POLITICS - The Divided GOP

"G.O.P. Is Divided as Budget Bills Start Piling Up" by ASHLEY PARKER, New York Times 3/8/2015

In their first major test of governing this year, Republicans stumbled, faltered — and nearly shut down the Department of Homeland Security.

And that vote may have been the easy one.

In April, physicians who treat Medicare patients face a drastic cut in pay.  In May, the Highway Trust Fund runs dry.  In June, the charter for the federal Export-Import Bank ceases to exist.  Then in October, across-the-board spending cuts return, the government runs out of money — and the Treasury bumps up against its borrowing limit.

All will require congressional action, and while many of these measures used to be pushed through in an almost unthinking bipartisan ritual, there is no such thing as simple in Congress anymore.

“We really don’t have 218 votes to determine a bathroom break over here on our side,” said Representative Charlie Dent, a Pennsylvania Republican.  “So how are we going to get 218 votes on transportation, or trade, or whatever the issue?  We might as well face the political reality of our circumstances and then act accordingly

The Republican leadership team, he added, “has not done a good job of managing expectations.  There are too many folks with unrealistic expectations.”

Republicans emphatically regained power with the midterm election, but those victories also masked pronounced divisions within the party.  That friction was on display during the fight to fund Homeland Security, with more conservative members forcing Speaker John A. Boehner into a strategy in which he had to win passage in the House with Democratic votes.

Even many congressional Republicans have started to say they need an approach beyond a reflexive “no” to prove their ability to function effectively as a majority.

Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma and a close ally of Mr. Boehner, said he hoped his colleagues had learned to “stop making the perfect the enemy of the good.”

“You make the progress and the deals you can,” Mr. Cole said.  “You’re going to have to bargain, and that means the other side has to get something, and in this House, you have to understand that beating on the table and yelling doesn’t turn 54 into 60.”

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, is six votes short of overcoming a Democratic filibuster.  And Mr. Boehner, of Ohio, is struggling to maintain his already tenuous grip on his caucus, in which roughly three-dozen members consistently refuse to support almost any leadership plan.

The Republican turmoil has, in turn, empowered congressional Democrats, who found that by standing unified, they can wield significant power from the minority, something Republicans in the Senate had done to great effect in the last Congress.

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the minority leader, held Senate Democrats together to prevent Republicans from even opening debate on a House-passed bill that would have funded the Homeland Security agency but also gutted President Obama’s recent executive actions on immigration.

Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the minority leader, kept her members together on the funding fight as well so they did not vote for any Republican measure that did not ultimately result in a long-term “clean” spending bill for the agency.

On the morning that she first held Democrats back from supporting a short-term measure to fund the agency, Ms. Pelosi said her members were skeptical about voting against a bill that would have kept the agency open, albeit briefly.  “And by the end of caucus, they were saying we have to stay together to make sure that we will keep government open until the end of the year,” she said, with a delighted laugh.  “But you have to show them a path.”

In an interview in her office, Ms. Pelosi said she expected Democrats to stay united in the face of other fights.  Passing bills with a majority of Democratic votes, after all, often helps pull the legislation to the left.

“Part of our strength springs from:  They need our votes to pass something,” she said.  “But part of it is, it’s no use for you going down this path, because the President’s going to veto it and we’re going to sustain his veto.  And that gives the President leverage, and that gives us leverage.”

Ms. Pelosi added:  “I see the strength that I have here, because we have a Democratic president in the White House.”

In recent years, Democrats were critical in helping Mr. Boehner on crucial legislation — averting a fiscal showdown, passing the Violence Against Women Act and providing relief for Hurricane Sandy victims — when he did not have enough Republican votes.  A similar situation is likely to occur this year, much to the frustration of conservative lawmakers.

The Highway Trust Fund becomes insolvent on May 31, threatening to halt many federally funded infrastructure projects.  Congress will need to increase the nation’s debt limit by late summer or early fall, as well as pass a new appropriations bill by the end of September to fund the government through the next fiscal year.

On CBS’s “Face the Nation” on Sunday, Mr. McConnell sought to reassure voters that under new Republican leadership, Congress would not spend the year lurching from crisis to crisis.  “I made it very clear after the November election, we’re certainly not going to shut down the government or default on the national debt,” he said.  “We’ll figure some way to handle that.”

Lawmakers were also hoping to address at least a modest overhaul of the nation’s tax code, as well as take on trade — one of the areas where Democrats may provide more of an impediment to Mr. Obama than Republicans.

The next major deadline, to prevent cuts in Medicare payments to doctors, comes at the end of this month.  Under the current law, if Congress does nothing, payment rates for doctors’ services will be reduced by 21 percent on April 1.

Since 2003, lawmakers have enacted 17 temporary patches to stop such cuts.  But in some years they froze payment rates or provided very small increases.

Doctors descended on Washington in late February, urging lawmakers to repeal the Medicare payment formula, which they say creates great uncertainty and cash flow problems.

The coming fights are already causing agita among House Republicans.  “What we’re going to have to do is help do a better job of selling why things have to be done,” said Representative Pete Sessions, a Republican from Texas and chairman of the House Rules Committee.  “We’ve got to sell it to the American people to make our ideas popular.”

Moderate Republicans said they hoped their more conservative colleagues would internalize the lessons of the Homeland Security fight and be willing to make compromises.

“We have to straighten that out,” said Representative Peter T. King of New York.  “Otherwise, it’s going to be a rough two years.”

But Mr. King represents a quieter faction within the Republican majority.  Many more hard-line members said they planned to double down on their strategy of opposing their leadership when they did not think the Republican proposal was sufficiently conservative.

“Sometimes it only takes a couple of these battles, though, to act as a catalyst for major change,” said Representative Matt Salmon, an Arizona Republican.  “I think that right now the powers that be are already on a very slippery slope.  They understand that, they know that.  You lose one battle, but I don’t think you necessarily lose the war.”

Representative Walter B. Jones, Republican of North Carolina, similarly said Mr. Boehner and his leadership team could face retribution if they turned to Democratic votes to help send major legislation to the president’s desk.  “If the leadership continues to reach out to Democrats and forgets that the Republican Party has certain core principles as a party,” he said, “it will create more and more animosity.”

Ms. Pelosi said she had a candid but good rapport with Mr. Boehner, whom she often calls as he finds himself stuck, to ask:  “How can I respectfully help?  How can we get this done?”

But does she ever feel just a little sorry for him?  “He’s the speaker of the House,” she said, considering the question.  “The speaker of the House has awesome power, and I think that the more that power is used to find solutions, the stronger the speaker is.”