White House is all smiles

WASHINGTON

After a grueling year that cost Democrats the Senate majority, the mood at the White House is remarkably chipper. The hyper-competitive president put post-election points on the board with an executive order on immigration, a historic overhaul of Cuba policy, and a spending bill that, while flawed, managed to fund administration priorities and provide a year of certainty.

Meanwhile, the White House has some happy metrics to cite — and is happy to cite them. The economy has improved dramatically, with an unemployment rate of 5.8 percent and 57 consecutive months of private-sector job growth. The good news: The public mood is starting to recognize these improvements. The bad news: This optimism has not translated into greater approval for President Obama or his economic policy.

The numbers, if not the polls, are similarly good when it comes to health care. After a disastrous rollout of the Affordable Care Act for the 2014 season, sign-ups for 2015 have been relatively glitch-free. Overall, an estimated 10 million people have gained coverage. At the same time, the steep trajectory of health care costs has flattened dramatically.

Lasting impact

On judges, the most lasting impact of any president’s tenure, Obama has won confirmation of 307 federal judges, including 53 on the courts of appeal. I worried about Senate Democrats’ deployment of the “nuclear option” to end the filibuster for almost all nominations, but the move has spurred confirmation of 134 judges in the 113th Congress, the most since 1979-80.

As The New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin observed, “When Obama took office, Republican appointees controlled 10 of the 13 circuit courts of appeals; Democratic appointees now constitute a majority in nine circuits.” That alone reflects a quiet, and lasting, revolution.

White House officials are under no illusion about the difficulties of dealing with a bolstered House Republican majority, a Senate under GOP control, and cantankerous congressional Democrats. Under these circumstances, much of the administration’s strategy involves doing whatever possible to ensure facts on the ground, to cement changes already secured or secure changes as yet unachieved.

This thread runs through administration discussions of three unrelated issues: dealing with a pending Supreme Court case that could effectively demolish the federal insurance exchanges; implementing the immigration order; and making good on the promise to close Guantanamo.

The Supreme Court case concerns the availability of federal subsidies in the 37 states that opted against creating insurance exchanges, leaving the federal government to do the job. The Affordable Care Act law spells out subsidies for insurance in “an exchange established by the state,” a provision the administration interpreted — correctly, in my view — to provide subsidies in federal exchanges as well.

For the administration, which can’t do much to influence how the justices rule, one approach is piling up enrollees, in part hoping this will make justices less inclined to disrupt people’s settled expectations, but even more in anticipation of how states respond if subsidies are invalidated. The more people receiving this benefit, the more inclined the states, even Republican-leaning states, will be to fix the problem.

The same theory holds true for immigration. The more people who enroll in the president’s expanded authorization program when sign-ups begin early next year, the harder it will be for opponents — or a future president — to dismantle it.

High cost

On Guantanamo, the administration’s calculus is the converse: to painstakingly whittle the number of prisoners down to the bare minimum of those who cannot safely be sent to another country — and then to argue that that the expense of keeping Guantanamo open is too high to justify the current legislative ban on bringing those detainees to the United States.

This may not be a winning argument: the ban on transferring prisoners here has been based on scare talk about increased terrorism threats, not sober cost-benefit analysis. Still, it may be the administration’s best hope in crossing that promise off the presidential to-do list — as officials gamely insist is possible by the end of his term.

Such will be the slow slog of the administration’s remaining two years.

Washington Post Writers Group