Healthcare repeal tops list of Obama’s pending showdowns with Republicans

President Obama and Republicans taking over the House are
girding for a series of showdowns set to begin almost immediately after
Congress resumes next week.

At stake is not only the direction of government over the
next two years, but whether it will function at all. The last Congress failed
to approve a single appropriations bill, and funding for the government dries
up the first week of March.

Lawmakers and the White House are set for serious budget
negotiations that will begin immediately after the president’s State of the
Union address. 

{mosads}Fights over healthcare, spending and the national debt could
result in grand bargains like the tax-cut deal Obama struck with Republicans,
or they could lead to a government shutdown, as when President Clinton went
toe to toe with the GOP in 1995.

Emerging fights over environmental and Internet regulation
also loom, as do scuffles over troop levels in Afghanistan, national security
policies and GOP-led investigations of the Obama administration.

Here is a look at five Obama-GOP showdowns to watch in 2011:

HEALTHCARE FUNDING

Republicans leaders in the House have pledged to hold an
up-or-down vote to repeal the healthcare law President Obama signed last year.

Once passed, however, this bill will be dead on arrival in
the Democratic-controlled Senate. Instead, the GOP is expected to try to
withhold funding for the new law in the budget, hoping to impede its
implementation.

Democrats will fight any defunding attempts aggressively; incoming House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), the departing Speaker,
has already signaled that protecting Democratic gains of the last two years —
and healthcare reform is the signature domestic policy achievement of the Obama
presidency — will be a top party priority.

While Democrats will likely back tweaks to the healthcare
law, such as removing an unpopular IRS reporting requirement for small
businesses, Speaker-designate John Boehner (R-Ohio) will face pressure from Tea
Party-backed freshmen to insist on deeper revisions or cuts. If the parties
reach an impasse on healthcare funding, the GOP could use the issue as a
bargaining chip to extract spending-cut concessions from Obama elsewhere in the
budget.

DEBT CEILING

Raising the debt limit to allow the government to borrow
more money has become an almost-routine act of Congress in recent years, a
necessary repercussion of a national debt that has soared to nearly $14
trillion.

But after an election in which dozens of GOP winners pledged
to tackle that debt, lifting the ceiling will be anything but routine.

The first fight could come in February, and might pit
Republicans against Republicans as much as Republicans against Obama. While Tea
Party-aligned lawmakers will push for deep spending cuts to begin lowering the
debt, Boehner has already acknowledged that as Speaker, he will likely have to
preside over a vote to increase the debt limit.

“This is going to be probably the first really big adult
moment” for the GOP majority, he told The New Yorker. “You can underline
‘adult.’ “

It was a statement the White House noticed, and Obama issued
his own indirect warning to Boehner earlier this month, when he said, “I’ll
take John Boehner at his word — that nobody, Democrat or Republican, is willing
to see the full faith and credit of the United States government collapse.”

OVERALL SPENDING

On spending, both Republicans and the Obama administration
begin with a small area of agreement: Both believe it should be cut. They
disagree sharply, however, on what to cut and when to start cutting.

On the timing, Democratic economists have argued that
immediate spending reductions will take money out of the fragile economic
recovery and undermine the de facto stimulus package that Obama signed earlier
this month, in the form of hundreds of billions of low-income tax credits and
unemployment benefits. Republicans want the reductions to start now.

Battle lines are already forming over the nature of the cuts
to come.

In a news conference last week, Obama said the debate would
center on “how do we cut spending that we don’t need while making investments
that we do need,” and he offered a hint of the areas he would try to protect:
“investments in education, research and development, innovation and the things
that are essential to grow our economy over the long run, create jobs and
compete with every other nation in the world.” 

Appearing on “Fox News Sunday,” one of the GOP’s chief
spending hawks, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.), took aim at redundancies in federal
job training programs and initiatives to promote science and math education —
two areas that Democrats have repeatedly cited as critical to the nation’s
long-term economic viabilities. In Congress, many Democrats will insist that
the defense budget be trimmed as much or more than any other area.

ENVIRONMENTAL REGULATION

One area where Republicans might have an upper hand is in their
fight against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). With the Democrats’
cap-and-trade plan dead in Congress for the foreseeable future, the Obama
administration has turned to executive rule-writing to try to reduce carbon
emissions and combat climate change.

The EPA took a big step toward expanded carbon regulations
by announcing a timetable earlier this month for phasing in emissions standards
for power plants and refineries. While the agency cites a Supreme Court ruling
granting it the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emission, its
aggressiveness has drawn the ire of coal-state senators like Jay Rockefeller
(D-W.Va.), who has pushed for legislation to roll back the EPA’s power.

In addition to a GOP House largely opposed to climate change
regulation, Rockefeller now has six more Republicans in the Senate, along with
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), his Mountaineer State colleague who famously shot a hole
through the cap-and-trade bill in a campaign ad.

Obama will face pressure to fight these efforts from
environmental advocates in his liberal base already disappointed by the failure
to pass a broad climate change bill. Yet as gas prices rise with the recovering
economy, public opinion could sway heavily against increased regulation and its
associated short-term costs.

NET NEUTRALITY

The decision last week by the Federal Communications
Commission (FCC) on net neutrality has galvanized House Republicans, who have vowed
to try to block new rules aimed at preventing cable and phone companies from
interfering with Internet traffic.

Boehner has railed against the FCC order, calling it a
needless regulation of the Internet that will stifle innovation and job
creation. Republican lawmakers have said they will introduce legislation to
overturn the decision.

They will face opposition from congressional Democrats and
President Obama, who has long supported “net neutrality” and praised the FCC
ruling. With both sides claiming to be on the side of a “free and open
Internet,” the issue has the potential to become a flashpoint in arguments over
how closely the Web should be regulated.