If GOP Takes the Senate, It Must Demonstrate Governing
“Show the country what you stand for. Then take it to the nation in 2016.”
Republicans are today on track to take back the Senate.
Why is this important? 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.
The risk-averse will say, why take chances? Why not just run against the Obama legacy in 2016?
The GOP should and will. What has happened to economic growth, social cohesion and America’s standing abroad will be a significant drag on Democrats. But it could very well not be enough.
Obama won’t be on the ticket. Hillary Clinton, now rapidly distancing herself from the administration she served, will be running on a different legacy, that of her husband and the holiday-from-history 1990s.
Moreover, for winning the presidency to mean something, you need a mandate. Ronald Reagan understood this. He could have coasted to victory in 1980 on mere opposition. But he had a platform, much of which he successfully enacted precisely because he ran on it.
Memo to the GOP: Win the Senate, then enact an agenda and dare the president to veto it. Show the country what you stand for. Then take it to the nation in 2016.
