Gerald Seib imagines that “full GOP control of Congress might well shift Republicans’ focus from stopping him to making things happen.” Chait doesn’t buy it:
Washington already has divided control. Now, to be sure, Republicans control just one chamber of Congress at the moment. Seib argues that the calculus might change if they win control of the other chamber as well.
For this to be true, you would have to imagine that there are deals that could be struck between the Republican House and President Obama that the Democratic Senate would block but that a Republican Senate would agree to. What reason is there to think that any such deal exists? Has Harry Reid actually blocked an agreement between John Boehner and Obama?
Maybe, argues Brian Beutler:
A better way to think about the difference between a Democratic and GOP Senate is to look at where along the political spectrum the center of negotiations will lie. Right now, because Democrats control the Senate, it lies further to the left than it would under GOP control, which makes all tentative agreements much harder to sell to the Republican House.
Move things to the right a bit, and the question becomes whether Obama would be willing to cut more conservative deals that aren’t currently in the offing. I don’t know what the answer is, but it isn’t crazy to think a lame-duck president might sign off on legislation that would, under the current arrangement, be tantamount to surrender. And when you look at it that way, it’s reasonable to imagine that Obama-Boehner-McConnell might cut more deals than Obama-Boehner-Reid. They’d just be worse deals.
The Dish 