Anyone following politics seriously was curious to see how the new Republican Congress would begin its work in 2015. Its leaders, House Speaker Boehner and Senate Majority Leader McConnell had both acknowledged that, under their leadership, this Congress needed accomplishments to demonstrate that they can govern effectively.

While it is premature to appreciate how effectively the Republican leadership and its members will deal with the issues of budget and other critical issues facing the nation today, it is instructive to examine the first steps of the new Congress as indicative of its potential.

Any objective review in this regard would have to note that, so far at least, this Congress has been almost exclusively focused upon the undoing of the previous six years of legislation passed by the Obama administration. While this focus may remind its base supporters of these stances on issues, it does virtually nothing to pass legislation that will be signed by the President and become law.

Republicans have so far worked to support bills that have been guaranteed a presidential veto, from the Keystone Pipeline to the Affordable Care Act to reversing the president’s executive actions on immigration to reducing the effectiveness of Dodd-Frank and attempting to add new sanctions in the sensitive negotiations with Iran on nuclear development in Iran.

In each case the Republican majority knows that it does not have the votes to sustain passage after a presidential veto, and therefore knows that each of these efforts are destined to end in failure if success is generating new legislation.

So what is the point of the attention to undoing the Obama legacy? That is difficult to determine. Certainly the Loyal Opposition has stood against these laws and executive actions, but that is always the point of opposition. Generally speaking, passing bills that can never become law though is not thought of as effective governing.

But it is entirely possible that Republicans have already thrown in the towel on their higher plans of effective governing and have settled in to simply fight this president every day until the 2016 elections, effective governing aside.

After all, Republicans claimed Obama “poisoned the water” by using executive order to alter the illegal status of nearly 4 million illegals. And many Republicans have noted that the president has seemed un-chastened by the 2014 election results that produced strong Republican majorities in both houses of Congress.

And there is little doubt Speaker Boehner was as offended as he indicated by Obama’s 2105 State of the Union speech where the president promised to veto many of the Republicans’ favorite ideas and offered an agenda so foreign to Republicans that it seemed more campaign speech than concession to the electoral outcome.

Beyond all of these rationale’s however lies the deeper Republican problem that within their own caucus exists the components to deny effective governance.

Since the Reagan years Republicans have claimed that “Big Government” can do nothing right, so when they find themselves managing Big Government it is counterintuitive to consider that they will embrace managing that which they deny is manageable.

Then too, the Republican Party, a rightward leaning party, has within it a more conservative faction that values ideology strongly over compromise. This wing, led by Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, would sooner shut down government than compromise with the White House and Democrats, hardly a “governing” approach.

Yet deeper lies the path Republicans have followed to perfection for the past six years, which has defined them as the party of “No”. What now seems apparent, as they review the past in their legislation, is that No means No more than governing means governing.

 

Jim Crawford is a retired educator and political enthusiast living here in the Tri-State.