GOP wants to be seen as restoring unity as it signals the economy, not dismantling Obamacare, is its first order of business

Before swaggering back into the Capitol this week to raise the curtain on a new Congress that rests firmly in their control, Republicans hinted on Saturday that they will pick their battles with President Obama, rather than pick a fight with every chance they get.

Illinois congressman Rodney Davis delivered the GOP’s first address of the new year, and set the tone with his first words. Speaking from Springfield – the home of Abraham Lincoln – Davis made clear that Republicans want to be seen as leaders able to restore unity to a broken nation.

But amid promises of “a new start on the people’s business”, Davis still took shots at his colleagues in blue, announcing that the House of Representatives will begin its new term with jobs bills “that will have bipartisan support but were never considered by a Democrat-run Senate”.

Davis described in detail a bill called the Hire More Heroes Act, which he said would make veterans and military service members exempt from a small-business provision in Obama’s signature Affordable Care Act. The congressman danced around the controversial healthcare law, never calling it by its popular name, “Obamacare”, and opting instead to call it “the president’s” law. He said the veterans bill would only deal with “one of many” problems in the law.

The address signaled that establishment Republicans have chosen to drop healthcare as a major priority and instead will try to change pieces of the Affordable Care Act here and there, in order to make it more palatable. This will likely enrage the excitable Tea Party faction, senator Ted Cruz especially. Such interests have returned again and again to the issue, particularly during the 2013 government shutdown.

Vice-president Joe Biden, standing in for Obama to deliver the White House’s weekly address while the president completed his vacation in Hawaii, also expressed a note of conclusion to the healthcare debate, saying: “We have finally ended the debate in this country of whether or not health insurance is a right or a privilege.”

Davis signaled that the economy will be Republicans’ first order of business, including a bill “to restore the 40-hour work week for middle-class families”. The healthcare law currently exempts companies from offering insurance only in cases of employees who work fewer than 30 hours a week.

Among the “common sense” ideas Davis said Republicans would present, however, is at least one that will divide partisans further.

Davis and incoming Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell have both said the Keystone XL pipeline will be one of the first issues to reach the president’s desk in 2015. Republicans say the pipeline, which would cross the US from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, would create jobs. Many Democrats say its effect would devastate the environment and exacerbate climate change.

Obama has approached the pipeline skeptically in public, saying in December that “at issue in Keystone is not American oil, it is Canadian oil”. Obama said analysis shows the pipeline would have minimal impact on US gas prices and would only create a few thousand jobs for construction and refining.



Other bills likely will attempt to block or neuter some of Obama’s executive actions on immigration, financial regulation and climate change. Republicans can do this by stripping funding, rewriting tax laws and pressuring benefits programs. Representatives have said they will try to vote quickly on temporary funding for the Department of Homeland Security.

Democrats and Republicans may find common ground on trade treaties and infrastructure projects, as Obama has pushed for new trade deals and urged extensive construction and repairs of roads and bridges.

Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, will try to counteract the more extreme Republican proposals and find acceptable compromises, since both parties are anxious to avoid another government shutdown, as almost occurred in December when House Democrats resisted a “cromnibus” budget bill that carried pro-Wall Street riders. Both parties are in opposition to power – Democrats to congressional Republicans and Republicans to the White House – and neither wants to look like a “party of no” ahead of a free-for-all 2016 election.

To that end, Republican leaders will try to quash Tea Party revolts and controversy within the party, such as revelations of Representative Steve Scalise’s speech at a white supremacist meeting in 2002. They will also need to persuade at least six Democrats if they are to overcome filibusters in the Senate; they would require an almost impossible two-thirds of both chambers to defeat a presidential veto.

Obama has indicated that he will not shrink from applying the veto if he deems it necessary.

By fall of 2015, Republican and Democratic caucuses will be revving for the search for 2016 presidential candidates, and the legislative agenda will fall away as the election cycle takes up all of Washington’s energies. When Congress returns on Tuesday to its electorally-mandated duties, the clock will have already begun ticking on their chances to accomplish anything at all.