By DICK MORRIS, Published on TheHill.com on October 28, 2014
If the Republicans win the Senate next week, to quote
Hillary Clinton's remarks in another context, "what difference does it
make?" With President Obama still in the White House and the Republicans
short of 60 votes -- and far short of the two-thirds needed in either house to
override a presidential veto -- how can GOP control of the Senate have much
impact?
The answer is that it can have an enormous impact -- if Republicans
play their cards right.
The key is how they handle the federal budget, legislation
that requires only a simple majority under the Byrd Rule and for which the
president does not have a line-item veto power.
Congress can go line by line through the budget, legislating
as it goes, rolling back one after another of Obama's initiatives.
Obviously, the GOP must not overplay its hand. If it uses
its power to defund ObamaCare entirely, for example, the president will
predictably veto the entire budget and the stage will be set for a replay of
the October 2013 shutdown of the government, with the same disastrous
consequences for the GOP.
But if Republicans limit their ambitions and carefully
choose their targets, they can use line-item changes to control and derail
important aspects of Obama's agenda.
The key is to pick targets where public opinion is on the
Republican side and not to use the budgetary power in ways that exceed public
expectations. Even though a majority of Americans oppose ObamaCare, it would be
an overreach to repeal it by defunding it. The process of defunding has no
roots in American political memory and is susceptible to Obama's argument that
the Congress must pay the bills it has incurred. And, in a fight of that
magnitude, as Clinton and Obama well know, the presidential megaphone drowns
out all else.
But if Republicans are more limited in their objectives,
they can succeed. They could, for example:
Use the Immigration and Customs Enforcement appropriation to
overturn Obama's executive order, expected right after Election Day, to end
deportations;
Use the Health and Human Services line to defund the
Independent Payment Advisory Board, dubbed the "death panel" by Sarah
Palin;
Repeal the medical device tax;
Require release of IRS emails by appending a requirement to
the budget for that wayward agency;
Stop the Federal Election Commission from regulating
Internet blogs;
Block the Federal Communications Commission from its
attempts at Internet regulation.
In these and a host of other areas, Republicans can use the
budget to thwart and roll back Obama's initiatives.
None of them likely rises to the level where the president
would veto the entire budget. And, were he to do so, he would have to fight on
ground overwhelmingly favorable to the GOP. He would fail.
And then there is ObamaCare. With the lawsuits invalidating
subsidies that go to people who did not pass through the federal exchanges
likely to reach the Supreme Court, the chance for a verdict overturning this
key element of the healthcare law cannot be discounted. Both Justices John
Roberts and Anthony Kennedy have repeated attacked legislating from the bench,
and the lawsuit asks not that they overturn ObamaCare, just that they read the
Affordable Care Act and enforce it literally as it is written. If ObamaCare
subsidies are overturned, Republicans can replace them with a new system of tax
credits without coercion by a simple majority in the Senate (as ObamaCare
itself was passed with a simple majority).
Would Obama veto a bill that restores coverage to the 10
million or so people who will have lost their insurance in the court decision?
Doubtful.
Source: Dick Morris
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