Republican leaders who will take full control of Congress this week plan to focus on attempting to unpick Barack Obama’s key domestic reforms, all but guaranteeing one of the stormiest legislative sessions for some years in the run up to the next presidential election.
As Air Force One returned to Washington on Sunday from Obama’s vacation in Hawaii, incoming Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell took to the airwaves to promise immediate legislation challenging the president on healthcare and the environment.
“We need to do everything we can to try to rein in the regulatory onslaught which is the principle reason that we haven’t had the kind of bounce back after the 2008 recession that you would expect,” the Kentucky senator told CNN.
His uncompromising start to the New Year matches defiant rhetoric from Obama, who used his last appearance in 2014 to insist he would refuse to sign such legislation, a presidential veto which requires two-thirds of Congress to ignore and is something neither McConnell nor the House speaker, John Boehner, are likely to overcome easily.
But this new battleground may differ from the legislative stalemate that has characterised the president’s last four years in office, because the new Republican majority in the Senate, with 54 seats, means McConnell will probably have the votes to pass legislation aimed at peeling off moderate Democrats and causing maximum political discomfort in the run-up to the 2016 presidential race.
In particular, the new Senate majority leader plans immediate votes on approving a controversial extension to the Keystone oil pipeline, one of several bills challenging the administration’s environmental pedigree that narrowly failed in the last Congress. Obama has hinted his opposition but has yet to come out with it officially.
“[People] are tired of inaction,” McConnell said. “They want us to act. What does active mean? To give you some examples, things like approving the Keystone pipeline which would put a lot of people to work immediately, trying to do everything we can to push back against over-active bureaucracy of the current administration that has created much job loss. For example, in my state the coal-mining industry.”
Republicans also plan to follow through on their election promise to attempt to overturn Obama’s healthcare reforms, although McConnell said his main focus would be finding Democrat support to unpick unpopular elements of the reform such as a tax on medical devices and rules blamed for limiting workers’ hours.
“There will be a vote on repeal, but the president will veto that,” explained the Wyoming senator John Barrasso on NBC. “So we will get on his desk for signature something with bipartisan support.”
Democratic senator Amy Klobuchar confirmed she was working with the Republican Orin Hatch on just such a measure to overturn the medical device tax, but insisted it would be replaced with other ways of raising the revenue that Obamacare needs.
“The hope is we will find a way to pay for this and get this tax off,” she told NBC. “We are looking at a way to reduce this tax.”
Democratic senators may also present a growing challenge to Obama’s foreign policy objectives. New Jersey senator Bob Menendez on Sunday reinforced his opposition to normalising relations with Cuba by predicting it would be impossible for the president to confirm a new US ambassador to the Caribbean country, even though he was able to find an embassy building without Congress.
“We already have operating interests section which the administration can usually convert to an embassy,” Menendez told CNN. “An ambassador? I think it would be very difficult to get an ambassador confirmed.”
For his part, Obama shows every sign of doubling down on his use of executive actions to circumvent Congress. The president plans a three-city tour ahead of his State of the Union address on 20 January, in which he will seek to pitch his policy priorities over the heads of lawmakers and directly at the American public.
McConnell conceded that one lesson of November’s midterm election victory was that voters were tired of whoever was in power in Washington and wanted more productive government.
“The American people had two messages: they were certainly upset with the president but they also wanted to do something about the dysfunction of Washington,” he said. “So I think the message of the American people is they would like to see a right-of-centre, responsible conservative governing majority.”
He added: “When people vote for divided government, they are not saying they want nothing done; they are saying is they want things done in the political centre, things that both of us can agree on.”
