OPINION:
Mitch McConnell is desperately seeking a way out of the corner he painted for himself. The Republican leader of the Senate promised the public two things last November. He said there would be “no government shutdown on my watch,” and that he would use the appropriations lever to force President Obama to “move to the center” on several crucial issues, including immigration.
He, like nearly everyone else, reasonably believed that the decisive whipping the president and his party took would make the man willing to work toward the kind of bipartisan solutions that marked the final Clinton years. But Barack Obama is no Bill Clinton. After all the votes were counted the president dismissed the results and doubled down on pique and ideology. To get his way, Mr. Obama uses race, class, threats and executive powers he probably doesn’t have to go around and over Congress. He made “new law” by granting executive amnesty to millions of illegal immigrants without the bother of going to Congress.
Mr. McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner decided to separate funding for the Homeland Security Department, which oversees the implementation of immigration law, and fund the agency only through this week. This would force the president to accept a funding bill that would include everything but the money to implement the immigration order. Or so they thought.
Congress actually has few ways to deal with a rogue president. Barack Obama is the unprecedented president, and not in a good way. The Republicans should have anticipated that they would be portrayed by the president, the Democrats and the lazy and compliant media as the petty obstructionists who would cheerfully strip the nation of its last line of defense against terrorists. That’s what’s happening, though it’s clear that Mr. Obama, unlike his predecessors, is hostile even to the idea of compromise. His hostility to listening to anyone else guarantees a partial shutdown Thursday.
The good news is that such a shutdown won’t strip anybody of very much. Ninety percent of Homeland Security employees were declared “essential” during the last shutdown, and they still are. So they will still guard the border (sort of), pat down airline passengers, and protect the president and the rest of us. The president continues to demand a “clean” bill that will enable him to do as he pleases, to implement amnesty in his way in the name of national security.
The Democrats have stopped Mr. McConnell from bringing the agency’s funding to the Senate floor four times, including the assistance of Democrats in the Senate who say they oppose what the president is doing but nevertheless rally around him on “national security” grounds. Republicans have suggested a continuing resolution to keep everything as is for a further few weeks of negotiation. But since the president does not intend to negotiate, the Democrats have said no to this, too.
The president’s insistence on no compromise was made abundantly clear when Gov. Mary Fallin of Oklahoma, in a private meeting with him last week, tried to ask him a question about the Keystone pipeline. When she said she would “respectfully like to talk about Keystone” she couldn’t get the question out of her mouth before the president told her rudely: “Not gonna happen.”
Mr. McConnell must find ways to force Mr. Obama to accept or reject legislation in the open, to raise a window on his mind that enables the public see him and his fellow Democrats as they are, saying one thing in Dubuque and Pittsburgh and voting another way in Washington. It won’t be easy, but it will be necessary.
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