During his first year in office, President Barack Obama enjoyed an “absolute majority” in Congress: sufficiently wide margins of power in both chambers of Congress that allowed agenda items to be approved without Republican support.
But when Republican Scott Brown won a special election to take the seat of the late Democratic Senator Ted Kennedy, the number of Democrats in the Senate dropped to 59 votes – forcing the Obama administration to propel the Affordable Care Act process towards “reconciliation”. which allows accounts to be approved with a simple majority.
The reconciliation, previously reserved for strictly financial matters, allowed Obama to pass his historic health legislation without a single Republican vote – but it ushered in a yearlong period of legislative congestion, government shutdowns and tax cliffs that would frustrate Republicans the remainder of his two terms.
How President Joe Biden now moves to secure his first legislative victory in Covid’s $ 1.9 trillion aid plan by the same means, Republican strategists, advisers and lawmakers suggest that Biden is at risk of poisoning the well and endangering future initiatives such as infrastructure, immigration and health.
“Once you pull the trigger for reconciliation, it sets the tone for the next two years before the intermediate tests,” said Eric Cantor, a former Republican president who worked with then Vice President Biden during the ACA’s approval. “They will do that and then they will regret it.”
The possibility does not disturb the White House, which argues that the American Rescue Plan has widespread popularity among the public – including Republican voters – as the country enters the second year of the coronavirus pandemic, an unprecedented public health crisis that reached more than half a million American lives.
“Trying to apply political lessons from the past to the situation we face now is a mistake,” Anita Dunn, a senior adviser to Biden, told CNBC. “It is simply not analogous. The country has never been there before.”
Former Obama administration officials say their relationship with Congressional Republican Party leaders has been tense from the start. Facing the interpartisan reaction of the nascent conservative Tea Party movement, Republicans pledged to oppose Obama’s entire political agenda and even declined invitations to the first state dinner at the White House in November 2009.
“The idea that something happened several months later to damage the relationship is a fantasy,” said Phil Schiliro, Obama’s head of legislative affairs during the first two years of the government.
Several current and former Republican advisers suggest that discussions over the $ 800 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act initially soured the relationship.
Obama requested ideas for the package at a bipartisan and bicameral meeting in January 2009, but then postponed it to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, House Speaker, Congressman David Obey, and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid – who had a greater majority in Congress – to develop a package based on popular measures with its constituents.
“They turned on the gas and went with their proposals,” said an aide to the Republican Party leadership who asked to remain anonymous to discuss private deliberations. The price fell 10% between the Chamber and the Senate, where Biden obtained three Republican votes in favor. But in general, “Republicans voted no and found that there was no [political] price to be paid for it. ”
Several months after that, when Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner visited Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell to discuss the first prospects for financial reform that would become the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Consumer Protection and Reform Act, McConnell said to Geithner, “the obstruction is working for them”, according to Obama’s memoirs, “A Promised Land”.
Halfway through the 2010 term, Republicans won seven seats in the Senate and 63 in the House, winning the majority in the highest party turnover in six decades. A decade later, White House officials suggested that Republicans face a greater political risk during the pandemic of being labeled obstructionists and withholding money from their voters’ pockets.
“Their decision is to use reconciliation, if not more,” a senior Biden government official told CNBC, requesting anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the White House approach, blaming Republicans for not supporting the project.
To be sure, Republicans also used reconciliation when it suited their agenda. On January 3, 2017, the first day of the congress session, the then chairman of the Budget Committee, Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., Presented a project that would serve as a vehicle for Trump’s twice unsuccessful attempt at the White House to repeal Obamacare. Later that year, the Trump administration would use the 50-vote limit to pass its tax cuts and jobs Act.
“The truth is that both sides use reconciliation to approve projects that are very difficult to approve in the first year,” said Derek Kan, an adviser to McConnell during the financial crisis who later served as deputy director of the Office of Administration and Budget for Trump. “And it often leads to strenuous relationships for the rest of the term.”
In recent public speeches to request support for the American Rescue Plan – more than double the Obama administration’s stimulus package in 2009 – Biden asked the public a question: “What would you like me to cut?”
It’s a rhetorical question, but several Republicans to have answered in-kind on social media: cutting off foreign aid, money for state and local governments, funding for arts and humanities programs and unrelated infrastructure projects. So far, none of these changes have been incorporated. And the notices across the hall continue, including some on the site at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue this week.
“The White House seems determined to do this with only Democratic votes,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, after a meeting with Biden to discuss supply chains. “I think it’s a mistake, but they want to try, and it depends on them.”