SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
The new Congress took their seats this week and immediately picked up a controversy. The Republican-controlled House voted to approve the Keystone XL pipeline. The Senate is considering similar legislation. The White House says President Obama would veto the pipeline. Now, there'd been talk that the new Congress might be less contentious, that there might be more cooperation between the new Republican majority in the Senate and the enlarged Republican majority in the House. But plenty of other rivalries are still strong. Joining us to chat about the old atmosphere in the new Congress is NPR senior editor and correspondent Ron Elving. Ron, thanks for being with us.
RON ELVING, BYLINE: Good to be with you, Scott.
SIMON: So who were these people saying that this new Congress might be different?
ELVING: Leaders of the new Congress by and large - things are different in the new session and from the Republican perspective they are clearly better. The Republicans have promised to show that they can govern. And that means to them that they will pass a bill in the House and at least bring it to a vote in the Senate, if not pass it there as well.
SIMON: The pipeline controversy's been around for years. Battle lines seem to have hardened over the years. How might that have been different in a new Congress that might have been less partisan?
ELVING: When you have the House already voting for it multiple times and you've got 60 cosponsors in the Senate, you're going to feel as though you've got it. So the Keystone sponsors had hoped that they might get the White House to go along or at least to negotiate with them on this. The president had never said definitively where he stood on the project on the merits. So they thought maybe there was a deal in there somewhere.
SIMON: But instead President Obama said he was going to veto it.
ELVING: Exactly, so the White House had taken the view that Congress had no business granting any cross-border pipeline permits. So it becomes a question not only of energy and environment and jobs, but also of jurisdiction and separation of powers.
SIMON: Ron, what kind of message do you read into - what amounts to - a voting rebellion against Speaker Boehner - barely reelected leader of his own party?
ELVING: It is embarrassing for him. More votes were cast against him within his own party than were cast against any speaker since the Civil War. So that does not make him any less the speaker, you understand, but it does remind him that he has a hard core within his own ranks that's openly rebellious and quite capable of causing him problems down the road. So that means he doesn't have as much room to maneuver as he would like in dealing with the Democrats, or with the White House, and he always has to watch his back.
SIMON: What are some of the flash points you see coming up immediately?
ELVING: First, we have the nomination of Loretta Lynch to be the attorney general replacing Eric Holder. She's been confirmed as a U.S. attorney by the Senate with not one dissenting vote. But the Republicans now want to have new confirmation hearings for her because they want to talk about all the other issues that are before the Justice Department, including immigration and Guantanamo, the prison, and just a number of things that have been hanging fire since the Bush administration and throughout the Obama administration.
SIMON: Do the Republicans see a chance to overturn the president's executive action on immigration?
ELVING: They tried to create one. When they funded the entire federal government through September they left out one department, the Department of Homeland Security, which includes custom and immigration service. And the idea there is they would return with specific language that would overturn the president's immigration order that deferred the deportation orders for millions, potentially, of people who are in the country illegally. So they hope to come back and do that before the Department of Homeland Security runs out of money, which would be February 27.
SIMON: And is there an opportunity for them to do that in the spending bill for the Department of Homeland Security?
ELVING: There's disagreement about that in particular. There's an underlying law called an authorization that would need to be changed. Some people think that that can't be done at the same time you change the appropriation and, you know, the whole business gets complicated because customs and immigration is largely funded by fees that it collects. So it's not clear they really depend on Congress to appropriate this money in the usual way. And then, of course, if you threaten to shut down the Department of Homeland Security, people are going to wonder about airport security and lots of other things that we're especially anxious about right now after this past week in Paris.
SIMON: NPR's Ron Elving, thanks very much.
ELVING: Thank you, Scott.