The Oklahoman: After State of the Union speech: Can Obama and Republican Congress get anything done?
The Oklahoman - Chris Casteel
The start of the new Congress has been marked by familiar conflicts between Republicans and President Barack Obama, raising questions about whether the next two years will yield anything but more grid-lock.
Obama is scheduled to give a State of the Union speech Tuesday to a Congress totally controlled by Republicans for the first time in his presidency.
In the lead-up to the address, the president has been introducing parts of his 2015 agenda — free years of community college, universal access to high-speed broadband, paid sick leave — that demonstrate how much his priorities differ from a congressional majority bent on cutting spending and rolling back regulations on the private sector.
For their part, Republican lawmakers kicked off the first two weeks of the new year by trying to take away the president’s authority over the Keystone XL pipeline; reversing executive actions on deportations; and repealing parts of the Dodd-Frank legislation on financial reform. The administration has threatened vetoes of all three bills.
Stake out positions
Rep. Tom Cole, R-Moore, said a certain amount of conflict was inevitable and that each side had to stake out their positions before compromises could be struck.
“If you really want to get something done, you will have to deal,’’ said Cole. “Dealing doesn’t come up front. It comes after the initial positions. I’m not telling you we’ll come to any big deals. But I’m not letting the initial phase color the judgment.”
Republican lawmakers and the president have expressed some optimism about working together, but the legislative opportunities mentioned by them comprise a pretty short list.
At a GOP retreat last week, Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, cited cybersecurity and trade as possible areas of agreement, with some potential for a highway bill and even tax reform.
Speaking to reporters last week, White House press secretary Josh Earnest said it was “perfectly fine for Republicans to pass legislation that the president doesn’t support. They obviously can make their views known on a variety of policy areas.
“What we should not do, however, is allow our well-known opposition or at least differences of opinion on some areas to prevent us from cooperating on others.”
Earnest also mentioned infrastructure — that is, the long-term highway funding bill — and tax reform as areas where common ground might be found.
Shift in control
Republicans made huge gains in the House and Senate after the November elections, and Obama became the third president in a row to watch party control in Congress shift to the opposition.
For former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, the change came in his first term. He and the new Republican majority were able to claim some major accomplishments — welfare reform and a balanced budget — before he was ultimately impeached by the GOP House.
Democrats mostly fought with former President George W. Bush, a Republican, when they took control of both houses in the last two years of his presidency.
But House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, of California, who was House speaker during Bush’s last two years, said there was still “a great deal of success.”
She told reporters this month, “We passed ... one of the biggest energy bills in the history of our country. We passed a stimulus that was very positive for low income people. We passed the TARP (financial bail-out), working with him.
“And so there is, in recent memory, a time when the opposing party worked with the president of the United States to get some things done, and that is what we would hope (Republicans) would do with President Obama. So far, they have not.”
Legacy or vetoes
Obama is in the same situation as Bush, facing a Congress in complete control of the opposition party for his last two years.
Cole said there are at least two big challenges to cooperation: the politically polarized country and the lack of negotiating skill in the president, who was not — as Clinton and Bush — a governor who had to work with legislators to get things done.
There is also some question, Cole said, about whether Obama wants to add more legislative accomplishments to his legacy or whether he is content to spend the next two years vetoing Republican bills.
Obama has made clear already that he has an agenda, but it’s not clear whether some of his proposals — such as the one for free community college — will even get a hearing.
At his end-of-the-year news conference last month, the president told reporters there would be “some tough fights on areas where we disagree.”
“If Republicans seek to take health care away from people who just got it, they will meet stiff resistance from me. If they try to water down consumer protections that we put in place in the aftermath of the financial crisis, I will say no. And I’m confident that I’ll be able to uphold vetoes of those types of provisions.
“But on increasing American exports, on simplifying our tax system, on rebuilding our infrastructure, my hope is that we can get some things done.”
Online:The Oklahoman