If Conservatives Can’t Have It All, They’ll Take a Cromnibus

Today on NRO

THE EDITORS: The planned Eisenhower memorial is a travesty. Give Ike a Statue.

RICH LOWRY: Obamistas admit they needed to lie to get the bill through. Thank You, Jonathan Gruber.

IAN TUTTLE: Democrats erase their links to “Mr. Mandate.” Gruber Who?

DAVID HARSANYI: There’s nothing in the climate-change deal we weren’t going to do. What ‘Historic Agreement’?

SMITH AND YANDLE: The dirty deal behind new power-plant regulations. Coal’s Bootleggers and Baptists.

Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty

November 14, 2014

Morning Jolters,

Patrick Brennan still here — Jim will be back tan, rested, and ready on Monday. Enjoy.

If Conservatives Can’t Have It All, They’ll Take a Cromnibus

Following reports that the president’s executive-amnesty plan may come as early as next week, at meetings yesterday the House Republican caucus discussed what to do about it, with some conservatives reconsidering whether they need a full government-funding resolution that blocks the action right now — an idea leadership has opposed. Our own Joel Gehrke reports from the Hill:

Conservative lawmakers are pitching a number of legislative proposals to House speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) and other House Republicans in order to avoid passing a long-term funding bill that would provide President Obama with the money he needs to implement his pending administrative amnesty for millions of illegal immigrants.

“We could essentially be green-lighting it if we do a full omnibus in the lame-duck with everything,” says a House Republicans who signed Representative Matt Salmon’s letter calling for the House to pass a continuing resolution in the lame-duck session that would prohibit Obama from implementing his executive orders.

The procedure outlined in the letter would set the stage for a lame-duck government shutdown if Obama vetoed the bill or Senate Democrats, who will control the chamber until January, block the bill.

But the House Republican, speaking anonymously about today’s Republican conference meeting and Republican Study Committee meeting say that Salmon and the other signatories see the letter’s proposal as just one way to oppose the executive amnesty.

“What we want to do is have the next Congress address the Department of Homeland Security [funding],” the lawmaker said. To that end, he said that conservatives are willing to pass a “CROMNIBUS” bill — a bill that combines several appropriations bills for specific departments (the House passed seven during this Congress that the Senate Democrats refused to vote on) with a short-term continuing resolution. The advantage of that, the Republican said, is that it would mean that a full government shutdown would not happen under any circumstances, because major areas of government, such as the Department of Veterans Affairs, would already be funded.

(Cromnibus, we were disappointed to learn, is not an innovation: The term’s been used during government funding debates for some time.)

In any case, it’s not a bad sign that leadership is talking tough, that conservatives are floating a variety of tactics, and that Boehner wasn’t rejecting the plans out of hand. Leadership’s idea of passing a no-strings-attached long-term funding resolution, as NR’s editors have argued, is awful, and the House can certainly come up with something better.

But that said, the battle to stop the president’s actions will be a political one: He can be forced into signing a bill that essentially promises he won’t grant legal status to millions of illegal immigrants on his own, or he can be shamed out of trying it altogether.

The plan, by the way, unfortunately looks to be as expansive as expected: Both the New York Times and Fox News report that it would give up to 5 million illegal immigrants formal work authorization, among other things. If you were betting that a midterm-election blowout would limit Obama’s ambitions for a key liberal priority that he can accomplish so long as he has almost no regard for our constitutional order . . . maybe it’s time to put down the racing form.

Mary Landrieu’s Gonna Need a Bigger Vote

I mentioned yesterday the Louisiana Democratic senator’s attempt to get approval for the Keystone pipeline through Congress in a last-minute effort to boost her chances against Republican challenger Representative Bill Cassidy. It doesn’t look like that’ll be nearly enough: She’s down 16 points, 56 to 40, in the first poll conducted of the state’s runoff election. It’s an internal survey from a Republican polling firm, and it assumes a somewhat low turnout from black voters — 27 percent of the electorate, when it could be over 30 — but Cassidy’s chances look good.

Nobody Home on ISIS

The House Armed Services Committee held a hearing yesterday to discuss the threat of ISIS. But if a hearing happens and this is what the representatives’ gallery looks like, did it really happen?

The Washington Examiner’s T. Becket Adams was there for the whole thing, even if our congressmen weren’t. (Testifying: Joint Chiefs chairman Martin Dempsey and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel — both with a higher tolerance for hurry-up-and-wait than your average congressman.)

In fairness, as the hearing began, most members were in attendance:

The room quickly cleared out, Adams reports, once each member had had his chance to ask a question. To some extent, I get it: House hearings often are little more than a grandstanding opportunity, and members of Congress have plenty of other ways to learn about the issues besides sitting through a hearing like this.

But hearings are a key way that Congress uses its oversight powers. They can request documents, demand studies, etc., but this is their chance to go face-to-face with the executive branch, and they often don’t show up.

Thom Tillis, the soon-to-be-installed-senator from North Carolina, hammered soon-to-not-be-senator Kay Hagan throughout this year’s campaign for not attending hearings on ISIS and other issues. That can feel like a sort of cheap shot — it’s an election year, congressmen have a lot to do, etc. Tillis won’t attend every crucial hearing either. And yet, one can’t help but wonder, would it be such a bad thing for our government if congressmen were shamed into spending whole hours, every once in a while, actually listening to our secretary of defense and our top general?

ADDENDA: British journalism in one tweet, via Stu Stevens.

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