Here’s a list of the current committee assignments (pdf) in the House of Representatives. It’s the best template available for trying to understand the makeup of the next Congress. There are obviously going to be some changes due to retirements and the results of yesterday’s elections. I think you can learn a lot by looking at this list. It brings into sharp relief just how hard it is going to be for the president to get any legislation passed. He can invite all the chairmen of the all the committees to the White House or out for a ride on Marine One, but none of them are going to want to play ball with him on anything. He can try to convince Ways & Means chairman Dave Camp (R-MI) to work with him on overhauling the tax code. That might be the most promising avenue, but it won’t be an easy sell. He can talk to Energy & Commerce chairman Fred Upton (R-MI) and Natural Resources chairman Doc Hastings (R-WA) about tackling climate change. He can talk to Judiciary chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX) about immigration reform. But it just seems unlikely that any of these men could deliver the votes of their Republican colleagues even if they wanted to.
This is what I was talking about prior to the election when I said that the Republicans are not legislators. The GOP seems to have a solid majority in the House for the foreseeable future, which means that they must get used to writing education policy and health policy and labor policy in ways that the Democratic Senate and the president can support. The problem is that they just don’t seem capable of doing that. What they’ll do instead is continue to legislate by crisis. They’ll refuse to raise the debt limit or pass appropriations bills to keep the government operating. They won’t compromise.
This is why the president needs to just let us go over the fiscal cliff. Once we are over it, the GOP has to pass laws to fix things. It will force them to legislate instead of simply obstruct. The GOP needs to learn how to do that if they are going to be a fixture in the House over the next decade. Our country is depending on them learning to do that.
This is why the president needs to just let us go over the fiscal cliff.
I 100% agree with you on this!! 😉
me too. Let’s get in the barrel and go over the falls. WHEEEEEEEEEE!
Exactly. Let the fiscal fire get started and hold their goddam feet to it. Doing nothing means more tax revenues and decreased spending, so the bond markets will accept it.
Make THEM respond to the crises that they have so blithely created. Make THEM responsible for not passing a middle tax cut that you’ll sign. Make THEM the party that raised taxes. And castigate them to the media every day for allowing the fires to rage uncontrolled and refusing to put them out, when it’s clear how they can easily extinguish them. And if equities fall while they dither and bicker with High Priest Grover, blame them for that, too.
We already know Boner’s bonehead Repubs can’t swim, so let ’em sink—and tell the nation three times every day that they’re sinking and can’t govern. Put the pressure on and see what happens.
The Senate should immediately send the bill they have already passed, locking in the middle-class cuts but allowing the upper-level ones to expire, to the House. The President should bully pulpit the heck out of it as an already compromised stop-gap plan “to take us until the newly elected Congress can sit down together and work on a long term plan”.
Then do nothing but broadcast to the country that there are only two options:
If 1 happens, great. If 2 happens, then Dems immedately pass (in the Senate) a bill designed around massive middle-class cuts and liberal spending priorities as soon as the new Congress convenes — after Filibuster reform. Then give it to the House and they’ll HAVE to work with Dems, or be tied irreparably to the same GOP brand that caused the mess in the first place.
And then they should go home and stay home.
Assuming that the appropriate narrative is provided by the President ahead of the right wing spin machine.
If the Dems don’t blow their chance for filibuster reform, the Reps will lose one major hidey-hole they’ve been using to escape public shame for their obstruction. The Senate will be able to pass popular bills, and the House GOP will have no way to dodge the spotlight on their childish, knee-jerk obstructionism. Even the compliant media will no longer be able to regurgitate the inevitable “Congress fails to pass xxxx”. It will have to be House GOP kills xxxx”. I think the pressure will get to them at some point, and if not, will threaten a flip in the House in two years.
In the meantime Obama will have lots of executive power to assert. The GOP may come to realize that cooperation is better than extending the imperial presidency, which will be Obama’s only alternative against a constant GOP blockade. He doesn’t have to be careful anymore.
I don’t necessarily buy the prediction of a decade-long Rep House majority either. A lot can change over 2 years, including what is perceived as self interest.
A royalist party in a parliamentary republic has no real interest in participation in government per se. Their whole reason for being is to shut the assembly down, blow up the republic, and hasten the Restoration.
When the King comes into his own again, real government — courtiers jockeying for grace and favor, pensions and preferment, governorships and royal monopolies — can return.
Then parliament can get back to its real role — a talking-shop that occasionally votes the King credits for his wars.
The weirdest transformation of political terminology hasn’t been what happened to the word ‘liberal’ since John Stuart Mill — it’s what happened to the word ‘republican’.
Over the longer term, the Democratic Party needs to buckle down and figure out a strategy for winning House races in swing districts and for winning control of the state offices that govern redistricting the next time around.
We can’t just concede the House of Representatives for a decade.
Howard Dean had such a strategy. It was called “50 states”. You fight in them all, not just the safe ones. Use Citizens United to keep up a nonstop campaign against the Republican wurlitzer (my idea, not Dean’s). Don’t let the corporate media get away with “both sides are to blame”.
The core of the 50-state strategy, of course, was to support conservadems like Heath Shuler and John Tester in red states.
I consider this strategy obviously and inarguable right, but there has been quite a bit of disagreement on that point. Oddly enough, it has come largely from people who proclaim their adoration for Howard Dean and the 50-state strategy.
First Conservadems then education which will lead to real Dems. The lack of knowledge of Science, Economics, and History in the red states is shocking. In most of America it’s true for that matter, but it is mostly Republicans who fight not only 20th Century knowledge but even 19th Century knowledge.
What we don’t need is the DNC and DCCC intervening in primary elections to pick Conservadems as Rahm Emanuel did. The national party should only come in after the locals have selected their candidates. There is no need for a Beltway Politburo running a top down party.
When the fundamental bedrock principle of your political party is ‘Government is the problem’, their strategy of failing to legislate makes perfect sense.
So long as they hold the Confederacy and Fox News, they’ll keep half of America in ignorant thrall enough to keep ’em getting elected, and we’ll continue to be subject to their tactics.
I expect the lame duck house will go full kamikaze on the Debt Ceiling in an effort to bring the economy down in flames…I have heard far too many conservatives saying things like ‘we need to let it all burn down’ to believe that they won’t carry through on their threat.
They’ll have the advantage of doing it at the very beginning of Obama’s second term, and have two years of the supine lickspittle media to whitewash their destructive policies to prevent a Dem takeover of the House in 2014.
If you thought Republican obstructionism was bad the last four years, you ain’t seen NOTHIN’ yet!
I didn’t know that Idaho, Utah, Wyoming, Arizona, the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, and Indiana were part of the Confederacy.
Change the South and you change the nation. FDR did it. JFK and LBJ did it. And those changes are still with us, which gives Ross Douthat a sad.
It’s very easy to do. When the Senate returns, they can declare this session of Congress over and go home. Let the press howl about the do-nothing Senate over the holidays. McConnell would make sure that they’d do nothing of substance anyway.
It’s time for the President to show the Congress how easy he’s been on them for the past four years.
Yes, go over the fiscal cliff.
You want debt reduction? Well, here it is, Tea Party.
The republicans will continue to hold us hostage with the tax cuts until we let them all expire. Let’s take away that weapon once and for all.
What you’ve suggested is a very simple and elegant solution. I hope they do just what you’ve suggested.
Booman, I’m not a political analyst. I was assuming the reason we didn’t take the House was the gerrymandering that occurred because of their big 2010 win.
If so, it seems like our strategy is to start right now while the irons are hot, find Dem candidates to back or some way to prepare districts to vote for Democrats in 2014.
One great thing about the campaign is that POTUS was finally able to get media coverage for what he was saying and recognition by low info voters for what he has accomplished. As well as getting them to realize what the GOP is really up to.
So, there is the need in some way for us to get the message out to the Fox viewers and those that barely watch the news.
I’d like to see Obama keep the OFA structure in place for us to work with them in a grassroots capacity to pass legislation we want, to win back the House in 2014. As I remember it, several Senate seats up in 2014 are in the South. There will be governors and state house and senate seats up then too won’t there?
We have a lot we can do and we can start right now building the structure. What do you think?
The modern GOP can’t organize anything either. I don’t want to get overconfident, but except for their longstanding advantages of infinite campaign funds and a supportive media Village they wouldn’t accomplish anything. I think the Iraq occupation and Katrina are examples of modern GOP management at it’s best. They are infested with groupthink and as a result unable to address even their most basic failings. The reason they adopted the “Party of No” strategy is that this is all they are capable of doing – they can’t create, only destroy.
Want an example? Google Project Orca. This was supposed to be the Romney project that was going to out-organize OFA. Apparently this was the source of their confidence that they would win on election night. They had brought in a bunch of supposed tech superstars to build a database and a smartphone app that would allow them to monitor voters in real time and deploy resources to GOTV wherever extra votes were needed.
Now, first of all, the whole concept was flawed. Yes, OFA does a great job of getting out the vote but it’s not because of actions on the day of the election but instead the months of groundwork before hand – including new registrations and early voting. If Obama had needed extra votes by, say, 4 p.m. on election day OFA would have kept making last minute calls but realistically the game would have been over.
Secondly, like everything else the GOP touches Project Orca was total crap … think of it as the Midas Touch in reverse. I got a sense of this yesterday as a poll watcher. There was no GOP poll watcher at that polling place until 4 pm … he told me that he was the third shift but the first two shifts hadn’t shown up. Apparently no one at Project Orca HQ had noticed. But then as I noticed this poor guy struggling with the instructions he had and the data he was given from the election judges I actually felt sympathy … it was a complete clusterf*** (his own word, btw) and impossible for him to provide meaningful data, let alone for the HQ to take any action based on that data. The second shift person eventually showed up late, without the required poll watcher paperwork, and only added to the confusion.
I’m not going to add details of the problems as I don’t want to help the enemy … assuming they still have any ability to self-analyze and improve. But in my career I’ve been involved in many large scale deployments of processes and tools and OFA has mostly been an example of how to do things right … Orca was the Katrina of process/tool deployments.
The poor Romney team … so convinced that they had out-Obama’ed Obama and believing all their data as it came in, only to be shell-shocked as every news org on the planet reported the actual results. But that’s exactly how they would govern if back in power.
Great stuff. love the use of “Orca”—killer whale, “killing machines”, oh yeah…
These dolts and their image of their bottomless machismo and absolute competence. Childish.
Obama has a default habit of giving opposition a discounted ride the first round; see how he approached the first Congress and sorta how he let Mitt run the first debate.
This go round, the Obama who showed up for the 2nd and 3rd debates may just be the guy who shows up. The Obama who, in good faith, believed the Rep promises the first 4 years was burned. This Obama, I’m betting, will suffer no fools.
Krauthhammer’s quick “Obama has no mandate” is only pre emptive wishful rhetoric. Obama has a mandate and he leads a Party that just learned it doesn’t have to back off.
Fiscal Cliff must rest with the GOP Congress, let’s see what they will cut, lets see how far they will go to protect the top 1% of Income Earners.
Looking at the election results county maps on Huffington Post. Some interesting things:
South Carolina has more blue as North Carolina has less blue.
Paul Ryan likely won his district because it was gerrymandered to include Waukesha County. Ryan’s home county went for Obama.
Rich Co. UT went 90.8% for Mitt Romney, likely his biggest margin. And still there were 83 votes for Obama. Cimmaron Co. OK at 90.4% Obama is likely second. A Presidential trip to Randolph UT and Boise City OK seems to me to be in order just so the President can listen to folks who so heavily voted against him and thank the 83 folks in Rich Co. and the 115 folks in Cimarron Co. that voted for him. Maybe he could talk with them about what he’s done to cut spending in order to deal with the GOP fiscal cliff.
Stephanopoulis gloating this morning that Ryan still has his seat and is in control, that Obama has to come to Ryan for a solution that Ryan will accept. Sounds like the whole election was a farce.