Immediately following the mid-term elections, President Obama began to make demands on the lame duck congress to put a piece of immigration reform legislation before him or he would act on his own. The president has had six years to push congress to move immigration reform forward, two of which his party had full control of congress and could have pushed just about anything through they wished, just as they did with ObamaCare, and yet he did nothing. Instead the president has chosen the lame duck session to demand action from congress OR ELSE!
This is just another fine example of the kind of failed leadership that is routinely displayed by President Obama who continues to place the blame of his go nowhere agenda on the inactions of congress. But blaming congress carries no water as a countless number of his predecessors managed to get a great deal of work accomplished while working with a mixed bag of congressional make-ups.
Past Presidents and their Congress
Take Richard Nixon for example! Despite his many flaws, Nixon was able to work with his democratic congress. Had their working relationship been better, Nixon would have been more successful with is domestic policy agenda but congress did little to object to his foreign policy which was quite successful. Nixon’s demise was not one of contention between him and his democrat controlled congress, his demise was of his own making.
It is hard to fairly assess any aspect of the Ford presidency as it came under such a peculiar circumstance and all would be pure speculation.
Jimmy Carter had a contentious relationship with congress but with the democratic faction, not the republicans. Carter, trying to do what he believed to be the right thing for the country, almost always came in conflict with the views of the very liberal congress of the time. Carter didn’t “play ball” with his congress who essentially made a lame duck president out of their party leader, but at least Carter tried.
Ronald Reagan enjoyed a very good relationship with congress throughout his 2 terms as president. While republicans did hold the Senate for Reagan’s first 6 years in office they never held the House. But despite never having full control of congress, Reagan’s conservative policies and leadership style seem to bode well with the democrats of his time and made for a very productive, successful and fulfilling 8 years for both the president and the congress.
Bush Senior was a single term president which typically indicates that the president did not share a good relationship with his own party and to some extent this was true. During his term in office republicans did not carry the Senate or the House although this was really not the issue. Bush 41 ran on a platform that promised a similar administration that of his predecessor Ronald Reagan, the idea being that he would continue with the successes of the previous 8 years and not make any radical changes. It sounded like a good plan but something had to be done with the mounting deficit created during the Reagan years.
Having already made the infamous promise of “Read My Lips, No New Taxes”, Bush 41 lost his own parties support when in the end he had to concede to democratic pressure which blocked his desire to impose tax cuts as a solution in lieu of the typical tax hikes favored by democrats. It was not due to a bad working relationship with congress that caused Bush 41 his problems it was the breaking of a single promise, that voting republican’s held him to, that cost him a second term in office.
Bill Clinton, much like President Obama, had the luxury of a democratic controlled congress his first two years in office however, failed to capitalize on it. After democrats lost both the House and Senate in the mid-terms, things became quite contentious between the president and the republican held congress. But Clinton remained popular and after being re-elected did a bit of a reset and as his relationship with congress improved significantly as did his ability to move parts of his agenda forward. Even through all the missteps and scandals that surrounded much of Clinton’s second term, a great deal was accomplished or at least that is the opinion of many. No matter, on the subject of the president’s ability to get legislation moved through congress, Clinton seemed to manage well in an environment where most would have predicted him to have failed.
Overall, George W Bush shared a reasonable relationship with congress. During his first two years in office the congress was split with the Senate belonging to the democrats and the House held by republicans. Wanting to set a tone of bi-partisanship, Bush 43 avoided conflict with congress as much as he could and during those first years he never handed out a single veto, in fact, it was not until about 2 years into the full republican controlled congress that Bush exercised his veto power for the very first time.
Bush 43 enjoyed the comfort of a republican controlled congress during the middle 4 years of his two terms in office however, his relationship soured during his final two years when democrats took over the House. Looking ahead to 2007 democrats chose to politicized the Iraq war, a war they almost unanimously supported in the onset, an action (it was never declared a war, big mistake by Bush) that received full congressional approval and a war that in the end democrats turned into a political opportunity to demonize the Bush presidency in an effort to score political points heading into the next election cycle. It was a hypocritical but effective move by democrats which turned public sentiment away from the original intent of the Iraq war and the fact the democrats were for it before they were against it. None the less, Bush 43 worked well with his congress through all but the very end of his presidency.
That makes a half dozen of the most recent presidents all of which seemed to manage well with congress in most cases.
So how does President Obama stack up to the leadership of his predecessors? Let’s take a look.
President Obama and his Congress
Then Senator Barack Obama not only campaign on a platform of Hope and Change for the nation, he also vowed that he would restore the people’s faith in their government and remove its dysfunction. In a 2007 campaign speech Obama said that he would "turn the page on the ugly partisanship in Washington and pass a bipartisan agenda in Congress.” Obama also wrote, in his Blueprint for Change, that his administration would increase transparency so that ordinary Americans can understand their government and trust that their money is well spent and also that his administration would end the practice of writing legislation behind closed doors. Whether or not he had good intention when he spoke/wrote these words we will never know but his campaign vow of transparency and a united congress evaporated about a minute after sitting down in his new office for the first time.
While they may not have fully agreed with the particular path the newly seated president chose, republican lawmakers wishing to work with Obama and the democratic controlled congress, in large, gave their support to the president’s early plans to move the economy forward. And with his massive spending package signed, sealed and delivered with the consent of congress, Obama cleared his desk and set his sights on healthcare reform!
The relationship between the president and republican lawmakers went downhill rapidly from this point forward. What was later realized as little more than political showmanship, the bi-partisan effort to craft a healthcare reform bill was soon taken behind closed doors with a ‘Democrats Only’ sign hanging from them. The fight between the parties grew contentious as republicans liked less and less what they were learning about the partisan healthcare bill being drafted. And the contentiousness spilled over to other agenda items as the president became highly defensive of anyone who challenged any portion of his progressive agenda.
The dam broke when, through the less than ethical actions of Harry Reid, the Patient Protection Affordable Care Act bill, better known as ObamaCare, was moved forward by both the House and the Senate with ZERO republican support and exactly enough democratic votes to pass the bill to the president to be signed into law. ObamaCare was not the only point of contention between democrats and republicans early in Obama’s term as president but it was the issue that cost democrats their majority in the house in 2010.
President Obama having failed to take advantage of his party’s monopoly on congress during his first two years in office and the loss of democratic control of the House left him with a stack of unfinished business. The big ticket agenda items, of the president’s, were all far too far to the left to foster any support from house republicans at least not without some compromise, especially after demonized them almost non-stop from the start of his presidency.
Fast forward to 2014, as the president continued to swim in the pool of his own arrogance, the thought never crossed his mind that democrats could lose control of the Senate. Now having done so, the president finds himself ill prepared to deal with the very republicans he has for the past four years blamed for all the inactions of congress.
Having lost the cover of Harry Reid and not wanting to compromise on an immigration reform deal with republicans, President Obama has decided that he will use his executive pen to circumvent congress and take whatever unilateral actions are available to him and glue together some type of makeshift immigration reform using a number of executive orders. This action, if carried out, will set a very negative tone for the remaining two years left in his presidency, adding to the dysfunction that has existed between the legislative and executive branches during his term and will likely wash away any hope of democrats remaining in control of the White House come 2016.
