President Barack Obama visited my home state of Michigan last week to do something I haven’t seen him do in a while: sign into law a significant bill that wasn’t related to a self-inflicted crisis, like the budget impasse of 2013, and was passed by a Democratic-controlled Senate and a Republican-controlled House.
He was at Michigan State University to sign the farm bill. The new law, according to several news reports, affects everything from what you see in the produce aisle at your local grocery store to how much the government spends on certain entitlements, such as food stamps.
Being a Michigander until I hit the bricks in Athens in 2011, it was nice to see my home state being used as a backdrop for a rare show of bipartisanship in an era of stalled policies and fierce gridlock. Even though no Republican accepted Obama’s invitation to come to Michigan for the signing, it obviously had Republican backing or it wouldn’t have passed in Ohioan John Boehner’s House.
Prediction: You’ll see much more of the president and Congress working together to pass laws after a wasted 2013 that hurt both Democrats and Republicans. It’s in their best political interest to do so.
And if anyone is keeping count on my predictions, I said in January that Obama would get the no-strings-attached debt ceiling increase he demanded of Congress. Well, Speaker Boehner, a Republican representing Ohio’s 8th congressional district near Cincinnati, got that passed in the House on Tuesday.
People just want to see things get done. Congressional leaders and the president know it, and that’s why Obama’s move to make more executive actions — like his administration’s recent announcement that the government received $750 million in commitments from U.S. companies to begin wiring more classrooms with high-speed Internet — might help his image after last year’s White House hiccups.
But Obama will need to get more bills to his desk that he can sign in order to get his once near-sterling public approval rating back and leave the legacy of “change” in Washington that was the platform of his 2008 campaign.
Similarly, if Boehner keeps working with the president when he can instead of consistently balking just to prove to the party base that he’s team NObama, then he might be able to up the GOP’s approval ratings.
He can start by putting immigration reform back on the table. The speaker recently said immigration likely wouldn’t happen in 2014 because Congress can’t trust Obama to implement policy because of “Obamacare.” Many critics saw that as a thinly-veiled excuse for not bringing up a contentious issue in an election year.
Middle school social studies textbooks say we have Congress and a president for a reason. If a fifth grader is expected to know what a working federal government looks like, I hope American voters do, and that they very carefully watch the Democratic and Republican parties between now and 2016.
Prediction: The party that proves it is willing to work with the other under Obama will have a president in the White House after the 2016 elections.
Joshua Jamerson is a junior studying journalism and local editor at The Post. What do you think of Congress and Obama working together this year? Talk politics with him at jj360410@ohiou.edu.
