Let’s stipulate that Republican strategist and pundit John Feehery is engaging in a bit of hyperbole and alarmism here; I still think he makes an important point that the business community would be wise to heed.
If Sen. Harry Reid’s rule change on filibusters did anything, it sent a message to the business titans who support Senate Tea Party challengers to Republican incumbents to knock it off.
Regaining control of the Senate is now more important than ever.
Republican strategists have been putting all of their campaign eggs in the ObamaCare basket. The president’s healthcare law, the reasoning goes, will be so unpopular that it will drive base voters to the polls a year from now.
That’s a risky bet. As we found with the Iran deal over the weekend and with the passage of the nuclear option in the Senate last week, it is hard to keep the attention of the news media — and the voters — on any one issue.
I think ObamaCare will still prove to be unpopular in the next year, but Republicans have to construct a wider message going into the election year.
Checking President Obama’s unbridled power is a pretty powerful message.
And having control of the House is not just good enough in the era of the so-called Reid Rule.
When Reid (D-Nev.) got his Senate majority to lower the threshold on executive branch and judicial nominations from 60 votes to 50 votes (assuming the vice president could break any tie), he gave tremendous power to the president.
Obama can stack the court in his image and can put anti-business ideologues in places like the Department of Labor, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the Commerce and Agriculture departments. And those ideologues can spend the next three years writing regulations that will govern this country for a generation or more.
And those regulations will cost the business community trillions of dollars in compliance costs.
In my experience, industry groups do a very effective job of lobbying Congress and protecting their clients’ interests. It’s certainly more effective to talk to Senate Democrats about how various proposals might adversely affect your industry’s bottom line than it is to promote the anti-government nihilism of the Tea Party. Nihilism is very ineffective when it doesn’t prevail. The reason is simple. Believing in nothing and doing nothing precludes you from entering into negotiations, and if you enter into them despite your opposition to any compromise, no one will take you seriously or be willing to offer you any concessions.
To use Mr. Feehery’s example, the decision to oppose nominees without cause (which is a form of nihilism) led the Democrats to remove a choke point where lobbyists could influence regulatory rules. More and more regulations will be generated within the executive branch rather than as a result of congressional compromise.
Will it cost the business community trillions of dollars in compliance costs? Over what time frame?
I don’t know the answer to that, but it definitely looks like the portion of the business community that bet on the Tea Party made a major mistake.
