Davis Merritt: Obsession with Obama puts GOP in bad spot

It turns out that the most depressing result of the midterm congressional election is that most Americans believe the votes will not have a useful impact on the people voted for and against.

For three weeks, Republican congressional leaders have been talking about hearing the voice of the people and have been delivering stern lectures to the president they despise and fear. Meanwhile, according to a bipartisan postelection survey done by combined Democrat and Republicans pollsters, more than three-quarters of Americans believe, depressingly, that the outcome will not substantially change the nation’s listless drift.

So the Republicans who will control both houses of Congress have the burden of earning their imagined mandate by finally beginning to offer workable solutions to the nation’s many problems.

And President Obama has the luxury of doing, within reason and the Constitution, pretty much what he wants to do and vetoing what he doesn’t want to do.

It’s a strange sort of interregnum. For six years, congressional Republicans had the publicly announced goal of not letting Obama accomplish anything and, when he did accomplish something, relentlessly denigrating it. Now they insist that the Election Day message was addressed to Obama only and consisted of whatever issue a given Republican ran hardest on: health care, not acting alone on immigration, the Keystone XL pipeline, federal regulations, guns or … whatever.

But national elections are rarely about discrete issues except in the imaginations of the candidates. They are less referendums on questions than they are expressions of how things are going in general, of discontent or happiness with events and people. The more likely message was: Get to work, do something, though with a subtext of pessimism.

So last week Obama did one of the things he wants to do by announcing the methods he will use to minimize the damage to people by our broken immigration system.

That, of course, further outraged the Republican leadership, a reaction partly, if not wholly, driven by the fact that their hatred of Obama has put them in a terrible spot. Predictably, their finger-wagging declarations that Obama “will live to regret” his “illegal” and “unconstitutional” actions only worsened their situation.

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, tried to rescue his caucus from its rhetorical hole, but only made it deeper. He declared that Obama is “damaging the presidency itself” by his unilateral and illegal actions and is choosing “to deliberately sabotage any chance of enacting bipartisan reforms.”

From Boehner’s frustrated tone, one would think that Congress had been right on the verge of fixing immigration but, doggone it, the president wouldn’t go along. In fact, the House could have fixed immigration policy almost 18 months ago after the Senate passed a bipartisan bill, but the far right, which doesn’t want reform, was too powerful.

So Obama did what he had been warning for years, saying to Republican leaders: Go ahead, make my day, pass a bill.

The bad spot the Republicans’ obsession with thwarting Obama has thrust them into has two levels:

If, as they contend, Obama’s action is unconstitutional, perhaps even warranting impeachment, then how can the next Republican president justify any executive action?

If they cannot put together a bill on their own, they fail and Obama wins. If they do put together a bill that meets most of Obama’s objectives, Obama wins.

They hate that when it happens. And when they hate, that happens.

This story was originally published November 24, 2014 at 6:02 PM with the headline "Davis Merritt: Obsession with Obama puts GOP in bad spot."