Thorn Run's Jason Rosenstock offers an optimistic vision for potential cooperation between Congress and the White House in this morning's edition of Politico Morning Money. The leading finance tip-sheet for beltway-watchers, which frequently features Mr. Rosenstock's insights, borrowed some prognostication (published first in the TRP Financial Services Report) into what Washington may be able to accomplish in the 114th Congress. While Politico's Ben White sounds a note of pessimism towards bipartisanship in 2015, Mr. Rosenstock sees compromise between Congress and the Administration as being in both parties' best interest. "[T]he combination of the 2016 map, as equally unfavorable to the GOP as 2014’s was to the Dems, and the small majority that soon to be Leader McConnell has to work with means that if anything is going to move it will ultimately need to be bipartisan.”
Politico Morning Money: Forget the Beltway Kumbaya
If you think the next Congress can make big deals on tax reform or immigration, you can probably forget it. Even trade deals could be very difficult. Fact is, the best hope from an economic standpoint is a Congress that doesn’t threaten shutdowns and debt defaults. And even that is no guarantee…
Thorn Run Partners’ Jason Rosenstock [offers a more hopeful view] in his a.m. note: “While we don’t like to be contrarian, it does appear that this time things could be different. This will be the first time that the Republicans are in complete control of the Congress, at least in name, during the Obama administration. Further, the combination of the 2016 map, as equally unfavorable to the GOP as 2014’s was to the Dems, and the small majority that soon to be Leader McConnell has to work with means that if anything is going to move it will ultimately need to be bipartisan.
“While some on the right have argued that Republican should dare Obama to veto everything, that strategy would likely backfire because of the need for Democratic votes to override any vetoes, and, as Senator-elect Cory Gardner has noted, there are powerful political reasons for the GOP to show it can govern. The veto strategy doesn’t fit into that box. Our prediction is that both sides will start off in 2015 by looking to show where they can find common ground — with trade, infrastructure policy and regulatory relief under the guise of pragmatic Dodd-Frank reforms as three areas that will garner attention.”