With eye on 2014, GOP welcomes Boehner’s Senate-first strategy

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) is passing the buck to the
Senate and, in the process, he’s lending a big hand to Senate Republican Leader
Mitch McConnell (Ky.)

{mosads}Boehner’s move to force the Democratic-led Senate to take
the lead on enacting President Obama’s agenda puts him squarely in line with a
top McConnell priority — wresting control of the upper chamber from Democrats.

The Speaker has made it clear that he believes his
one-on-one negotiations with Obama over the last two years allowed Senate
Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and his caucus to escape responsibility for
taking politically-tough votes in the last two years, helping Democrats not
only keep control of the Senate, but expand their majority in 2012.

As Boehner put it on Thursday, “those days are
over.”

The House, he indicated, has no intention of acting on the
agenda Obama laid out in his State of the Union on Tuesday until Senate
Democrats prove they can pass it first. That means no move to hike the minimum
wage, no major gun-control legislation, no big climate change bill.

That strategy has some Senate Republicans salivating, hoping
they will finally get to see vulnerable Democrats take the politically
dangerous votes that Reid protected them from taking in 2011 and 2012.

Sen. John Barrasso (Wyo.), a member of the Republican
leadership team, said he looked forward to seeing red-state Democrats like Sen.
Mark Begich (Alaska), Mark Pryor (Ark.), Mary Landrieu (La.) and others on the
ballot in 2014 vote on a budget and gun-control legislation.

“I would welcome an opportunity to have votes on these
[issues], as well as climate change,” Barrasso told The Hill, “just to have so
many of these Democrat candidates have to choose between the president and
their constituents back home whose opinions clearly oppose that of the
president.”

Boehner’s strategy is another example of the coordination
between him and McConnell. The Senate minority leader has also stepped up calls
for Senate Democrats to bring bills to the floor rather than rely on
last-minute deal-making on major issues.

While Boehner and McConnell have worked closely together for
much of the past two years, tensions between House and Senate Republicans have
occasionally spilled out in the public during the later stages of major
negotiations.

Forcing the Senate to act was a key rationale for the House
GOP’s move to suspend the debt ceiling while simultaneously conditioning member
pay on the passage of a budget resolution through both chambers of Congress.

Republicans have complained that the Democratic-led Senate
has not passed a budget in four years, and when Obama signed the debt-ceiling
legislation earlier this month, it put Democrats in the upper chamber on record
committing to a budget.

“You could argue already that the strategy is paying
dividends in terms of getting the Senate to do its work,” said Sen. John Thune
(S.D.), the third-ranking Republican. “So I think it will put more pressure on
Senate Democrats to actually have an agenda and actually require us to govern a
little bit over here.”

Boehner’s office publicly insists that the Speaker’s
strategy was not about helping Republicans win the Senate in 2014.

“It’s not about that,” Boehner spokesman Michael Steel said.
“This is about getting the best public policy for the American people. In order
for that to happen, Senate Democrats have got to take responsibility and do
their job.”

Privately, House Republicans acknowledge that the move could
have added political benefits for the party in Congress.

And for Boehner personally, the Senate-first policy relieves
him of pressure at a time when he has had trouble persuading his fractious
conference to pass any significant legislation.

After playing a starring role in the nonstop fiscal drama of
the last two years, Boehner is more than happy to let Reid sweat in the
spotlight for the next several months.

In the 112^th Congress, Thune said, “the House was
busy legislating and the Senate was essentially just biding its time.”

“It’ll force [Reid] to at least do some things,” he said of
Boehner’s declaration.

Boehner’s strategy does carry both short-term and long-term
risks.

The most immediate is in the blame game over $85 billion in
automatic spending cuts through sequestration that are set to take effect on
March 1. The Speaker has said the Senate must act first to replace them,
pointing to legislation the House passed twice in 2012.

But the House bills are dead in the new Congress, opening
House Republicans to criticism from Democrats that they are doing nothing to
prevent deep cuts to military spending that both parties have criticized.

In the long-term, inaction on Obama’s agenda in the House
could reopen Republicans to the obstructionist label Democrats stuck on them
during Obama’s first term.

Boehner is betting that most of the president’s proposals
won’t even make it past Democrats in the Senate, rendering that charge moot.

But if Reid has a more productive spring than Boehner is
expecting, it will quickly ramp up pressure on the Speaker to allow House votes
on legislation that may not garner majority Republican support.