The 112th Congress convenes this week, amidst considerable maneuvering in both parties to set an agenda for the year. Unsurprisingly, most developments involving Republicans are centered in their new stomping grounds in the House, and most involving Democrats are happening in their Senate redoubt.
The big headline for the GOP is its plan to hold a House vote next week on total repeal of the Affordable Care Act of 2010, a.k.a. ObamaCare. This is expected to pass the House easily; with the decimation of Blue Dogs last November, it’s not clear how many Democratic votes the gesture will attract. But it is clear the repeal will go nowhere in the Senate, leading to the next phase of the GOP effort to disable ObamaCare through some combination of appropriations denials, state obstruction, and selective congressional forays against the least popular elements of the law (especially the individual mandate and anything that can be construed as a restriction of Medicare services). Lurking in the background, of course, is the slow march towards litigation of constitutional attacks on ACA, which will eventually make their way to the U.S. Supreme Court.
A less visible but potentially more dramatic House GOP development is the announcement of investigatory plans by the new Oversight and Government Reform chairman, the veteran conservative provocateur Darrell Issa of California. Here’s the Washington Post’s description of Issa’s initial plans:
Issa, who will have power to subpoena government officials to appear before the committee, said he intended to conduct inquiries into the release of classified diplomatic cables by Wikileaks; recalls at the Food and Drug Administration; the role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in the foreclosure crisis; the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission’s failure to identify the origins of the meltdown; as well as business regulations and alleged corruption in Afghanistan.
Item five on this six-item list could be the most interesting, since Issa has penned an encyclical to corporate lobbyists asking for examples of government regulations that are allegedly preventing a revival of economic growth. This is the legislative equivalent of ringing a dinner bell. But item two is revealing as well, given the high likelihood that Issa will veer from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into full-scale airing of the common Tea Party theory that ACORN and other “radicals” caused the housing crisis and then the financial meltdown by encouraging poor and minority folk to take out mortgages they couldn’t afford.
The buzz among Democrats (aside from the struggle of House Members to adjust once again to the second-class citizenship of minority status) is over plans in the Senate to enact filibuster reforms as part of the first-day adoption of Senate rules, which requires only a majority vote. Despite public claims by all 53 surviving Democrats that they support filibuster reform, the exact nature of what they will support remains something of a mystery, though almost no one thinks such major steps as lowering of the threshold for cloture will be enacted. Senate Democrats have already announced their package will not be unveiled, as originally planned, on the first day of the session (tomorrow); since the Senate will quickly recess, the “first day” when Senate rules can be adopted will technically not conclude until January 24. That gives Democrats nearly three weeks to figure out what they can actually accomplish on filibuster reform.
Meanwhile, aficionados of political theater are enjoying the long and painful process that is almost certain to conclude in the dismissal of Michael Steele as chairman of the Republican National Committee. Steele surprised many observers by announcing over the holidays that he would pursue another term in the post; his tenure has been characterized by chronically poor fiscal stewardship and embarrassing gaffes, but Republicans can’t be too happy with the spectacle of firing an African-American who presided over the best GOP midterm election cycle in decades. At present, the front-runner to succeed Steele is Wisconsin Republican chairman Reince Priebus, who can boast of a midterm election in which his party picked up a Senate seat, the governorship, and both state legislative chambers, perhaps the best GOP year in Wisconsin since Joe McCarthy’s heyday.
Elsewhere this week, state legislative sessions are gearing up amidst nearly universal fiscal crisis alarms, with Republicans in a vastly stronger position nationally than in the recent past. As the two parties circle each other in Washington, state capitals could be where the real action occurs.
