For President Obama, Thursday marked the unofficial beginning of the lame-duck era.
After being virtually invisible during budget negotiations and ceding almost all power to Democrats on Capitol Hill, the president found himself backed into a political corner, forced to support a $1.1 trillion spending package that he had little hand in crafting and that contains provisions the White House vehemently opposes.
In the end, the president simply had no choice: Having warned of the economic catastrophe that would be a second government shutdown in just over a year, the White House could not be seen as the party responsible for causing it.
Thursday’s anticlimactic showdown between Congress and the president is a preview of what the next two years may look like, political analysts say, with Mr. Obama struggling to find the political leverage he needs to keep from becoming an afterthought in all crucial policy debates.
“It’ll be a challenge for him to stay relevant over the next two years,” said Darrell West, vice president and director of governance studies at the Brookings Institution.
While Mr. Obama came out in full support of the spending package, his Democratic allies in Congress did not follow suit. House Minority Nancy Pelosi of California bashed the bill and rallied her troops to do the same, essentially ignoring the administration’s call for lawmakers of both parties to back the legislation and avoid a government shutdown.
SEE ALSO: Spending bill passes House after pleas from Obama, GOP leaders
House Democrats appeared unwilling or unable to stomach some provisions in the bill, including changes to the Dodd-Frank financial reform package, cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency’s budget and measures allowing donors to give more money to national political parties.
The White House panned those portions of the bill — along with a measure essentially blocking the District of Columbia’s move to legalize marijuana — but decided they weren’t worth a tooth-and-nail fight.
“I anticipate that Democrats and Republicans will support this piece of legislation,” White House press secretary Josh Earnest told reporters moments after the House took its first vote to clear the bill, which passed 214 to 212. “They will do so not because either side got every single thing that they wanted. The president certainly didn’t get everything that he wanted. If the president were writing this bill himself, this bill would look a lot different. But it is a compromise.”
The mammoth spending bill was just one example Thursday of how this White House quickly is losing influence on Capitol Hill.
The Senate Committee on Foreign Relations passed a new authorization for use of military force to fight the Islamic State, but the bill contains strict limits on ground troops, something the White House had cautioned against.
Secretary of State John F. Kerry made a personal appeal to the committee this week, imploring them not to restrict Mr. Obama’s authority to send in ground troops if necessary. The Democratic-led committee brushed aside Mr. Kerry’s comments.
Moving forward, the White House is preparing for other political fights in which it will have little, if any, leverage.
The budget deal funds the government through September 2015, with the exception of the Department of Homeland Security, which is funded only through February. That will allow Republicans, who will assume control of the Senate in January, to use another round of budget negotiations to try to block Mr. Obama’s executive action halting deportations for millions of illegal immigrants.
The White House can do little to stop Republicans from heading down that path other than to try to convince them such a strategy is politically perilous.
“If they do choose to have that fight, and I don’t think they will, but if they do, I do feel confident saying they will not have widespread support among the American people for this,” Mr. Earnest said, adding that he believes Americans don’t want to see critical Homeland Security functions go unfunded just because the GOP objects to the president’s moves on immigration.
Meanwhile, liberals were incensed Thursday at what they viewed as Mr. Obama giving up power to Republicans and being unwilling to fight for Democratic Party principles.
The progressive super PAC Democracy for America, for example, took aim at the rollback of the Dodd-Frank financial reforms — an aspect of the bill the administration opposes but doesn’t feel strongly enough about to threaten a veto.
“The White House has no business giving cover to Wall Street wing Democrats on this absurd right-wing power grab, and the fact that they are is one of the reasons why there’s a growing movement encouraging Elizabeth Warren to enter the 2016 race for president,” said Neil Sroka, Democracy for America spokesman.
Mrs. Warren, Massachusetts Democrat and a rising populist hero on the progressive left, has come out against the spending bill, encouraging fellow liberals to oppose it.
The groundswell of support for her potential White House bid — even though she herself has said on multiple occasions she will not run — highlights many liberals’ uneasiness with Hillary Rodham Clinton, the party’s clear presidential front-runner.
Indeed, progressive groups have expressed serious concern about Mrs. Clinton’s close ties to Wall Street. Thus far, she has been unable to rally liberal groups firmly to her side, and the Clinton and Warren camps have come to exemplify a growing split in the party.
Many liberal groups have taken similar issue with Mr. Obama, charging the administration has failed to articulate a clear populist agenda for Democrats. For example, philosopher Cornel West has called him “a black mascot of Wall Street oligarchs and a black puppet of corporate plutocrats.”
But internal Democratic politics likely will be the furthest thing from the president’s mind over the next 24 months.
Next year and beyond, political specialists say the president will be forced into a defensive posture, with the $1.1 trillion spending bill a prime example of how Republicans will be able to work around the White House on major pieces of legislation.
Instead of driving those debates — and perhaps relegated to the role of bystander in key negotiations — Mr. Obama may have to dig in and fight merely to preserve what he was able to accomplish in the first six years of his presidency.
“In some ways, I think the president will be fighting to preserve health care reform, to preserve the executive order on immigration, to preserve his executive order on climate change,” said Matt Dallek, a political science professor at George Washington University who specializes in political leadership and the presidency. “I think there will be a lot of defense on what they see as major legacies. And that’s going to be a tough fight.”
• Ben Wolfgang can be reached at bwolfgang@washingtontimes.com.
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