The Republicans Warn President Obama of the Fight

In Congress, Barack Obama now has to face a Republican majority. They won’t shrink from using their voting power against the president.

Obama was nice and family friendly to the 112th U.S. Congress on its first day, with a Republican majority in the House of Representatives. Members of Congress posed with their spouses and children, in addition to scenes of the oath-taking ceremony for new Majority Leader John Boehner. His predecessor, Nancy Pelosi, stepped down with dignity to her role as opposition leader.

Later in the week, the niceties will come quickly to an end. The Republicans announced a vote to attempt to repeal Barack Obama’s health care reform bill. It was a campaign promise of the Republicans to free the American people from a health care package vilified as socialist and parasitic. The vote serves mostly as a symbol, given that the U.S. Senate is still dominated by the Democrats. In case of an emergency, if the Senate should fall, the president has promised to exercise his veto.

Primarily it’s about opposing Obama; secondly, it’s about content.

But that’s it; the Republicans do not stop here at the end of voting victories, leaving the president ashamed and angry. Darrell Issa, Representative from California and new chairman of the Committee for Oversight and Reform of Government in the House of Representatives, has scheduled for the first three months six committees of inquiry.

They will investigate abuses of governmental power under Barack Obama, from the WikiLeaks leaks to the percolation of funds in Afghanistan. Issa seems to know what the inquiries will find: “…one of the most corrupt U.S. administrations.” Before he’d called Obama “one of the most corrupt presidents in modern times,” and after protests blamed it on a “slip of the tongue.”

Together with the support of Mitch McConnell, the Republican Minority leader in the Senate, who claimed that “[t]he single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president,” this U.S. Congress promises to one of high political entertainment value. Whether he has earned the vote of the American voters is open for debate.