What a GOP Victory in the Senate Might Mean

With less than a week until
election day, most election models continue to favor Republicans:
They are favorites to pick up at least a few seats in the House and
to win majority control of the Senate.

The big question, then, is what happens next. If Republicans win
control of both chambers of Congress, what will they do? To a great
extent, that question can be broken down into two parts: What will
Republicans, who are unified mostly by opposition to Obama,
agree to do? And what can Republicans do, given
that Senate Democrats will still retain the ability to stymie
legislation via the filibuster, and that Obama will still be
president, with veto power over any legislation that succeeds in
making it to his desk.

The question of agreement is one that Republicans have largely
avoided in recent years (recent efforts to find positive priorities
that unify the party have been so vague as to be meaningless) as
opposition to the president has become the priority.

But as Molly Ball
reports at The Atlantic, there are certainly
Republicans who would like to take the opportunity, should it
arise, to be more proactive:

…With control of both houses of Congress, Republicans would be
on the hook for Congress’s actions. They alone would get the blame
if Congress remained dysfunctional—and they alone could claim
credit if Congress actually passed bills with popular support. If
Republicans passed such moderate, constructive legislation, Obama
would be hard pressed to simply veto everything they put on his
desk.

“The way I describe it is, we’re putting the guardrails on the
Obama administration’s last two years,” Senator Rob Portman told me
in a recent interview, explaining how he envisions a
Republican-controlled Senate proceeding. Needing GOP approval for
nominees, Obama would have to appoint moderates to judicial and
executive positions, he said. But Portman, a fiscally focused Ohio
Republican who is generally conservative but believes in bipartisan
compromise, sees several areas of potential cooperation with the
administration. He mentioned tax reform, a “grand bargain” on the
budget, an energy bill—perhaps something that combines Keystone XL
pipeline approval with reductions in carbon emissions—and new
free-trade agreements, which Obama has supported but Senate
Majority Leader Harry Reid has
blocked. Portman, who voted against the bipartisan
immigration-reform bill that passed the Senate last year, also
believes a Republican-led immigration-reform bill could pass the
House and Senate and potentially be approved by Obama.

The question here is whether the rest of the party (or enough of
it) would be on board with this approach. As Ball writes:

Even if Republican leaders want this to happen, the biggest
obstacle will be Republicans themselves—chiefly the restive
conservatives in the House, who have prevented consideration of
bipartisan legislation approved by the Senate on issues like
immigration and who have often prevented the party from doing
what’s in its own political interest (see: government
shutdown). McConnell’s Senate majority will include pragmatists
like Portman—but also ideologues like Ted Cruz. Portman
acknowledged this obstacle when I spoke to him. “We as Republicans
have a real challenge to get the diversity of our ranks to work
together,” he said.

But even if Republicans can come together, there’s still the
matter of the other party. Democrats might lose the
majority in the Senate, but they will retain significant ability to
block legislation from even coming to the president’s desk. And
while Republicans might get around that by cutting deals or through
the use of reconciliation, which allows for certain limited types
of spending bills to move through the Senate on a simple majority
vote, Obama’s veto power will remain in force. Over at National
Review, Ramesh Ponnuru walks through various scenarios for
deal cutting and pushing legislation through the process, and
concludes that, while some business-friendly deals might be
possible, there are real limits on what a GOP Congress will be able
to do in the next two years.

Republicans, with nominal control of the Senate, will not be
able to “prove they can govern” because they will not in fact be
able to govern. They can, however, work to prove that they have an
attractive governing agenda, advancing legislation to reform
federal policies on taxes, energy, health care, and higher
education in ways that raise Americans’ standard of living. Most of
that legislation would fall victim to filibusters, and some of it
to vetoes. Offering and fighting for it would nonetheless lay the
groundwork for a successful 2016 campaign, ideally followed by the
enactment of much of it.

This is basically right: It’s not an opportunity to legislate so
much as an opportunity to prepare to legislate. In some ways,
Republicans, should they win, will be in a similar situation as
Democrats were following the 2006 midterm. And during that time,
Democrats teed up a variety of big-ticket issues, from the stimulus
to the health care law, that would result in major legislative
victories following the 2008 presidential election.

Republicans are badly in need of a brand revamp right now, and
some sense of direction, post-Obama. As Nick Gillespie
noted earlier today, there are a variety of ideas and policies
and general attitude shifts that the party could begin to adopt to
begin that process, and two years of Senate control would provide
an opportunity to do so. The first item on the party’s agenda, in
other words, should be to have one.