Obama to sit down with triumphant GOP leaders

US president Barack Obama and the newly victorious Republican leadership in Congress have both pledged ahead of their lunch at the White House today to seek common ground in a capital riven by partisan division.

The two sides, however, will come to the meeting with a list of priorities that are anathema to the other side and which could ensure they break up anew without so much as a honeymoon.

A weakened Mr Obama will be trying to rebuild the Democratic base that failed to vote for the party’s candidates on Tuesday, something he underlined with his commitment to bypass Congress on immigration at a press conference the next day.

Mitch McConnell, the incoming Republican Senate majority leader, has a different task – herding a larger, conservative caucus behind measures that are tailored to corner Mr Obama, without overplaying the party’s hand.

Newly elected senators, such as Tom Cotton in Arkansas, Cory Gardner in Colorado and Joni Ernst in Iowa, were all backed by the party establishment as candidates for the election to avoid the disaster of the 2010 and 2013 election.

In both those earlier elections, the Republicans were well positioned to take control of the Senate but were undone by out-of-the-mainstream candidates in key races who could not command voter support.

“Superior Republican candidate quality is the single most decisive variable of the 2014 elections, especially when compared to candidate fields in 2010 and 2012,” said Jonathan Collegio, a former spokesman for the conservative campaign group, American Crossroads.

Tilting right

In policy terms, the new senators’ views may be more closely aligned to the most conservative wing on a range of issues, including the Tea Party champion in the chamber,

Ted Cruz

of Texas.

“The myth of the establishment taming the Tea Party is just that – a myth,” said Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution, the Washington think- tank.

Ms Ernst has expressed support for the view that the United Nations is aiming to strip Americans of their property rights, called Mr Obama a “dictator” and expressed a willingness to take up arms should the federal government “decide my rights are no longer important”.

While serving in Iraq, Mr Cotton, a favourite of the neoconservatives, wrote a letter attacking the New York Times for revealing a clandestine US intelligence programme and suggested the reporters should be "behind bars".

Both Mr Cotton and Mr Gardner served in the House of Representatives during a period when the Republican speaker, John Boehner, struggled to control a caucus that adopted positions far more conservative than he did.

Some of the Senate's most conservative members will also rise to positions of power, with Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma likely to take over as chair of the Senate environment committee. Mr Inhofe is a climate change sceptic.

The Republican leadership under Mr McConnell has so far indicated that their initial priorities will be firmly from the party’s policy mainstream.

The bills they will put forward from January, once the new Congress takes its place, include repealing a tax on medical devices and clearing the way for building the Keystone XL pipeline to transport crude oil from Canada. Both measures could win significant Democratic support.

“The priority is to put bills on the president’s desk that will move the country forward,” said John Barrasso, a Wyoming senator who is part of the Republican leadership. “It is going to be back to how Congress is supposed to work.”

Putin’s dominance

Mr Barrasso also wants speedy action on lifting exports of liquefied natural gas – to underline, he says, “Vladimir Putin’s energy dominance”. In practice, such a policy would take years to come into effect.

But the Republicans will have to decide how far to push one of their core aims: repealing Mr Obama’s healthcare law, which is expected to be among their first votes in January.

Mr McConnell has made clear he does not expect Mr Obama to sign such a bill, forcing him to move on to a second approach, of taking the legislation apart bit by bit.

Such a piecemeal approach may not be enough for the conservatives in the party. Mr Cruz, for example, is calling for the “complete and total” repeal of Obamacare.

Any chance of Mr Obama and the Republicans to work together may have already been poisoned by then – by the president’s commitment to bypass Congress on immigration reform with an executive order to be issued in coming weeks.

Mr McConnell said this would be like a “red rag to a bull” for Republicans. But for the moment, Mr Obama seems determined to wave it.

– (Copyright The Financial Times Limited)