Pelosi wins leverage as GOP, Boehner scramble for votes

The pitched battle over an Interior Department spending bill has underscored the troubles facing Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) — and the unique leverage enjoyed by House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) — in the summer’s coming spending fights.

Pelosi and her party have little power to dictate what comes to the floor or to prevent the majority Republicans from moving their agenda. Yet Boehner’s struggles to rally 218 Republicans behind crucial legislation — most notably the big spending bills required to keep the government open — have put Pelosi and the Democrats in a unique position to influence the debate.

{mosads}The dynamic is hardly new. Boehner, since gaining the Speaker’s gavel in 2011, has repeatedly leaned on Democratic votes to prevent government shutdowns, raise the debt ceiling and provide aid to victims of national disasters — votes that have angered a right flank that wants him to fight harder for conservative ideals.

But with a number of big fiscal battles looming this year, including a highway bill, the reauthorization of the Export-Import Bank, another debt ceiling hike and a host of government spending bills, House Democrats say they’re fully expecting the entrenched Tea Party subversion to continue, forcing Boehner across the aisle and lending them greater sway.

“The pattern’s getting more evident,” said Rep. Raúl Grijalva (D-Ariz.). “The Tea Party, God bless ’em, they’re cutting their nose to spite their face.”

Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) agreed, predicting that the only way the Republicans can move significant legislation is to move left in search of Democratic votes. 

“They’re going to need a lot of help because of the 30 or 40 extremist ideologues — true believers —if they don’t get them then they’re not going to be able to pass bills,” Pascrell said. 

Rep. Sam Farr (D-Calif.), a member of the Appropriations Committee, piled on.

“Every time we’ve gotten to that point where we really need to pass something, then he [Boehner] finally comes to Pelosi and asks for help and she gets the votes,” Farr said. “It’s an indication of things to come.” 

House Republicans have already passed six of their appropriations bills, with promises of approving the remaining six before the end of the fiscal year. But they hit a wall this week on the Interior bill when conservative Republicans balked at Democratic amendments barring the Confederate flag in national cemeteries. 

The timing was terrible for GOP leaders, who were forced to defend a proposal reaffirming the flag’s relevance on the same day that South Carolina became the last state to pull it down. And Pelosi, a master tactician who’s had a greater rate of success maintaining control over her troops than does Boehner, made sure to maximize the attention by trying to force a vote on a resolution removing depictions of the flag from much of the Capitol.  

Trapped in a racially charged debate that had devoured Capitol Hill and embarrassed the national party, GOP leaders pulled the Interior bill from the floor and kicked Pelosi’s resolution to a committee, effectively killing it.

The surprising turn of events has both accentuated Pelosi’s clout in the lower chamber and stymied, at least temporarily, the Republicans’ appropriations plans for the month. 

Appropriations Committee Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), who was aiming to pass all 12 spending bills before August, said Friday that his timeline now appears out of reach.

“It’s going to be next to impossible,” Rogers said.

In the ongoing government spending debate, much will hinge on the fate of the sequester, the automatic across-the-board cuts that are opposed by President Obama and the Democrats, who warn of harmful economic effects, but backed by conservatives, who want to cut deficits and shrink the federal government.

“That’s the No. 1 issue,” said Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-Md.), a member of the Appropriations panel.

Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), head of the Democratic National Committee, said the Republicans are “wasting their time” passing partisan spending bills at the sequester levels knowing Obama will never sign them.

“Until we have a deal to set aside the sequester, which we know that we’re going to have to do in order to actually pass a budget, then everything we’re doing is for show,” said Wasserman Schultz, who is another appropriator. “There’s no question that in order to pass an omnibus bill they will have to do it in a bipartisan way.”

Rep. Mario Díaz-Balart (R-Fla.), yet another appropriator, warned that Republicans aren’t going to accept tax hikes as part of any deal to eliminate the sequester. But he also acknowledged that Obama’s veto pen, combined with the filibuster power of Senate Democrats, mean House Republicans won’t get everything they want in the spending fight.

“We’re going to have to have some Democrats on board. That’s just the reality that we face,” he said. “It’s not the reality that I wish we had — as a Republican, I would love to do things on our own. But we require 60 votes in the Senate.”

For Boehner, the decision to compromise with Democrats is full of political risk. The Ohio Republican is already under fire from conservatives who accuse him of caving too often to Obama’s policy demands: 25 Republicans voted in January to strip his Speaker’s gavel. Their rebellious streak has since forced GOP leaders to pull a number of their priorities from the floor, even as they control the largest Republican majority since the Great Depression.

House Democrats, meanwhile, are giving no indication they intend to make life any easier for the Speaker. They say this week’s Interior debate, combined with a recent trade fight in which Pelosi and liberal Democrats very nearly derailed a top priority of both the White House and GOP leaders, has only strengthened their hand ahead of the fiscal fights still to come.

“We have now a more unified caucus than the last time we went through this, and a much more demanding caucus than we had the last time,” Grijalva said. “I think Pelosi going into these discussions is a lot more emboldened than she was.”