Republicans’ Agenda Takes Shape

Fresh off a resounding election night victory, Republican leaders on Wednesday began to etch out an ambitious plan to press a GOP agenda centered on taxes, trade, energy, health care and financial regulation through a divided government.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R., Ky.), in his first appearance since voters handed the reins of the chamber to his party in Tuesday’s midterm election, said he and President Barack Obama found a measure of common ground in a phone call Wednesday, seeing overlapping goals to rewrite the complex tax code and ease the passage of international trade agreements.

“The president indicated he’s interested in doing tax reform,” Mr. McConnell said at a news conference. “He’s interested in that issue and we are too.”

Mr. McConnell, widely expected to be elected the next majority leader by his peers, said Republicans were gearing up to consider a string of issues that had been blocked by Senate Democratic leaders over the past two years, with the goal of sending bills to the president’s desk.

“I’m not sure he’s going to sign everything, but we’re going to function,” Mr. McConnell said.

Pipes that would be used on the Keystone XL project sit 
at a yard in Mont Belvieu, Texas, earlier this year. 
Bloomberg News

Energy

As one of their first moves, GOP senators are expected to come out strongly against Mr. Obama’s most consequential energy and environment policies, with Mr. McConnell vowing to hold votes on the Keystone XL pipeline and legislation to pare back the administration’s proposed carbon-emissions rules.

It is an open question how much headway Republicans can make, given the Senate’s 60-vote procedural threshold and the threat of a presidential veto. But centrist Democrats with home-state energy interests could align with Republicans to create bipartisan majorities on bills that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D., Nev.) didn’t want to bring to the floor, including approving the Keystone XL pipeline, curtailing Environmental Protection Agency rules to cut carbon emissions and expediting federal reviews of natural-gas exports. The votes would put senators on the record in a way Mr. Reid often avoided.

If a stand-alone bill arrives on Mr. Obama’s desk approving the pipeline next year and he vetoes it, Republicans say they will bring it up again and attach it to a must-pass measure, like spending legislation. “I believe we will be able to move it either way,” Sen. John Hoeven (R., N.D.) said Wednesday.

Read thee rest of the story and other expected moves by the GOP HERE.

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