When Republicans took control of both houses of Congress in the 2014 elections, I (like others around here) thought they should use their greater if still limited power to advance a broad range of conservative policy ideas—passing them in the House and seeing most of them filibustered in the Senate but in a way that would help Republicans coalesce around some principles and policies and compel Democrats to actually go on the record opposing the most attractive parts of the conservative agenda.

Having made that case here and elsewhere, I also tried it out on many congressional Republicans, and the most common objection I heard, mostly from leadership members and staff, was that such an approach would unreasonably “box in” the eventual Republican presidential nominee. I’ve never quite understood why that would have been a bad thing early in this presidential cycle: Congressional Republicans boxed in the 2012 presidential candidates on Medicare, for instance, in a way that advanced the case for essential entitlement reforms, made their ultimate enactment much more likely, and made the party as a whole far more responsible. Testing out some potential agenda items before the presidential campaign really got going should have given congressional Republicans some influence over the party’s presidential candidates without really constraining those candidates’ options much.

Ultimately, whether for this or other reasons, congressional Republicans have chosen not to pass bills and force Senate votes on a lot of conservative ideas but instead to try to “prove they can govern” to the extent congressional Democrats and the president allow them to, which naturally has not been a very great extent.

Read the article “The Next Speaker’s Agenda” on nationalreview.com.