Nikki Haley liked the MAGA glow while avoiding Trump’s bold type of politics. But after the Capitol uprising, that position is becoming less and less sustainable.
Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell told POLITICO last year that he thought the House was “so confused about what they are doing that it probably doesn’t make much difference”.
Josh Holmes, McConnell’s former chief of staff and a close ally, called some of the House’s recent positions “totally exempt from any kind of business defense”.
Tanden’s endorsement, he said, “is particularly mysterious to me, because she personally participated in several efforts during the Obama years to basically destroy Tom Donohue and the US House for opposing Obamacare and for opposing them in the elections. 2014 and 2012. “
The House insists it is taking the same approach with the Biden government as it did with the Trump administration: working with them on settlement issues and fighting in areas where they don’t. The group has never committed to supporting Republicans, said Neil Bradley, the Chamber’s executive vice president and policy director.
“Some people may have assumed that the Chamber was somehow an arm of a political party,” Bradley said in an interview. “They were wrong in that assumption.”
He saw nothing unusual in the House’s endorsement of Tanden, noting that former Indiana governor Mitch Daniels, who ran the OMB during the George W. Bush administration, supported Tanden as well.
“The Chamber is consistent in believing that people who have basic qualifications should be confirmed and that we should have deference to elected legislators,” said Bradley.
The Chamber did not accept Biden’s entire agenda. The commercial group criticized its decision to cancel the Keystone XL pipeline and “pause” new oil and gas leases on federal land and in federal waters for 60 days. Tom Donohue, of the Chamber The retiring chief executive also stepped back against Biden’s proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $ 15 an hour during a meeting in the Oval Office with the president and other executives on Tuesday.
But Suzanne Clark, who the House announced this week as her next chief executive, told CNBC’s “Squawk Box” on Wednesday that “$ 15 doesn’t seem like the right number, the minimum wage may need to be raised “.
While the House approved the potential minimum wage increase in 2019, the stakes are higher now that Democrats control Congress and the White House. And some Republicans think the House is being more respectful of Biden than it was of previous Democratic presidents – a sentiment shared with joy by senior officials in the current government who used the House’s support for Covid’s relief project to sell him publicly.
“Traditionally, the Chamber has been the spearhead in the fight against liberal policies” under Democratic presidents, said a former Chamber official.
The House’s willingness to work with Biden follows an often difficult relationship with Trump. This he defended Trump’s tax cuts and deregulation, but backed down in the face of the president’s protectionist instincts and his punishment of technology companies. The Chamber also joined the National Association of Manufacturers and other trade groups to sue the Trump administration for its executive orders on immigration and criticized Trump’s actions on drug prices.
After Trump supporters broke into the Capitol last month, Donohue clearly made no attempt to dissuade Vice President Mike Pence and the Cabinet from invoking Trump’s 25th Amendment or impeachment Congress, saying in a statement that “we trust them to use these tools judiciously, if necessary, to ensure the well-being and security of our nation. ”
The Chamber also said it is reviewing the actions of lawmakers who supported the January 6 election contest and that some of them “for their actions will have lost” their support. The review is in progress.
Trump “was destabilizing and President Obama and Vice President Biden probably look much better in the rear view mirror after four years of chaos,” said Valerie Jarrett, senior adviser to President Barack Obama who led a highly public campaign against the House early in the Obama years before establishing a more productive relationship with Donohue.
House movements during the Biden era became the subject of K Street, where Republican-style operatives question how long member organizations will continue to support their mission and how much political power they still have. The Chamber spent more on lobbying than any other commercial group last year. But he didn’t spend as much on TV ads supporting candidates as he did before.
The Chamber disbursed $ 35.7 million in elections during the 2012 cycle and $ 29.1 million in the 2016 cycle, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, but spent only $ 5.7 million in the 2020 cycle .
While many factors fueled the decline in spending, Bradley said one of them was the rise in super PACs closely aligned with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer, McConnell and McCarthy as alternatives to wealthy donors .
“This dynamic is certainly a change from a decade ago,” he said.
A Republican strategist echoed that assessment, calling the evolution of the House’s status as the result of “a fundamental change” in national political spending, pointing specifically to the Senate Leadership Fund, which is aligned with McConnell.
“I know Republicans, my friends are going to be mad at what they are doing,” said the strategist. But the Chamber “is no longer the vehicle for the Republican Senate’s political organization – the SLF is – so they need to realign themselves around” capitalist values, rather than a political party.
The House is trying to use its still substantial influence to pressure the Biden government and Democrats in Congress to work more closely with Republicans on priorities such as Covid’s relief bill. While Ron Klain, the White House chief of staff, polls praised showing that most Americans support many aspects of Biden’s plan, Bradley said focusing on “whether one or more Republicans support him or what the polls say is a misreading of what we need to do to make Washington work”.
Bipartisanship, however, is not a popular approach within any party at the moment. And while the corporate lobby has stirred the right, it has not exactly been welcomed with open arms by Democrats, who are still backing up in Chambers’ efforts to defeat Obamacare and financial regulatory reform.
They are “in no man’s land,” said John Feehery, a former Republican lobbyist. “This is the problem with what the House has done, is that it has alienated all Republicans,” he added. “And then, you know, it’s not like they go to the Republican conference and say, ‘Hey, you have to vote in favor of that,’ Republicans are going to say, ‘Go fuck yourself —‘”
Representative Josh Gottheimer, a New Jersey Democrat who last year received an inaugural bipartisan award from the House, said he believed the House had “made a strategic decision to change” but that it would take “time to build those relationships [with Democrats] and build that level of trust. “
Gottheimer added that he has a “strong and constructive relationship with the group and encouraged other Democrats to become involved with them, but said he understood why some of his colleagues could take a” trust, but verify “approach.
Lisa Gilbert, executive vice president of the Public Citizen ethical watchdog group, which, ironically, has joined Tanden in the past to specifically criticize the House and Donohue, said she is not entirely convinced of the move of the House to the medium.
“I don’t necessarily think it will change your political positions. It just shows that they are smart enough to understand that supporting just one party will not work in the new environment, ”she said, adding that she fears that the House’s decisions will wrongly, in her opinion, grace the House among Democrats.
Operatives from both parties were divided over the influence that the Chamber will have as a more centrist player.
“How can you be an effective presence in Washington, DC when you manage to alienate absolutely everyone?” another republican strategist meditated. “I’m not sure you want to.”
The strategist also recalled that another business group in Washington, the Business Roundtable, already occupies an intermediate range.
Matt Haller, a former Chamber official who is now the main lobbyist for the International Franchise Association, rejected this pessimism about the change in the Chamber of Commerce.
“There will always be a middle ground” among members of Congress, said Haller.
“There will always, in my opinion, be a place for the Chamber to try to bring people together on issues.”
Sam Stein contributed to this report.