in the ocean. That is broadly consistent with the Republicans’ pre-election promises, but is considered far too severe by the Democrats in the Senate, the president and milder Republicans.
By the same token, many of the Republicans’ fiercest deficit hawks say they will not allow the debt ceiling to be raised unless they secure swingeing budget cuts. The Republican leadership appear worried that an unseemly zeal to slash spending and precipitate a melodramatic showdown with the Democrats would alienate moderate voters at the general election next year. But they also tend to bow to the zealots in the party who agitate feverishly—and often successfully—to unseat in the primaries anyone without a similar gleam in their eyes. Just how these impasses will be resolved, and with what amount of brinkmanship, is anyone’s guess.
Barack Obama, for one, seems to assume that the Republicans will indulge in a spell of futile pandering to their base before compromising on the budget and perhaps a few other matters. “That’s what happens in Washington,” he said breezily this week, on his way back from a holiday in Hawaii. Some observers see scope for bipartisanship on trade deals or an overhaul of immigration laws, although that would depend, presumably, on how poisonous the negotiations over the budget become.
A good indicator of Congress’s likely descent into bickering and stalemate is the sudden interest in both chambers in the rules of procedure. John Boehner, the new speaker of the House, has resorted to a procedural gimmick to try to impose spending cuts until a new budget is passed. He has also instituted new rules intended to rein in the deficit, but has exempted from them some of the Republicans’ most cherished but expensive goals, such as further extending the temporary tax cuts agreed with the Democrats last month.
In the Senate, meanwhile, Democrats are threatening to make it harder for the Republican minority to obstruct the will of the majority. As soon as the chamber convened on January 5th, Tom Udall, a Democrat from New Mexico, put forward a motion to change the rules of the filibuster, whereby 41 of the 100 senators can stymie almost any measure. Normally, such a change would require the approval of two-thirds of senators. But on one interpretation of procedure the rules can be changed by a simple majority of senators at the beginning of a new Congress.
Republican senators complain that the Democrats, having lost the election, are now trying to subvert its result. Somewhat contradictorily, they are decrying the attack on the Senate’s traditions even as they threaten similar acts of vengeance should they win control of the chamber at the next election. Resorting to yet another procedural ruse, Harry Reid, the leader of the Democratic majority, has deferred the matter for a few weeks in the hope of striking some sort of deal with the Republicans. Even if the Democrats in the Senate get their way, however, they will be just as constrained by America’s newly divided government as the Republicans.
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