Republicans will have their biggest House of Representatives majority since the Truman administration in the late 1940s, and, they believe, a mandate to slash spending dramatically and overturn President Barack Obama's 2010 health care law.
But their chances of success are dim, since Democrats will still control the White House and the Senate. That makes the potential for getting serious work done in 2011 difficult to predict. ...McClatchy
Look for conflict, and not just between Democrats and Republicans. Strong tea party Republicans v. everyone else will be part of the mix.
"The 112th Congress is going to be a mix of cooperation and conflict, "said John Pitney, a professor of politics at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif.
First will come the conflict, thanks to a new Republican army with dozens of new members, elected with the backing of the conservative Tea Party movement and pledging to adhere to a 45-page list of fresh GOP promises. Their top priorities are repealing and replacing the 2010 health care law and dramatically slashing federal spending.
Rumblings from congressional veterans suggest that the bipartisanship that helped Congress approve tax cuts and repeal of the military's "don't ask don't tell" policy in December is likely to crumble quickly, at least early in the year.
Here comes big trouble for Republicans: although "Obamacare" is unpopular, the actual components of "Obamacare" are popular and getting more so as each change comes into effect.
... Polls show that while support for the law overall is weak, support for many of its specific provisions, even among Republicans, is quite strong.
[Theda] Skocpol [Harvard government and sociology professor and co-author of the new book Health Care Reform and American Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know] says there's a longstanding academic explanation for that: "Americans are ideological conservatives but operational liberals. That's been an established principal in political science and the study of American public opinion for 50 years."
She says that means if you ask people if they prefer the government or the market to tell individuals what to do, they will always give the more conservative answer, "but if you ask Americans specific things — do you want aid for the poor to buy affordable health insurance? Do you want tax credits for small business to help them insure their employees? They will always give the more liberal answer."
Meanwhile, Skocpol says she thinks that Republican vows aside, it will be very difficult to make the new health care law go away, although "that's not to say that there can't be all kinds of mischief and delay in carrying through the intended combination of cost controls and expanded coverage."
All of which means the new Republican-led House next year will hold lots more hearings and take lots of votes to try to de-fund parts of the law. And more judges may declare the individual insurance requirement in the bill unconstitutional.
But experts say that the more new benefits of the law become entrenched, the harder they will be to take back. ...NPR
