How a GOP Senate Majority Could Help

Dick Morris writes an interesting column about how Republicans could best use a Senate majority, should they win one in the upcoming elections. One area of  focus is on how the GOP could pass a budget that, while slowing down or stopping parts of Obama's agenda, would be unlikely to draw a veto. Morris lists the following possibilities:

• Use the Immigration and Customs Enforcement appropriation to overturn Obama's executive order, expected right after Election Day, to end deportations;
• Use the Health and Human Services line to defund the Independent Payment Advisory Board, dubbed the "death panel" by Sarah Palin;
• Repeal the medical device tax;
• Require release of IRS emails by appending a requirement to the budget for that wayward agency;
• Stop the Federal Election Commission from regulating Internet blogs;
• Block the Federal Communications Commission from its attempts at Internet regulation. [link dropped]

Some of these, like a repeal of the innovation-destroying medical device tax, look like unequivocal wins. Others, like blocking the FEC from regulating blogs, look more like temporary solutions to problems that will come roaring back without further action in the future. (And I frankly don't see how defunding the "death panels" is anything other than a dubious, symbolic win: Any scheme of government payment for anything will ultimately call for limits to spending, so that threat will simply arise in another form unless ObamaCare is repealed.)

Morris and others, like Thomas Sowell, have commented before on other ways a GOP Senate majority could thwart the President, such as by killing bad treaties or preventing particularly bad judicial appointments. As I elaborated then, I regard a GOP win as a holding action at best. That said, it could be a crucial one, and I support voting for such a majority.

-- CAV