Would GOP Senate be king of world?

If the Republicans win the Senate in November, the first thing they’ll say is: Finally, we can pass all of our bills and force President Barack Obama to deal with them.

The second thing they’ll say is: Oh, wait a second. This is the Senate.


That tension — between their desire to bring Obama to his knees and their ability to actually do it — is the political reality that will determine the Republicans’ legislative strategy if they win the Senate majority.

They’d love to set up clear contrasts between the parties and pave the way for 2016. But everything they do will be shaped by the limits of the Senate: What can they actually put on Obama’s desk without 60 GOP votes?

No one should underestimate the significance if the GOP captures the Senate in November — and while by no means a certainty, it is a very real possibility.

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Even with its limits, a Republican Senate would change the course of the Obama presidency for his final two years in office. Mitch McConnell, who would become majority leader if the Senate changes hands, is already promising to load up the appropriations bills with policy restrictions that could raise the risk of another government shutdown if Obama doesn’t sign them.

With both the Senate and the House in their hands, Republicans could put Obama on defense on everything from Obamacare to the administration’s greenhouse gas regulations, the Keystone XL pipeline, education policy and spending priorities.

They’d have a better chance of forcing the president to sign or veto changes to the health care law, a go-ahead for Keystone, House-passed jobs bills like the one that would make the research and development tax credit permanent — and a halt to greenhouse gas regulations.

And the oversight power alone would keep Obama administration officials busy with even more hearings. That’s something Senate Republicans can do with even the thinnest majority. Just by taking over the chairmanships of the committees, they could launch another round of hearings on the health care law, the IRS scandal, the mess at the Veterans Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency regulations. Some are even talking about reviving subjects like the release of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl and the bungled Fast and Furious gun-walking operation.

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But that’s where the Republicans’ power would break down — and where tea party groups that want to see all-out war with Obama could find themselves disappointed. It’s also where some top Republican strategists are warning the party not to get too focused on blocking Obama’s policies rather than proposing their own.

“If it’s going to be about defining Republicans, then we get the initiative. If it’s going to be about responding to President Obama, then we potentially hand him the initiative,” said GOP pollster David Winston, who advises the House Republican leadership.

The wish list

If you talk to Senate Republicans, the wish list you get, after the standard “we’re not measuring the drapes” qualifiers, is a pretty lengthy one. They talk about entitlement reform — never with any specifics — and even tax reform, two ambitious goals they claim they’d like to take on once they have the power to write a budget. They’d take another vote on repealing the Affordable Care Act — something the GOP base still wants, even though enrollment is well underway — and then present alternatives to the law. And they’d push back hard on the EPA greenhouse gas regulations.

That’s all consistent with the signals being sent by McConnell. He has talked about how he’d run the Senate more openly and let the committee chairs determine the agenda. But he also promises he would challenge Obama at every turn, especially on the EPA regulations, using the spending bills as leverage.

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He also has told conservative activists that his own priorities would be to rein in Obamacare, pass a budget and hold hearings on the greenhouse gas regulations — a huge issue in his home state of Kentucky. Leadership aides also say the Senate agenda would be likely to start with jobs bills that have gotten bipartisan support in the House.

Other Republican leaders talk about even more ambitious plans, always in generalities. “We could pass a budget. That would be a start. That gives us more tools to do a lot of things,” said Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn of Texas. “We could pass tax reform. We could get spending under control.”

Senate Republican Conference Vice Chairman Roy Blunt of Missouri listed tax reform, entitlement reform and “holding regulators more accountable” as the big goals of a GOP Senate — but he declared that “the most important thing we could accomplish is to begin to create a sense of certainty about the government again” by encouraging job creation. “The president gets to decide whether he wants to be part of that or not,” Blunt said.

Rob Portman of Ohio, who outlined a Senate Republican jobs plan earlier this year, said a GOP majority would “change the dynamic in this town by giving the president an incentive to deal with us” on tax reform, regulatory relief and trade.

And GOP senators would like to set an overall goal of reducing regulations, with the hated EPA as a special target. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, who likely would become chairman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, says he would file Congressional Review Act challenges to every final EPA regulation that’s issued — the tool that allows Congress to block regulations, unless Obama vetoes the measures.

But can they get 60 votes?

The catch is that Republicans would not be able to land every veto-bait bill on Obama’s desk — certainly not all the ones conservative groups would like them to send him.

The most confrontational groups on the right want Republicans to use the Senate as a platform to draw clear contrasts with Obama by loading his desk with all the bills that get stuck in the Democratic Senate now, like a repeal of Obamacare and a rollback of the EPA regulations. They’re not under any illusions that Obama would sign them — they just want to force him into a long list of vetoes.

“Would he veto them? Probably. But it would be a crystal-clear contrast compared to what you have now, because nothing gets to his desk,” said Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity. Heritage Action’s Dan Holler says a GOP Senate would be “an opportunity to paint a very different picture of the Republican Party, if they’re willing to take it.”

But even under the most optimistic scenarios for Republicans, they’d only have a narrow majority — they wouldn’t have anywhere close to 60 votes. So Senate Democrats could block many of their most ambitious plans as easily as Republicans block their measures now. A GOP majority might want to send a straight repeal of the Affordable Care Act to Obama’s desk, but that doesn’t mean a GOP majority would succeed in getting it there.

“It gives you a wonderful opportunity to showcase how we’d solve the nation’s problems,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). The downside, he said, is that “you’ll be having a vision without 60 votes.”

They’d face the same problem with appropriations bills. Those can be a powerful tool not just for setting spending levels, but also for banning funding for Obama administration initiatives the Republicans hate. “It gives us an opportunity to examine everything,” said Thad Cochran of Mississippi, who survived a tea party challenge earlier this year and would likely be Appropriations Committee chairman under a Republican majority.

In theory, Senate Republicans could load their bills with all of the same kinds of restrictions House Republicans have been placing in their appropriations bills — like blocking the proposed IRS regulations on political activities by 501(c)(4) groups, banning bonuses to senior IRS officials, and modifying the Dodd-Frank financial reform law by making the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau subject to annual appropriations. And, of course, blocking any further implementation of Obamacare.

But that’s only in theory. In practice, appropriations bills still need 60 votes if they’re passed individually, which McConnell says he wants to do. So an Interior appropriations bill that guts too many EPA regulations, or a Labor-HHS spending bill that has too many Obamacare funding restrictions or gets loaded up with anti-abortion riders, wouldn’t get enough Democratic votes to pass.

“The biggest problem is that every member, every interest group is going to want every problem solved, and that’s just not going to happen,” said a Senate Republican appropriations aide.

For all of McConnell’s confrontational talk, he’d be savvy enough to know that Senate Republicans would have to pick their battles with Obama, the aide said — because even if they could get moderate Democrats to side with them on some appropriations riders, “it doesn’t mean we can just turn the bucket over and empty it into the legislation and send it to the president.”

Low-hanging fruit

That’s why Senate Republicans say they’d start by looking for the low-hanging fruit: bills that have gotten Democratic support in the past and might be able to get enough to reach the magical 60-vote threshold.

That starts with the Keystone pipeline, which is already getting full-throated support from red-state Democrats like Mary Landrieu of Louisiana and Mark Pryor of Arkansas (assuming they survive their reelection campaigns). And Republicans believe they could score an easy hit on Obamacare by repealing its tax on medical devices, which funds some of the law and is opposed by Democrats in states with strong medical device industries, like Massachusetts and Minnesota.

John Barrasso of Wyoming, chairman of the Senate Republican Policy Committee, says the most likely early bills to take up would include Keystone, an official delay in Obamacare’s employer mandate (which the administration has already put off through executive action), a rewrite of the health care law to define full-time employment as 40 hours a week, and his bill to require the approval of liquefied natural gas exports to all World Trade Organization member countries.

“I’m looking for the things that have bipartisan support, that can get 60 votes today,” Barrasso said.

Of course, not all Republican senators have the same ideas on which bills could get Democratic support. Targeting every final EPA rule might seem like too much of a poke in the eye to Obama, but Inhofe is convinced he’d be able to get at least some Democrats on his side. “I believe that by that point, there will be a lot of the Democratic senators who will be up for reelection in 2016 who will want to distance themselves from him,” he said.

There are other issues that could advance in a Republican Senate, and possibly even lead to deals with Obama. One strong possibility is trade promotion authority, which would allow Obama to fast-track trade deals in Congress. Orrin Hatch of Utah, the likely Finance Committee chairman in a Republican Senate, has introduced legislation to authorize the fast-track authority. And other GOP senators say it’s one area where they could reach an agreement with Obama — though they’re warning him not to wrap up a proposed Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement before he gets it.

“He even says he wants TPA — he just never does anything about it,” said Charles Grassley of Iowa, another top Republican on the Finance Committee.

Another possibility, according to Grassley, is lowering the corporate tax rate — and conservative activists note that Obama himself proposed lowering the rate from 35 percent to 28 percent in 2012. A corporate tax rate deal “seems eminently doable with no shame to Obama,” said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. But that doesn’t mean Obama and the Republicans would be able to settle their basic differences over the idea, such as whether a corporate tax deal would have to be deficit neutral.

Budget reconciliation

And those bills only get the Republicans so far anyway. To put the biggest issues on Obama’s desk, like entitlement reforms — or a repeal or rewrite of major sections of Obamacare — they’re talking openly about using another powerful tool: budget reconciliation.

If Senate and House Republicans can work together to come up with a budget blueprint, something that hasn’t been possible in the years of divided control of Congress, they’d be able to write legislation to put the biggest changes into effect — like entitlement changes or tax reform. And unlike other kinds of legislation, a budget reconciliation bill would require only 51 votes to pass the Senate.

That’s why top Republicans are eyeing that approach as a way to push the rest of their agenda, especially for changes to the Affordable Care Act. “We need to fix Obamacare to the extent that we can while Obama is still in office,” Cornyn said. “That’s why it’s important to pass a budget so we can do more with 51 votes.”

The procedure has limits, though. For one thing, it can be used only to pass measures that have a clear budget impact, and not everything in Obamacare has a clear budget impact. That’s why it has always been uncertain how much of the law could be repealed through reconciliation or even reshaped through a GOP replacement plan, even if the party could agree on one.

However, when Mitt Romney’s policy advisers drafted the outline of a reconciliation-based Obamacare repeal plan in 2012, they concluded that they could actually knock out most of the law — including not just the individual mandate but also the insurance regulations and pre-existing condition coverage that went with it, according to a Romney adviser familiar with the plan. That’s because the pre-existing condition coverage was so tightly linked to the mandate, they concluded, that Senate Republicans would be able to eliminate them together.

That plan has been shared with key House and Senate staffers, according to the Romney adviser, so they’ll be able to build on it if there’s a Republican Senate majority next year.

But other Republican sources say it’s not clear that a GOP Senate would try to repeal the entire law through reconciliation. It’s possible that a GOP Senate would just try to knock out unpopular parts of it, like the employer mandate. And they could get some Democratic support for that, since some supporters of the health care law are starting to conclude that it’s not that important to the law after all.

And don’t hold your breath for another Ted Cruz-inspired attempt to defund the entire health care law, at the risk of another government shutdown. Even some of Cruz’s most loyal allies — like Mike Lee of Utah — say the time for those kinds of tactics have passed, now that millions of Americans are enrolled, even if Republicans do control both chambers.

“The ground is altogether different now that it’s in place,” Lee said. “Everything has changed.”

They could use budget reconciliation to push elements of an Obamacare replacement plan — but only if Senate Republicans can unite on one, which they haven’t done yet. Hatch has a comprehensive replacement plan, and aides say he’d try to move forward on that. But other Senate Republicans aren’t convinced that one big Obamacare alternative is the way to go — they think it’s better to push for smaller, more limited market reforms.

“I don’t think we need one replace bill. We need 10,” Lee said.

There are other big decisions Senate Republicans would have to make about reconciliation, like whether to push for a Rep. Paul Ryan-style rewrite of the Medicare program and whether to commit to a full tax-reform plan. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who would become Senate Budget Committee chairman, has been lukewarm about Ryan’s budgets in the past.

And even though Ryan — who’s expected to change jobs and become House Ways and Means Committee chairman next year — has written that “if I could make just one change in Washington, it would be to fix the tax code,” other Republicans aren’t convinced it will be realistic to push for all the painful tradeoffs that would be necessary, especially while Obama is still in office. Sessions and his aides aren’t commenting on their plans.

Outside of budget reconciliation, other Senate Republican committee chairmen would be able to pick legislative fights with Obama, but they wouldn’t necessarily have the leverage to win them.

Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, a vocal critic of Obama’s education policies, would be the likely chairman of the Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee. That would give him a platform to turn up the heat on Education Secretary Arne Duncan over the administration’s expansive use of waivers from the No Child Left Behind Act, which Alexander considers part of a maze of federal rules that has created a “national school board.”

But some education experts say Republicans would never truly be able to rein in those waivers until they can reach an agreement with Obama on a rewrite of No Child Left Behind, which isn’t likely to happen.

“Congress does have the ability to rewrite the waiver authority to tighten it or eliminate it, but to do that, you really need to rewrite the law,” said Anne Hyslop of the New America Foundation. “The disagreements will be amplified, but I’m not sure the policies are really going to change.”

Get ready for more hearings

The easiest change Senate Republicans could make would be to have more hearings about Obama’s policies — enough to keep administration officials busy answering document requests and crossing back and forth between House and Senate hearing rooms.

Hatch would be likely to hold hearings on the implementation of Obamacare, especially on the growing questions about the accuracy of the subsidies that are being paid out, as well as the continuing fallout from the IRS scandal. But that’s just the beginning, as Senate Republicans eye other investigative targets like the EPA regulations — a likely subject for Inhofe’s committee — and possibly the deal the administration struck to secure the release of Bergdahl.

Grassley, who would become Judiciary Committee chairman and is one of the Republicans’ most vocal advocates of congressional oversight, said the investigative power would be the biggest difference a Republican Senate could make. “You only need one vote to do oversight,” Grassley said.

Grassley is even talking about reviving the investigations of Fast and Furious, which has been off the congressional radar for months. “Let’s get to the bottom of something that’s been out there a long time — Fast and Furious. Let’s get to the bottom of IRS,” he said.

There’s also the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, which has broad oversight jurisdiction. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, the ranking Republican, is retiring, and John McCain of Arizona — Obama’s former election rival and now a fierce administration critic — is next in line. But McCain wants to become chairman of the Armed Services committee instead, so the Homeland Security gavel would probably go to Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, a fiery critic of Obamacare and other administration policies.

Even though Johnson has been an aggressive opponent of the administration until now, he says his model for oversight would be the bipartisan relationship that Susan Collins (R-Maine) and former Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut struck when they held the top Republican and Democratic positions on the committee.

He says he’d focus his hearings on “how we can streamline and modernize regulations,” as well as the gaps in information on the people who have signed up for Obamacare coverage. But he also insists he’d try to reach consensus: “We all have to be hearing from businesses, so what can we all agree on?”

“There has to be a purpose to it. It shouldn’t just be show trials,” Johnson said. He says he’d press the administration for “achievable goals,” especially on illegal immigration. “They keep giving us all of this razzmatazz about political reform. First, you’ve got to stop the flow. That’s your achievable goal.”

One major subject that’s not likely to get as much interest in the Senate as in the House: Benghazi.

House Republicans are still digging aggressively into the story of those attacks, and Grassley says it ought to be a subject for Senate oversight. But other Senate Republicans seem to have moved on. Bob Corker of Tennessee, who likely would take over the Foreign Relations Committee, said it’s “really hard to say” whether there should be more Benghazi hearings. He says he’s more interested in general embassy security, a subject he wants to address in the next State Department reauthorization bill.

Even Graham, one of the most aggressive critics of the Obama administration’s handling of the attacks, isn’t exactly demanding another investigation. When asked for possible topics of Senate oversight, Graham ticked off his list: Obamacare, IRS, Benghazi.

Pause.

“Not so much Benghazi.”