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MSN.com
Before Battling
Democrats, G.O.P. Is Fighting Itself
By Jeremy W. Peters
WASHINGTON — As most Republicans were taking a victory lap the morning
after the elections, a group of conservatives huddled anxiously in a
conference room not far from Capitol Hill and agreed that now is the
time for confrontation, not compromise and conciliation.
Despite Republicans’ ascension to Senate control and an expanded House
majority, many conservatives from the party’s activist wing fear that
congressional leaders are already being too timid with President Obama.
They do not want to hear that government shutdowns are off the table or
that repealing the Affordable Care Act is impossible — two things
Republican leaders have said in recent days.
“If the new Republican leadership in the Senate is only talking about
what they can’t do, that’s going to be very demoralizing,” said Thomas
J. Fitton, president of Judicial Watch, a conservative advocacy group
that convenes a regular gathering called Groundswell. Any sense of
triumph at its meeting last week was fleeting.
“I think the members of the leadership need to decide what they’re
willing to shut down the government over,” Mr. Fitton said.
Establishment Republicans, who had vowed to thwart the Tea Party,
succeeded in electing new lawmakers who are, for the most part, less
rebellious. And when the new Congress convenes in January, the
Republican leaders who will take the reins will be mainly in the mold
of conservatives who have tried to keep the Tea Party in check.
But they have not crushed the movement’s spirit.
As Republicans on Capitol Hill transition from being the opposition
party to being one that has to show it can govern, a powerful tension
is emerging: how to move forward with an agenda that challenges the
president without self-destructing.
Some conservatives believe that the threat of another shutdown is their
strongest leverage to demand concessions on the health care law and to
stop the president from carrying out immigration reform through
executive order. Yet their leadership has dismissed the idea as a
suicide mission that could squander the recent gains.
One thing that will prove popular among the base is a commitment by
Senator Mitch McConnell, the presumptive new majority leader, to bring
up a bill that would ban abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy, which
he is expected to do next year.
Whether the party can reconcile more demands of its base with the will
of its leadership could determine how enduring the Republican Senate
majority will be. The crop of senators up for re-election in 2016
includes those elected in the first Tea Party wave of 2010. And in a
sign of what is at stake, even some of them are sounding notes of
compromise and caution that would have been unthinkable at the height
of the right’s resurgence.
“I understand the frustrations of the conservative base; I am one of
them,” said Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, one of the original class
of Tea Party-inspired senators. “I also recognize reality.”
“We’re not going to pass the entire conservative agenda tomorrow. We
can certainly lay it out,” Mr. Johnson added. “Let’s start with the
things we can pass. Doesn’t that make more sense?”
But in a stark reminder of the difficulties Republican leaders will
face from within their own ranks, other lawmakers popular with the Tea
Party base are saying the fight is on.
As votes were still being counted on election night Tuesday, Senator
Ted Cruz of Texas said Republicans could still work through Congress to
dismantle the Affordable Care Act — even though the president is
guaranteed to veto anything Congress passes that undermines it. “After
winning a historic majority, it is incumbent on us to honor promises
and do everything humanly possible to stop Obamacare,” Mr. Cruz said in
an interview.
Some Republican senators rejected that outright. “There are intelligent
things to do, and there are some not-so-intelligent things to do,” said
Senator Orrin G. Hatch of Utah. “And one of the first things we should
do is find some areas of common ground with our Democrat friends.”
Tea Party conservatives, many of whom argue that the government
shutdown last year was a sound strategy, said they were baffled by
remarks after the election by Mr. McConnell that the Senate under his
control would prioritize policies that Republicans knew Democrats would
also support.
Many also fumed when Mr. McConnell stated the obvious: Republicans do
not have the votes to repeal the Affordable Care Act because they
cannot override a presidential veto on their own. (It takes 67 votes to
do so; they have 52 seats now, with the possibility of picking up two
more.) The next day, he and Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio wrote an
op-ed for The Wall Street Journal insisting that, indeed, repeal
remained a goal.
Any perception that Mr. McConnell is not sufficiently committed to
repealing the health care law, despite his running hard against it in
his own re-election campaign, would renew the same fissures among
Republicans that preceded the government shutdown...
Read the rest of the article at MSN.com
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