The 114th Congress may be more productive than its predecessor—just
|WASHINGTON, DC
VIEWED from a distance, the scaffolding on the Capitol’s dome makes the building seem perpetually out of focus. The intentions of the congressmen sitting underneath it, who took their seats for the 114th Congress for the first time on January 6th, are similarly fuzzy. They may continue where the last Congress, a notably unproductive one, left off. Or they may work with the president to pass some limited legislation. While they make up their minds, a giant doughnut will be suspended above their heads to let workmen repair the 1,000 cracks that become apparent when the building is seen from up close.
This giant floating bun ought to serve as a warning. In the previous Congress the centre too often went missing; to be more productive, this one will have to find it.
Those who think this will happen argue that Congress works best when it is wholly controlled by one party, as the new one is. When one side holds just one chamber of Congress and the presidency, as was the case for the Democrats between 2010 and the end of 2013, the other lot has plenty of power—in the sense that it can stop things happening—but not much incentive to co-operate in governing. It is harder for a party to act as a protest movement when it is in charge of the legislature. When Bill Clinton found himself faced by a Congress wholly controlled by Republicans, he signed one bill reforming the welfare system and another that cut taxes. When George W. Bush faced a Democratic Congress, he signed a stimulus bill that gave the economy a needed boost in the early part of the financial crisis.
The Kiss (not by Rodin)
A further cause for optimism is that the Speaker of the House, John Boehner, is in a stronger position. Mr Boehner was re-elected to the post on January 6th, celebrating with a leathery kiss on the unwilling cheek of Nancy Pelosi, the minority leader (see picture, which went viral). Before the vote, some of his colleagues had talked about a coup. In the event 25 Republicans voted against him. The sight of Louie Gohmert, one of Mr Boehner’s more obstreperous foes, receiving three out of an available 241 votes must have been particularly enjoyable. Since becoming Speaker in 2011, Mr Boehner has often been forced to do things he himself opposed in order to keep his members onside and retain his job. Now that Republicans have their biggest majority in the House since 1946, he can afford to be more robust.
Yet for all this, Republicans and the president do not agree on much. Mitch McConnell, the majority leader in the Senate, has said there may be room to deal on trade, infrastructure and tax reform. Of these three, trade looks the most promising, because granting the president’s administration fast-track authority to do deals that cannot be unpicked by Congress later would not cost any money.
The other two supposed areas of agreement will founder on a familiar argument about tax. The president would like to raise revenue to pay for infrastructure improvements, perhaps by using a windfall from the foreign profits of American firms repatriated after a reform to corporate taxes. Republicans would prefer to pay for this through spending cuts elsewhere. Both sides are open to a deal that would lower the combined federal and state taxes on companies—at 39%, the highest rate in the developed world—while closing some loopholes. But whereas the president would continue to tax companies on their worldwide profits, Republicans favour a sytem that taxes profits based on where they are made. On both these issues agreement that something should be done is not enough to ensure that it is.
If the list of things where co-operation is possible is short and comes with many disclaimers, the opportunities for confrontation are numerous. Both Mr McConnell and Mr Boehner are under pressure from their members to find ways to hamper the implementation of the Affordable Care Act and the president’s executive action on immigration. They will try to do so by attaching riders to bills that the president would otherwise wish to sign, testing how much he is willing to lose in order to preserve two of the things that he sees as big achievements. This is likely to start in the coming week, when the Senate votes to approve the construction of Keystone XL, a pipeline that would take oil from Canada’s tar sands to refineries on the Gulf coast. The White House has said that the president will veto the bill.
The pipeline is a good illustration of why hoping for too much from this Congress will bring disappointment. Keystone XL, if built, may contribute to a slight increase in CO{-2} emissions, though its overall impact will be hard to discern. Nor will it provide much economic benefit: the pipeline is unlikely to create a large number of jobs, and with oil at $50 a barrel it is probably not viable economically. Yet Democrats often act as if Keystone XL were the most important environmental threat facing America, whereas Republicans offer it as a fix for any number of ailments, from slow growth to unemployment. This suggests that the argument is not really about whether to build a new pipeline, but about two conflicting views of American progress and about election adverts to be aired in future cycles.
One of the first things the House will do will be to pass the Hire More Heroes bill. Since the passage of the Affordable Care Act, Republicans have denounced the law’s impact on small businesses, many of which must provide health insurance for their staff once they employ 50 people for 30 hours a week or more. The Hire More Heroes bill would change the law so that a company with 49 staff could hire as many military veterans as it wanted without breaching the threshold. This may be a good idea, but to claim it will transform the fortunes of either America’s small businesses or the employment prospects of ex-servicemen is nonsense on stilts.
As well as passing laws, the Senate will be called on to confirm the president’s nominations for two important offices: secretary of defence and attorney-general. Both will produce plenty of theatre. The attorney-general’s hearing will be dominated by questions from Republican senators on how immigration law will be enforced, now that the president has unilaterally suspended parts of it. The hearings for secretary of defence will provide an opportunity for Republican presidential hopefuls in the Senate to denounce the administration’s foreign policy as being both too adventurous and too passive.
By the autumn of 2016, when work on the Capitol’s dome is due to be completed, the 114th Congress will have run its course, the country will be in the throes of a presidential election and freshmen congressmen will find themselves accused of having become Washington insiders. This Congress will be less destructive than its predecessor, which shut down the government and flirted with a sovereign default. But at the moment the workmen scurrying around the roof look slightly more likely to leave behind something of lasting value than the politicians considering their legacies 200 feet below.
This article appeared in the United States section of the print edition under the headline "Construction above, obstruction below"
