海角大神

If there鈥檚 one thing that has epitomized the relationship between the White House and the Republican-controlled House over the past three and a half years, it has been the extent to which showdown politics has become a regular part of governing in Washington. Less than six months after the GOP took control of the lower chamber of Congress, Washington was gripped by a showdown over the budget and the extension of the debt ceiling that lasted right up until the last minute and resulted in a deal that nobody really liked, but which supposedly would never really be implemented because of the 鈥渟uper committee鈥� that would solve all our budget problems. When that super committee failed, we ended up with budget cuts that nobody really liked and which ended up being the catalyst for further showdowns. We also saw showdowns over the extension of the Bush tax cuts, the end of Don鈥檛 Ask Don鈥檛 Tell, and pretty much every high profile nomination requiring Senate confirmation. Most famously, of course, the showdown strategy resulted last year in a 16-day government shutdown that only seemed to happen because the GOP leadership was outmaneuvered by a Tea Party that had decided that shutting down the government would be a good idea when every indication was saying otherwise.

As we approach the 2014 midterms with the prospect of the GOP winning control of the Senate well within the realm of possibility, speculation is naturally turning to what the GOP would do with its Senate majority during the last two years of the Obama presidency. In a new聽笔辞濒颈迟颈肠辞听interview, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell seems to be promising more showdowns, and perhaps even another shutdown:

None of this should come as a surprise, of course. Nobody expects that the GOP would suddenly decide to cooperate with the president on issues like immigration reform, or the budget, or anything else, if they gained control of the Senate. This is especially true given the fact that the beginning of the 114th Congress will coincide with the effective beginning of the 2016 Presidential election process. Both parties in Washington are going to be far more interested in using their time in Washington to shape the agenda for the upcoming election than actually getting anything done, and this will be especially true for a GOP seeking to gain back the White House after eight years of Democratic control. Additionally, political rhetoric like this is obviously something that will appeal to the base voters that Republicans want to get to the polls in November. From that perspective, then, making a promise like this does make some political sense for McConnell.

At the same time, though, I have to wonder if the GOP would actually be helping itself if it followed a strategy like this, assuming that it does win the Senate in November. Polling in recent years has shown fairly consistently that the public has a very low opinion of Congress in general, and that one of the main reasons for that is the perception that members are unable to get anything done because they are pursuing partisan agendas rather than actually trying to solve problems. If Republicans spend the two years between 2014 and the presidential election engaging in exactly that kind of strategy, then they face the prospect of turning voters off even more to the point that it does real harm to whomever ends up being the party鈥檚 nominee in 2016. Given the fact that the GOP is already facing the prospect of real Electoral College problems based on the results of presidential elections going as far back as 1992, the prospect of annoying the voters that they need to attract in states like Virginia, Florida, and Ohio ought to concern them.

Republicans don鈥檛 see things this way, of course, and the McConnell strategy outlined in this interview is therefore likely to appeal to them. They believe that if they engage in the kind of strategy that McConnell talks about here by attaching controversial policy issues to budget bills and forcing the president to veto them, they will end up gaining support among the public. On some of these issues, such as the Keystone XL Pipeline, they are correct to point out that the public does seem to support the GOP position. Additionally, the fact that the president鈥檚 job approval is quite low and unlikely to get any better over the next two years would seem to argue that picking fights with him over issues like this isn鈥檛 necessarily political risky. Nonetheless, given three years worth of polling showing that the public isn鈥檛 exactly thrilled by the kind of delay and gridlock that McConnell seems to be promising, I鈥檓 not sure that this kind of legislative strategy is in the GOP鈥檚 long-term interests.

Doug Mataconis appears on the Outside the Beltway blog at http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/.