As noted by Jed Lewison, the Republican agenda, should they retake the House, distills down to this:
- Extend Bush tax cuts for wealthy.
- Pledge to veto EFCA or energy reform legislation passed by Congress after the November election but before the new Congress.
- Tell Democrats to support the GOP’s effort to repeal a provision of the health care law that Boehner claims would require businesses to itemize all expenditures over $600. (Note that Republicans actually blocked a vote to repeal the mandate in House and the small jobs bill in the Senate, currently being blocked by the GOP, is also a vehicle for repeal.)
- Submit a massive spending reduction package to Congress.
- (Tell the president to) (f)ire his entire economic team.
As Jed summarized:
The thing about that list is that there isn’t a single thing about what Republicans would actually do. It’s just a list of demands on President Obama and except for the first one — in which Boehner demands Obama extend Bush tax cuts for the wealthy — they are purely rhetorical in nature.
Unsurprisingly, the Party of No wants to do, essentially, nothing. Of course, Republicans tried to kill health care reform and banking reform, and they’re continuing to try to kill energy reform and climate legislation. And because they stand for nothing, and have nothing to offer the voters, they’re falling back on their usual electoral strategy of exploiting and exacerbating bigotry. But just to be fair, it does deserve mention that the Republicans do intend to take action on one front, and their intention has been clear for months: they want to try to impeach President Obama.
Glenn Thrush at Politico understands:
Republicans are planning a wave of committee investigations targeting the White House and Democratic allies if they win back the majority.
Politico being Politico, Thrush refers to GOP staffers’ claims that there won’t be any “self-destructive witch hunts,” but he doesn’t mention if he bothered to ask if any of the staffers think impeaching President Clinton over a personal matter was a witch hunt.
“I actually think it will be even worse than what happened to Bill Clinton because of the animosity they already feel for President Obama,” says Lanny Davis, a deputy White House counsel who lived through Clinton’s trials.
And Thrush lists some of the possible investigations, most of which already have been thoroughly explored and dismissed as non-issues.
“If Republicans go on an investigative witch hunt when and if they gain power in November, then their power will be very short lived,” said Mark McKinnon, a former George W. Bush adviser sympathetic to Obama. “The American public wants Congress to work together, not to investigate each other.”
Of course, a witch hunt is in the eye of the beholder. And it would be interesting to know if McKinnon can point to any evidence of the GOP genuinely trying to work with Democrats on anything. On issue after issue, every attempt the president and the Democrats made to reach across the aisle resulted in stalling, obfuscating, misrepresenting what the Democrats were doing, and then no Republican support. But Politico being Politico, Thrush also offers this as a very ripe target for GOP investigations:
No investigation poses a more significant political danger to Obama than a no-holds-barred GOP probe into TARP, the AIG bailout, the Freddie-Fannie sinkhole and the administration’s de facto takeover of GM and Chrysler.
Except, of course, that TARP was signed by Bush, the AIG bailout happened under Bush, and the conservatorship of Freddie and Fannie happened under Bush. But investigating the “de facto takeover” of GM and Chrysler could actually be interesting, given that GM didn’t go under, and thousands of jobs were saved (with great sacrifice by the autoworkers) and Chrysler was successfully reorganized under new ownership after declaring bankruptcy. In other words, the most significant dangers from GOP investigations of President Obama might be to members of the Bush administration. Except, of course, that Thrush omits to mention one other possible avenue of investigation. But then, maybe he hopes to go along for the ride, when the GOP sends a fact-finding mission on a junket to Kenya to search for the birth certificate.