• By
President Barack Obama

With the prospect of a Republican takeover of the Senate looming, the White House is quietly mulling potential silver linings of such a dynamic during President Barack Obama‘s final two years in office.

While it’s hard to find anyone in the administration who sees any upside for Mr. Obama if the GOP controls both chambers of Congress–certainly no one is making a public case–one optimistic view of a GOP-controlled Congress is that maybe Mr. Obama would finally be able to cut some deals.

There are trade pacts the president wants, and that Republicans support. But those have been put on ice until after the midterms because they divide Democrats. Republican leaders would also like to tackle tax reform and an immigration overhaul, as would the president. Yet neither made any headway this election year. Tax reform presents Democrats with some tough, divisive decisions, and the immigration issue divided Republicans.

The idea is that after November, Republicans will be less inclined to block Mr. Obama because they’ll be looking toward the presidency in 2016 and will want to round out the GOP record to include some planks that have broader national appeal; at the same time, Mr. Obama could have more space to make deals because Democratic leaders won’t be reining him in with their own congressional politics.

So, the theory goes, it’s possible that with a GOP-controlled House and Senate, the White House could forge a coalition of Republican lawmakers and moderate Democrats to net some tangible outcomes.

House Speaker John Boehner
European Pressphoto Agency

But most White House officials continue to imagine a brutal final two years of the Obama presidency if Republicans control the House and Senate. Indeed, one prevailing view is that 2015 and 2016 will be dominated by repeated presidential vetoes, a barrage of investigations into executive branch practices and a ramped-up effort to block the undoing of Mr. Obama’s health-care law.

In the past, Mr. Obama has misjudged Republicans’ willingness to make deals. Remember when he said his re-election would “break the fever” of lockstep GOP opposition to his agenda and bring Republicans to the negotiating table to get–at minimum–immigration reform? This year, Mr. Obama isn’t making public predictions about the GOP’s post-election posture as he campaigns to retain Democratic control of the Senate.

If past is prologue, the Republicans themselves might prove to be their own worst enemies by failing to muster the votes necessary to send controversial legislation to the president’s desk.

House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) has struggled to muster 218 Republican votes for just about anything. Few Republicans expect a GOP majority in the Senate to be any more cohesive, especially once a handful of those senators start trying to outflank each other for the party’s presidential nomination.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid

For some in the White House, the worst outcome in November would be if Democrats retain control of the Senate by just one or two seats. That dynamic,they say, would embolden moderate Democrats to create headaches for the White House and for Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid.

Mr. Reid has done a hefty share of blocking for the White House, even on issues that have significant support in his own party. Mr. Obama never had to contend with legislation on the Keystone XL pipeline this year because Mr. Reid held it at bay. Ditto for new sanctions against Iran, which had broad bipartisan support.

With a GOP-controlled Senate there would be no stopping such bills from reaching the president’s desk, forcing Mr. Obama to make choices he has so far had the luxury of avoiding.



For the latest Washington news,

For outside analysis,