What Republicans Want

The Republicans have a pitch for you. It’s a very simple pitch: do what we want now, and maybe – just maybe – we’ll consider the possibility of doing something you want later. 

No guarantees, no promises, and don’t quote us on that, but rest assured that if you agree to what we want now, then we’ll definitely think about it. Definitely maybe. Perhaps.

That was the offer House Republicans made to Barack Obama in anticipation of his executive action on immigration. 

Hold off on the unilateral action, they said, and there might be a chance that the Republican-controlled House (the same legislative body that denied George W. Bush immigration reform and killed the most recent bipartisan legislation) would defy all the odds and expectations and pass a bill of some sort. 

Obama, quite sensibly, refused their entreaties and plowed ahead. The GOP claimed that in doing so, Obama “poisoned the well” and precluded any chance of real reform passing – anabsurd and stupid argument that, not surprisingly, is very popular with pundits.

One of the political impacts of Obama’s decision was to drive a huge wedge between the establishment Republicans who want to prove the GOP can govern and the hardcore conservatives who want to burn the government down to stop Obama’s “executive amnesty.” 

This posed a big problem for Republican leaders who want to show that they’re really mad at Obama, but also want to avert the political suicide of a government shutdown. 

And so to get themselves out of this jam, Republican leaders are making basically the same pitch to conservatives that they made to Obama: give us the government funding we want now, and we’ll see what happens next year.

Politico reported yesterday that the brilliant minds of the Republican leadership were coalescing around a novel approach to the immigration fight: fully fund most of the government until late 2015, but carve out a short-term continuing resolution for “immigration enforcement related funding.” 

That continuing resolution would expire at some point early next year, after the GOP takes control of Congress, at which point they can have the immigration funding fight that conservatives are pushing for. They’ve apparently taken to calling this hybrid monstrosity the “Cromnibus” – CR, plus “omnibus.”

And they’re doing this because everything, as a rule, is terrible.