Boehner (right) has been elevated nationally as Obama targets him as the face of the GOP. GOP plots Boehner-run House

House Republicans have held a series of private discussions to plot their first moves if they win the majority in November — with plans to use spending bills and subpoenas to rein in President Barack Obama and satiate their own ravenous base.

Republicans recognize they won’t be able to do any broad governing even if they take back the House; they’d hold just one chamber of Congress, or at most one branch of government, if they also win the Senate. So officials familiar with the early discussions say they’ve centered on undoing key parts of the Obama agenda and repositioning Republicans as the party of fiscal responsibility heading into 2012 — a mantle the GOP surrendered during the big-spending George W. Bush years.


The plans presently under discussion include defunding some parts of the new health care law and delaying implementation of others, withholding some of the unspent stimulus funds and using the oversight power of Republican-led committees to investigate the Obama administration.

“The goal, obviously, would be to make it a one-term presidency,” said a GOP lobbyist briefed on the talks.

Republicans caution that the discussions are preliminary and that their plans will be calibrated based on the actual margins after the elections. They realize they could easily fall short of winning back the majority — and many privately predict a fierce struggle for power and direction if that happens.

Even assuming Republicans win, the plans they are sketching out now won’t fully satisfy many conservative activists. Republican leaders are talking privately of avoiding a full-throated assault on Obama and making their mark on spending (cut it) and taxes (cut them, too) to set the stage for 2012.

The truth is, when you strip away the unrealistic (repealing any significant parts of health care) and the recycled (extend the Bush tax cuts), there are few authentically original or viable ideas getting knocked around, even in private chats. This is the impression would-be Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) has left in public, too, by promising new policy prescriptions twice, only to unveil familiar plans. This is unlikely to change until Republicans reconcile the worldview of members like Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) — make sweeping changes, even if they are unpopular — with the play-it-safe attitude of many others.

So far, the Contract With America, this is not.

House Republican Whip Eric Cantor, who would move up to House majority leader if Republicans take the House, said in an interview that voters “want more of a balanced approach” to governing and that the GOP would “learn from the mistakes that were made when we were in the majority and learn from the mistakes the current majority has made.”

“When the election results come in, perhaps the White House will begin to see that not listening to the American people for 20 months didn’t work, and maybe we ought to start listening,” the Virginian said.

But it won’t be as easy as that.

If Republicans win the majority — and that remains a big if — they will take power knowing they remain deeply divided over the direction of the GOP and broadly unpopular with the American people. The past few weeks of the GOP-is-winning narrative has obscured dysfunction at many levels of the party: an RNC in complete meltdown, top House leaders who are highly suspicious of each other and in deep disagreement about how hard they should pull the country in a much different direction on health care, energy, religious freedom, etc.

It’s not even clear which John Boehner will show up to take the speaker’s gavel: the one who has worked hard in the past to find some common ground on issues such as education or the new, more rigidly partisan figure who has emerged in the heat of the campaign.

“The pedigree of Mr. Boehner has always been his deal-making ability,” said a House Republican leadership aide. “While that may be his first instinct and true nature, the numbers — reality — will make it so that he will not be able to do that without exposing himself to a significant risk of undercutting his own caucus. Assuming we win, it’s going to be on a wave of anti-Democrat, anti-Obama policies, not on a wave of ‘Republicans are so great.’”

A big question is whether Boehner, known for his debonair demeanor, would be tough and partisan enough to confront Obama and satisfy both the new insurgents who would be in his caucus and the emboldened base around the country.

Friends promise that Boehner would show his inner revolutionary if he got the job. Back in February, in a speech to the Conservative Political Action Conference, he even billed himself as an heir to Newt Gingrich.

“I was there for the Contract With America in 1994. I helped write it,” Boehner said. “If I'm the speaker next year, we're going to get the reform movement started again.”

Boehner, who has been elevated nationally as Obama and Democrats target him as the face of the GOP, began to show his cards on Wednesday, offering a modest agenda of his own to counter Obama’s big economic address in his home state of Ohio.

The Republican leader vowed to cut nonsecurity discretionary spending to the levels of the 2008 budget year — before bailouts and the stimulus — saving nearly $100 billion in the first year. And he pushed a two-year freeze on current tax rates to give businesses more certainty about the future. (Republicans say they have requested a cost estimate for the tax freeze but don’t have it yet.)

“I'm open to the president's ideas,” Boehner said on ABC’s “Good Morning America.” “But I think the president is missing the bigger point here. … Until this uncertainty and spending is under control, I don't think these [economic measures] are going to have much impact.”

It's hard in this politically charged moment to envision areas of possible compromise with Obama, but there are a few, some symbolic but others quite substantive. Obama and Republicans will have an incentive to curb spending, at least on the discretionary front, which is a drop in the budget bucket but a start. Both are committed to winning in Afghanistan and carrying out the war on terror. And both sides expect renewed focus on trade agreements as a way to boost the economy. Of course, it’s easier to envision bitter battles on these fronts.

When it comes to the workings of Congress, allies say Boehner plans an internal reform regimen aimed at rolling back what he considers leadership excesses that blossomed under former GOP House Majority Leader Tom DeLay and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. He plans to devolve power out of top leaders and back to committee chairmen and even plans to give the opposition party more opportunities for votes and amendments.

There is no reason to expect Republicans will follow through with any meaningful reforms: Every new leader promises this — Gingrich did in 1995, Pelosi did in 2007 and Boehner will do the same if he wins — and they often backtrack once in power.

Voters will get a better clue of the Boehner governing plan in the third week of September, when the GOP plans to release its blueprint for office — a “governing agenda” or “commitment to America." The draft agenda, modeled on the 1994 Contract With America, is divided into spending, taxes, health care, national security and reform sections. But don’t expect any exotic and controversial new ideas because most Republicans feel their road to power is paved on the backs of unpopular Democrats.

Party strategists said Boehner’s top three priorities would be jobs, spending and health care. Boehner would use appropriations bills, which originate in the House, to make progress on all three, the strategists said.

Playing to their base, GOP leaders have pledged to work to repeal health reform. But Cantor admits: “When you have Obama in the White House, he’s unlikely to sign a bill to repeal Obamacare.” Privately, Republicans know it’s nonsense to think they could jam a repeal through Congress and get it signed by the man who signed the original law.

“So what I believe we can do is work to delay implementation and defund the promulgation of regulations that are harmful to job creation,” Cantor added.

The plan includes restrictions on appropriations to prevent funding for Department of Health and Human Services officials and others involved in making the reforms a reality.

Another House GOP plan, as part of $1.3 trillion in promised budget cuts, is "rescission" of unused stimulus money.

The plan, released in May by Ryan, the top Republican on the House Budget Committee, includes the following: “ Cancel Unused TARP Funds. Prohibit the Treasury Secretary from entering into new commitments under the Troubled Asset Relief Program [TARP]. Ending TARP would prevent up to $396 billion in additional disbursements. … Cancel Unspent ‘Stimulus’ Funds. Rescind all unobligated budget authority authorized under the ‘stimulus’ bill and dedicate to deficit reduction. Saves up to $266 billion."

After spending, a secondary focus for Republicans will be the congressional power of executive branch oversight, which allows the majority to launch investigations. Cantor said oversight is “going to be a big part of what we do” but added that “in order for the public to regain confidence in Congress, we’re going to have to make the argument that the things that have been done are costing jobs.”

Rep. Darrell Issa of California, the top Republican on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, has proved to be an aggressive, savvy opponent of Obama, and he would have twice as much staff available to him in the majority — a ratio the current chairman, Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.) currently enjoys. Issa's staff would go from 40 to 80, two-thirds of whom are investigative staff.

But even Issa’s aides are talking restraint. “Our job is not to shut down government or the administration,” Issa spokesman Kurt Bardella said. "It's to get it to work better and to eliminate the waste, fraud and abuse — to be better stewards of taxpayer dollars. As the size of the federal government grows, the oversight should keep pace with that."

A top party strategist said that in both parties’ majorities, “there’s been some degree of overreach in terms of oversight.”

“That has given critics the opportunity to say the majority has taken its eye off the ball,” the strategist said. “We’re very cognizant of that. That’s why our big push will continue to be jobs and spending.”