House Republicans are preparing to release their election-year agenda beginning Tuesday — but if history is any judge, don’t expect them to make much headway in actually getting most of it done.
The last agenda, the House GOP’s 2010 Pledge to America, had a decidedly mixed record of success, falling short on vows to repeal Obamacare, balance the budget, freeze hiring of new federal employees, permanently ban taxpayer funding for abortions and enforce sanctions against Iran.
Instead, Republicans settled for half-measures: Lawsuits to try to limit the reach of Obamacare, cuts to Congress’ own budget and investigations into Planned Parenthood’s funding.
“They made good plans, they didn’t make smart pledges. They didn’t have the votes, didn’t have the president,” said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum and former director of the Congressional Budget Office.
Republicans are hoping for better success this time as they release their 2016 agenda, dubbed “A Better Way.” House Speaker Paul D. Ryan will kick things off Tuesday with an anti-poverty address in the Anacostia neighborhood of the District of Columbia.
Mr. Ryan will discuss national security on Thursday, followed by events in the coming weeks on innovation, the Constitution, tax reform and health care, which should include the GOP’s long-awaited replacement to Obamacare.
“I think what Ryan’s doing is very important,” said former Speaker Newt Gingrich, whose 1994 agenda, the “Contract with America,” helped Republicans retake the House after decades in the minority. “He’s helping start a conversation about solutions rather than just problems. And he is putting the Republican Party in a position of being positive and forward-looking, rather than being ’anti-.’”
The push comes nearly six years after the GOP unveiled its Pledge to America at a family-owned lumber company in Northern Virginia.
In 45 pages Republicans outlined what they would do after riding a tea party wave to the House majority, from cutting taxes to spur the economy to repealing Obamacare and ensuring that suspected terrorists were tried in military, not civilian, courts.
“We recognize that these solutions are ambitious, and that we are proposing them at a time of intense public district in politicians and the political system,” its drafters wrote at the time.
House Republicans rode the pledge to victory, taking control of the House on the strength of the tea party revolt.
And in the early going, in 2011, conservatives said the signs were positive. GOP leaders had an Obamacare repeal bill on the floor by mid-January, and they pushed to rein in spending after a series of government bailouts and D.C. directives to lift the country out of a recession.
Congress also quickly passed a bill to repeal Obamacare tax-reporting requirements, and approved a short extension of all of the Bush-era tax cuts.
“There was an active effort to take on President Obama and secure conservative policy victories. The problem is, beyond that point, they seemed to retrench and shy away from direct confrontation,” said Dan Holler, a spokesman for Heritage Action, a conservative pressure group.
Yet 2011 “sequester” caps on federal spending have been loosened repeatedly, and the GOP’s pledge to cut off Obamacare funding yielded mixed results — a wholesale push led to a government shutdown in 2013, though a piecemeal attack on reimbursements to insurers resulted in a federal court victory last month.
Republicans retook the Senate in 2015, but the party still struggled to exact conservative victories, as Mr. Obama vetoed a fast-track bill to repeal his signature health care law and defund Planned Parenthood over its abortion practice.
Conservatives say Republican leaders in Congress failed to use the tool the Constitution gives them — the power of the purse — to force concessions from the president.
“There was never any real effort to defund Planned Parenthood,” Mr. Holler said. “The real effort would have happened on the funding bill.”
Other 2010 pledges left unfulfilled were to rein in Mr. Obama’s expansive regulations on U.S. businesses and to make all of the Bush-era tax cuts permanent.
By contrast, the 1994 Republican “Contract with America,” spearheaded by Mr. Gingrich, led to a series of balanced budgets and even prodded President Bill Clinton into signing an overhaul of welfare.
Mr. Gingrich, however, cautioned against comparing the 2010 pledges to the 1994 contract, saying Republicans now are working in the shadow of the Obama presidency, without the tools to rein him in.
Now Mr. Ryan, who accepted the speaker’s gavel after intraparty fighting nudged Speaker John A. Boehner out last fall, wants to enter the post-Obama era as the “party of ideas.”
“Let’s face it: People know what Republicans are against. Now we are giving you a plan that shows you what we are for,” the speaker said over the weekend.
Mr. Ryan said he endorsed Donald Trump, the de facto GOP presidential nominee, last week because the billionaire businessman would help turn the House policy agenda into “laws to help improve people’s lives.”
But Mr. Ryan has advanced his agenda independently of Mr. Trump, and analysts like Mr. Holtz-Eakin say it should give down-ballot Republicans a platform to stand on outside of Mr. Trump’s orbit.
• Tom Howell Jr. can be reached at thowell@washingtontimes.com.
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