Fun times ahead.
Welcome to House Speaker John Boehner's hell, Mitch McConnell. Now that you have to actually lead the Senate, with a Republican conference chock-full of extremists with presidential ambitions, you get to figure out how to simultaneously appease your crazies without
destroying your party in 2016.
Obama plans to use his executive authority to change the enforcement of immigration laws by the end of the year, a move that top Republicans warn could derail efforts to pass a long-term spending bill by a Dec. 11 deadline. Increasingly, some top Republicans believe that it will be difficult to pass the year-long spending package that they originally envisioned, and are refocusing on a shorter term bill.
Speaker John Boehner, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and their top aides and deputies are mulling several options that would give Capitol Hill Republicans the opportunity to vent their frustration with what they view as an unconstitutional power grab by the White House—without jeopardizing the government financing bill.
In other words, the rabble rousers in the party are itching for another government shutdown, and believe that executive action on immigration gives them their opening. It's not just the Ted Cruzes of the Senate, either. Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, III is
among the loudest proponents of brinksmanship with Obama over the issue, and there are
nearly 60 House Republicans pushing it as well.
Republican leadership wants a long-term funding bill, but will have to try for a shorter-term bill because of the pressure. The lawmakers who most want confrontation with Obama like short-term funding bills—they give more opportunities to try to force these fights and more shutdown threats. Meanwhile, McConnell and Boehner have to actually put up some semblance of governing, now that Republicans are fully in control of Congress. Lurching from crisis to crisis with short-term funding bills isn't governing. McConnell, in fact, promised the day after the election,"[t]here will be no government shutdowns and no default of the national debt."
So here they are. They have to have some kind of response to Obama on immigration, and that's highly unlikely to be an immigration bill on the floor. They have to try to avoid a shutdown. They would prefer not to have spending fights every two or three months, and they'd really prefer not to have another pre-Christmas shutdown. They will end work on Thursday of this week for the Thanksgiving recess, and won't come back until December 1, at which point they've got just 10 days to keep government open.
The one thing that's clear at this point is that Boehner and McConnell have no idea at all how they're going to proceed, so that much remains unchanged after the election. But how, and if, they extricate themselves from this one will potentially set the tone for the next two years.
