Today, the event is essentially a tool of legislative strategy. It’s no longer just an occasion for the President to present the details of his agenda to Congress and the public, though every President does do that. The real purpose now is for the President to take advantage of the unusual opportunity of having his political opponents before him as a captive audience. While the President can’t actually make Congress vote for any of his proposals, on this one night he can make every congressman and senator squirm as they are forced to decide, in public, whether to applaud for each of his ideas.
Forcing members of the other party to applaud against their will is an old tradition, but Barack Obama has really made it the highlight of the whole show. He of course knows that, while the staging of the evening emphasizes the President towering over the Congress, there is a very real chance that almost nothing he proposes—replacement of the automatic budget cuts in the sequester, climate-change legislation, a higher minimum wage, immigration reform, gun control—will ever reach his desk.
The reasons are familiar. The House is controlled by Republicans, who typically operate under the so-called Hastert rule, which holds that no legislation will move to the House floor unless it commands the support of a majority of Republicans (rather than just a majority of the House). In the Senate, where Democrats have a majority of essentially fifty-five votes, the extraordinary use of the filibuster by Republicans in recent years means that all significant legislation requires sixty votes to move.
This odd situation—common in America in recent years, when we have had divided government, though unheard of in most other democratic systems—means that success for Obama very much depends on finding creative ways to force Republican leaders to let the will of Congress express itself absent these parliamentary choke points. Since much of Obama’s agenda enjoys majority support, the trick for him is in forcing Republicans to act on it.
The last few weeks actually suggest that the White House has reason to be optimistic. In January, two Obama-backed bills—one raising taxes and one funding relief for victims of Hurricane Sandy—passed the House in violation of the Hastert rule (that is, without a majority of Republicans). A third bill, which delayed a potentially catastrophic fight over the debt ceiling, also became law. The dynamic that led to passage of all three pieces of legislation was the same: the Republicans held a politically untenable position on a major issue and were forced to retreat from it after a White House campaign that embarrassed them.
That’s the template for passing Obama’s agenda in 2013, and that was the point of his speech Tuesday night.
The most dramatic example of Obama trying to shame Republicans was when he told the story of a teenager who was recently shot and killed:
In the two months since Newtown, more than a thousand birthdays, graduations, anniversaries have been stolen from our lives by a bullet from a gun—more than a thousand.
One of those we lost was a young girl named Hadiya Pendleton. She was fifteen years old. She loved Fig Newtons and lip gloss. She was a majorette. She was so good to her friends they all thought they were her best friend. Just three weeks ago, she was here, in Washington, with her classmates, performing for her country at my inauguration. And a week later, she was shot and killed in a Chicago park after school, just a mile away from my house.
Hadiya’s parents, Nate and Cleo, are in this chamber tonight, along with more than two dozen Americans whose lives have been torn apart by gun violence.
The Republicans in the chamber joined the Democrats in rising and applauding Hadiya’s family members, who were sitting with the First Lady. And as they rose to their feet, clapping, Obama hit them with the emotional peroration of the speech:
They deserve a vote. They deserve a vote. Gabby Giffords deserves a vote. The families of Newtown deserve a vote. The families of Aurora deserve a vote. The families of Oak Creek, and Tucson, and Blacksburg, and the countless other communities ripped open by gun violence—they deserve a simple vote. They deserve a simple vote.
That phrase may serve as the rallying cry for 2013. Obama’s legislative strategy in his first two years, when Democrats controlled both chambers of Congress, was mostly about trying to convince a few Republicans to support his agenda. The next two years, when Republicans controlled the House and Obama was politically weaker, were mostly spent trying to negotiate halfway compromises with John Boehner. If last night was any indication, the two years to come will be far more confrontational.
Original Article
Source: newyorker.com
Author: Ryan Lizza
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