Republicans to put healthcare repeal to a vote

Darrell Issa, a Republican, right, seen yesterday with the US speaker of the House, John Boehner, in Washington, DC, has called for an investigation into the alleged corruption in the Obama administraShow more

The Republican-led US House of Representatives is expected today to begin its attempt to undo the landmark healthcare reform legislation passed by the last Congress, in which both houses were controlled by the Democrats.

A floor vote on the measure is planned for January 12.

The move will be largely symbolic. Even if the House votes to repeal the legislation, it is unlikely to pass the Senate, where the Democrats hold a 53-to-47-seat majority.

But analysts say the efforts to repeal the healthcare reform and the Republicans' immediate push to investigate what they say is corruption in the Obama administration could set the tone for the next two years in Washington, affecting everything from foreign policy to extending unemployment benefits.

"The odds are partisan polarisation will continue full speed," Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University in New Jersey, said in an e-mail. "Obama will have to make trade-offs if he wants to expand his legislative record."

Larry Sabato, the director of the Centre for Politics at the University of Virginia, agreed, adding that he thought "for the most part, gridlock will prevail".

"The Democratic Senate is unlikely to pass much of anything - at least of a controversial nature - that the Republican House passes. And if somehow it happens, then President Obama has his veto power, and there are not nearly enough Republican votes in the House to override a presidential veto. That eliminates healthcare repeal and lots of other things," he said.

What is most likely to happen with healthcare legislation is what Fred Upton, a Republican representative from Michigan, told Fox News Sunday. "We're going to go after this bill piece by piece," he said.

In the House of Representatives this is done by tinkering with the money allocated in appropriations bills or adding restrictions to such expenditures.

"The big controversy over healthcare reform will actually happen when the GOP tries to undo the law through spending cuts," Mark Rozell, a professor of public policy at George Mason University in Virginia, said.

Mr Sabato added: "What Obama has to worry about is that the House can squeeze healthcare reform, financial-services reform and other laws passed during his first two years. If the Republicans are clever about it, they can achieve at least a tweaking of Obama's legislation, since the president is unlikely to veto many of the big appropriations bills that reach his desk.

"There are always items in these bills that presidents do not like, but the pain of having to go through the process again after a veto, and the threat of losing provisions in the bills that a president may like, usually induce a president to sign under protest."

Since last autumn's congressional campaigns, the effort to repeal healthcare reforms has been rivalled by a call from Darrell Issa, a Republican representative from California, to look into corruption in the Obama administration.

In October, Mr Issa accused Mr Obama of "playing faster and looser with the rules" than the former Republican president George W Bush. He claimed that under Mr Obama, the Pentagon was recruiting private contractors to work for the government with promises of better benefits and higher salaries, a practice that is illegal.

Now, as chairman of the House committee on oversight and government reform, Mr Issa has the subpoena power to conduct as many investigations as he wants of the Obama administration. According to documents obtained by Politico, Mr Issa plans to launch investigations into everything from WikiLeaks to Fannie Mae, the backer of many US mortgages, to corruption in Afghanistan in his first few months as the oversight committee chairman.

"Congressman Issa has made it clear that he wants to spend a considerable amount of time trying to expose corruption and incompetence. While this can clearly backfire on the GOP politically, the administration needs to handle this with care and make sure that the hearings don't become a mechanism for undercutting public support for the programmes that have passed," Mr Zelizer said.

Divided government, one Congress trying to undo the work of a previous one and politically motivated investigations of a presidential administration are nothing new in US politics. Only 10 times since 1945 have both branches of Congress and the presidency been controlled by the same party.

"In a way, we have simply returned to the norm in modern American government. Neither party has complete power," Mr Sabato said. "Divided government usually means that there is a great deal of posturing, but not necessarily a large legislative output at the end of the session of Congress."

Mr Rozell was a little bit more optimistic about what lies ahead.

"There will be contentious debates over planned GOP efforts to roll back federal spending to 2008 levels - something the Obama administration will strongly resist. Both sides have a strong incentive to avoid brinkmanship-style politics, so there is likely to be a lot of overheated sounding rhetoric and then eventually some kind of workable compromise on a number of government spending disputes," he said.

And all this is also nothing new.

"Obama will have to learn to adapt and endure just what every other recent president since and including Ronald Reagan has had to endure for at least part of their terms. That's a cost of losing the election," Mr Sabato said.