Mitch McConnell's Mission: Degrade and Destroy the Obama Presidency

By Paul Waldman, The Washington Post

15 November 14

any have described the question now facing incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell as follows: How can he satisfy the Republican crazies on the one hand and show that Republicans can govern on the other? But that isn’t really the question he faces. Aside from an occasional move like passing a continuing resolution to keep the government’s doors open, the Republicans won’t be doing any governing.

Rather, the real question McConnell faces is this: How can he go about, to borrow a phrase from Barack Obama, degrading and ultimately destroying the Obama presidency? On this, McConnell has very different ideas from his even more conservative colleagues.

In the end, this is an argument not about goals but about tactics. That doesn’t mean, however, that it won’t be fought with all the fury that some extremely furious people can muster. There’s already a conflict brewing between McConnell and conservative Republicans over exactly how to go about their futile quest to repeal the Affordable Care Act, even though the new Congress won’t be sworn in for two months. This particular argument is a microcosm of the entire next two years, and it shows just how complicated McConnell’s task is.

Mitch McConnell is now the most important Republican in America, and as such he’s faced with two competing management challenges. The first is to manage the entire Republican party in all its chaotic glory. If keeping everyone within the coalition happy is too much to hope for, at least he can try to keep them from running wild and staging open, bitter rebellions. The second is to manage the GOP’s image in the media.

Though he’s been the leader of Senate Republicans for the better part of a decade, McConnell has never had so much responsibility for his party. And serving both of these goals simultaneously may be harder than even he anticipates. McConnell has long been regarded as one of the shrewdest operators in Washington, but he’s now ascended to a new level as the GOP’s undisputed leader (let’s not kid ourselves that the hapless John Boehner has nearly the same level of influence). One can’t help recall that Newt Gingrich was also regarded as a strategic genius, and two years after he ascended to Speaker of the House, Bill Clinton was re-elected, then two years after that Gingrich was gone.

What Republicans are now arguing about is whether they should try to use the budget procedure known as reconciliation to repeal the ACA. Reconciliation, which is used for budget bills, circumvents filibusters and therefore requires only a 51-vote majority. The problem is that it’s extremely complex and can only be used on some parts of the law. But the conservatives advocating it — both inside Congress from people like Ted Cruz, and outside from groups like Heritage Action — aren’t concerned with such details.

McConnell has offered conflicting signals on whether he will ultimately go that route. And this gets at the core difference between him and conservatives: They want to storm the gates of the Obama presidency, even in a suicide mission, while McConnell would much rather try to weaken the walls little by little until the edifice crumbles.

So imagine two different repeal proposals. One occurs through the regular process. It passes in the House, just as it has fifty times before. When it moves through the Senate, Democrats filibuster it and it dies. McConnell would then say to his party, “Okay, we did that. Everybody had the chance to vote on full repeal. Now let’s go through the law, provision by provision, and see what we might be able to undo for real.”

The second scenario goes like this: the Senate somehow manages to attach a full repeal to a budget bill and pass it through reconciliation. It goes to President Obama, who vetoes it. We then arrive at the same point.

The difference between the two scenarios is that the latter garners much more media attention, since it involves the president directly. Instead of being regarded by the media as a perfunctory vote that everybody knew had to be gotten out of the way before the real work begins, it would become a huge showdown.

And since McConnell is now in charge of the GOP’s image as well as its legislative agenda, the last thing he wants is for them to be seen undertaking this kind of high-profile yet futile gesture, since it would just validate everything Democrats say about them being both radical and unserious about governing. If he’s going to have a veto battle with Obama, he’d much rather it be on something where he knows he’ll have a better chance at getting public opinion on his side. For instance, he might try to eliminate the employer mandate, one of the law’s less popular provisions. That’s a fight he might actually win.

And unlike the Tea Partiers, McConnell knows the difference between winning and losing. He’s just as committed to undermining the Obama presidency as they are. What we don’t yet know is whether he can convince them to let him do it his way.