In an ornate meeting room, tucked away one floor above what used to be Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office, incoming House Majority Leader Eric Cantor Tuesday faced a skeptical pack of reporters, all of whom wanted to know exactly how the GOP plans to run the House. The questions were largely specific: Will they adhere to their pledge to run the House more transparently? Will they follow their own deficit reduction rules? If Republicans want to cut spending, what spending do they have in mind?
But underlying all of these queries was a broader question: Will Republicans govern as if they have a broad mandate? Or will they govern as the victors of a midterm election, who only control part of one branch of the federal government?
At that level, Cantor couldn’t have been more clear: he and the rest of the GOP think the majority of the public is on their side, and they will do whatever they can to bring about a fundamental change in the way President Obama has lead. In fact, more important to fulfilling the procedural pledges they made to the Republican base is making sure those changes to Obama’s agenda happen.
It will start, according to Cantor, with a three-week action-oriented agenda leading up to the State of the Union address, involving relentless attacks on Obama’s achievements and his plans for future governance.
Step one: “We are planning to put a repeal bill of the health care reform legislation proposed by this president on the floor.”
Step two: “After the House acts to repeal the health care bill, we’ll move then to our spending cuts.”
Step three: “The week following, we’ll be targeting the job-killing regulations that have been pursued by this administration.”
“After State of the Union we’ll begin a discussion having to do with the budget,” Cantor added. “[I]t will… encapsulate our vision of how we intend to take this country forward as a new House majority.
There’s not much room there for Democratic priorities. There’s also not much room there for the Republicans to pass their agenda, even on a symbolic basis, without running afoul of their pledges — particularly the ones about open debate and deficit reduction.
Republicans have scheduled a vote on health care repeal for Wednesday of next week. It will likely be brought to the floor under what’s known as a “closed rule,” with no opportunity for Democrats to offer votes on amendments.
“The repeal bill is going to be a very straightforward document,” Cantor said. “It is going to reflect what I think most people inside the Beltway and outside the Beltway understand about the health care bill that was passed.”
This isn’t particularly at odds with past practices in the House, where the majority really runs the show. But it reflects the GOP’s real priorities: openness, transparency and fiscal responsibility, perhaps — but not at the expense of the agenda itself.
To that end, the GOP hasn’t (but Democrats have) asked the CBO to score its health care repeal bill. Republicans know what that score will say: that repeal will blow up the deficit. But they don’t buy the numbers, and, whenever those numbers conflict with their policy priorities, they’ll ignore them.
“Most people understand that the CBO did the job it was asked to do by then the Democrat majority… everyone knows beyond the 10-year window, this bill has the potential to bankrupt this federal government as well as the states,” Cantor said. (The CBO found that after 10 years, the health care bill will reduce the deficit significantly more than it will in the first decade.)
Cantor’s words stood in stark contrast to those of incoming Minority Whip Steny Hoyer — the man he’s replacing.
At his press briefing yesterday morning, Hoyer recalled Newt Gingrich, who once lectured his party’s conservative idealists on the floor of the House after he negotiated a budget compromise with President Bill Clinton.
“He looked at them and he said… the problem is you have a country, an electorate, that has elected a Democratic president. A lot of the Republicans in the United States Senate don’t agree with us Republicans in the House. And a lot of Democrats in the House of Representatives don’t agree with us. Now we can have gridlock, Gingrich said. Or we can reach some compromise, which is what the American people expect.”
And, of course, it took a government shutdown for Gingrich to reach that point.
