When Picking a Fight Can Also Be Starting a Negotiation
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/13/us/politics/obama-and-congress-open-on-confrontational-note.html?hpw&rref=politics&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=well-region®ion=bottom-well&WT.nav=bottom-well&_r=0
Obama and Congress Open on Confrontational Note
WASHINGTON — In the halls of the White House and the corridors of the Capitol, there was a stark dissonance last week between President Obama’s rhetoric of consensus and compromise and his confrontational actions, offering the first glimmers of the president’s strategy for engaging with a Republican Congress that holds the fate of his agenda in its hands.
On the first day of the 114th Congress, Mr. Obama sat in the Oval Office and said his message to the new Republican Congress would be, “Let’s figure out how to work together.”
Only about two hours earlier, his press secretary, Josh Earnest, told reporters that the president intended to veto the first two pieces of legislation Republicans in the House of Representatives were planning to pass: to authorize the Keystone XL oil pipeline and to redefine a full-time worker under the Affordable Care Act.
With his quick veto threats, Mr. Obama signaled that he would be aggressive in rejecting legislation he sees as chipping away at his policy priorities, such as the health care law, or his presidential authority to do things like approve an oil pipeline. But by insisting that he wants to collaborate with Republicans, the president — who will host the top four congressional leaders of both parties at the White House on Tuesday — also hinted that there is negotiating room beyond those threats.
“The president’s attitude is that we shouldn’t let our disagreements, as big as they are on some issues, prevent us from working together on the things we do agree on,” said Dan Pfeiffer, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama. “If Republicans take a similar attitude, there is an opportunity to prove people wrong and make some progress.”
For now, Mr. Obama and congressional Republicans are dwelling mostly on the big disagreements.
Congressional leaders pointed to the swift veto threats as the latest evidence that the president has no real interest in partnering with them — “At a minimum, he could have waited a few hours,” said Speaker John A. Boehner, Republican of Ohio — and warned that Mr. Obama could be spoiling his chance for a productive relationship.
“They think they can keep poking people in the eye and it won’t have any consequences, and the reality is, it will,” said Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma. “To us right now, it looks like the president wants to pick a fight with us every other day, and if that’s their strategy, good luck. I don’t think it’s going to work very well.”
White House officials argued that it was Republicans who had chosen to bait Mr. Obama into an early confrontation, by advancing measures they knew he would reject. The Keystone bill, in particular, seemed written with the intention of drawing a veto because it takes power from the president and gives it to Congress. Both of the bills the president said he would veto last week were similar to legislation he had threatened to veto in the last Congress.
“Maybe it raises questions about the willingness of Republicans to actually cooperate with this administration when you consider that the very first bill that’s introduced in the United States Senate is one that Republicans know the president opposes,” Mr. Earnest told reporters on Jan. 6, referring to the Keystone measure.
Beyond the bickering lies a timeworn reality that Mr. Obama is embracing, and a tactic deployed by his predecessors in both political parties: using vetoes, and the threat of using them, as a crucial element of negotiation between presidents and Congresses led by the other party. Bill Clinton mastered the art, often using vetoes as a negotiating tool on major agenda items. He vetoed welfare reform legislation twice before signing it into law in 1996.
“It’s not just a question of saying ‘no,’ the veto is a bargaining tool for the president where he extracts legislative concessions from the opposition,” said Charles M. Cameron, a politics professor at Princeton University who wrote a book on the subject. “If the president will stick to his guns, either the Republicans are going to get nothing done or they’re going to have to give him some of what he wants.”
The threats Mr. Obama issued last week were of the “blame-game veto” variety, Mr. Cameron said — the sort that allow both sides to make a political point and rally their respective bases, but that are not really intended to yield a legislative compromise.
The president’s veto threat on the Keystone measure convinced at least one wavering lawmaker of his own party, Representative Debbie Dingell of Michigan, that she should vote “no” on the bill.
“I was waiting to see where the president was going to be and what he was going to ask us to do,” said Ms. Dingell, who joined 152 other Democrats in opposing the measure.
At the same time, the threat united Republicans. After the bill passed on Friday, Mr. Boehner issued a news release boasting, “House Defies President’s Veto Threat, Approves Job-Creating Keystone Pipeline.”
But more often, said Sam Kernell, a political-science professor at the University of California, San Diego, a president’s veto threat is the start of a negotiation that leads to a law.
“Obama is tracking history here, because threats are really a big part of divided government,” Mr. Kernell said. His research analyzing veto threats by presidents reaching back to Ronald Reagan shows that measures that prompt them are “highly likely” to become law.
Anita Dunn, a former senior aide to Mr. Obama, said he and congressional Republicans are both staking out early positions so they can ultimately sit down and strike such bargains.
“There’s going to be a lot of common interest, after the rhetorical grenades have been thrown, in stepping back and figuring out what in two years both sides can claim as achievements,” she said.