Will midterm loss send Obama in regulatory direction?

The polls this morning show the Democrats in danger of losing the House and possibly the Senate in the upcoming midterm elections.  How will Barack Obama govern?  Will he emulate Bill Clinton and move to the middle to find selected portions of the GOP agenda he can claim for himself?  The Daily Caller’s Jon Ward thinks Obama will go the other direction:

A Republican takeover of the House will make Capitol Hill a much less relevant place for President Obama, and is likely to turn the administration’s focus toward working through federal agencies and regulation — which it can do unilaterally — rather than trying to pass new legislation.

Opponents of the Obama administration’s agenda said they are shifting their attention away from the legislative arena and toward the regulatory field of battle.

“Right now we see the next two years, the battles moving from Capitol Hill probably to the regulatory agencies,” said Randel K. Johnson, senior vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

In one sense, Obama and congressional Democrats don’t need to pass any more major pieces of legislation. Having passed a massive overhaul of the health care system and financial regulation, they will have plenty to do – and plenty they will be able to do – simply in writing regulations and rules to implement those laws.

The Environmental Protection Agency is also planning to regulate carbon emissions, in the absence of a bill written by Congress to do so. That figures to be a third major avenue of action for the Obama administration no matter who controls Congress.

If so, Obama had better figure a way to do that with zero funding.  If the GOP controls the House, especially by a significant margin, they can block regulatory efforts simply by defunding the agencies that attempt it.  In order to operate, the House has to allocate the funds; that’s what is mean by “the power of the purse.”

The EPA and HHS are two targets already on the scope for Republicans in January 2011.  Voters overwhelmingly want ObamaCare repealed, but that won’t happen until a Republican replaces Obama in 2013.  The next-best option for the GOP is to defund the myriad agencies and panels authorized by ObamaCare in order to stop it in its tracks, while the new Congress attempts other reforms in their place.  The EPA and its endangerment finding on carbon dioxide is another popular target for de-appropriation.

If Obama attempts to move beyond current efforts on both and impose his agenda through bureaucratic fiat, he will pay a steep political price, for a number of reasons.  First, if Democrats lose control of Congress in these midterms, voters will have sent a loud and clear message about Obama’s agenda.  Pursuing it beyond such a rebuke will cement the impression in voters’ minds that Obama and his team aren’t listening and don’t care to start.  Attempts to bypass Congress and impose regulatory burdens will also add to the image of a czar-driven, top-down, autocratic White House.

Finally, by stubbornly pursuing this agenda, Obama will marginalize himself as a radical rather than the post-partisan moderate he’s posed at being since January 2007.  He will guarantee himself and his party another election cycle like 2010, only in 2012 Democrats have a lot more seats to lose in the Senate as well as the Presidency itself.  Democrats may have to mount a primary challenge in the presidential election just to save themselves — and may look at Evan Bayh as their savior.  Such a strategy would discredit the New Left wing of the Democratic Party for a generation.

If the GOP gets the sweeping midterm victory the polls suggest, keep an eye on what Obama does with his team at the White House for an indication of which direction he takes.  If he cleans house and brings in some old hands from the Democratic Leadership Council, then expect an attempt at a Clintonian triangulation strategy.  If he keeps his political team, Democrats should expect disaster — and Republicans should expect the best opportunity to scale back the federal regulatory regime in decades.

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