New low in relations between Obama, congressional GOP

WASHINGTON — Relations between President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans have hit a new low.

There has been little direct communication between Obama and the GOP leadership on Capitol Hill since Republicans took full control of Congress in January. Obama has threatened to veto more than a dozen Republican-backed bills. And House Speaker John Boehner infuriated the White House by inviting Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress without consulting the administration first.

But the dispute over Obama’s high-stakes nuclear negotiations with Iran has put the relationship perhaps beyond repair.

The president and his advisers are seething over Republican efforts to undermine the sensitive discussions with Iran, most recently by sending an “open letter” to the country’s leaders warning that any nuclear deal could expire the day Obama walks out of the Oval Office. “I cannot recall another instance in which senators wrote directly to advise another country — much less a longtime foreign adversary — that the president does not have the constitutional authority to reach a meaningful understanding with them,” Vice President Joe Biden, who spent nearly four decades in the Senate, said in an unusually harsh statement.

For their part, Republican lawmakers call their outreach to a hostile nation a reasonable response to an administration they say has spurned Congress and ignored its prerogatives at every turn. It’s the starkest sign yet that Republicans see an adversary, not a potential partner, in Obama’s White House — even on foreign policy issues where partisan differences have traditionally been somewhat muted.

The dynamic of a lame-duck president clashing with Congress on his way out of the door is not a new one. President George W. Bush struggled over Iraq troop levels and pushed unsuccessfully to pass an immigration bill. President Bill Clinton faced impeachment proceedings.

Republicans and White House officials agree they must find some way to get along well enough in coming months to perform the basic functions of government, such as raising the borrowing limit and extending the highway trust fund. Aside from potentially trade, there is little hope of bigger deals on taxes or anything else.

Yet even after a government shutdown and years of intense disputes over spending, health care and immigration, White House officials see Republicans’ aggressive efforts to insert themselves in the Iran negotiations as the opening of a new front in the fight between the parties.