Barack Obama met the newly emboldened Republican leadership in Congress on Friday, heralding the start of a new political landscape in which the balance of power in the capital has been tilted in favour of an ascendant GOP.

The president pledged to work with his opponents in a bipartisan fashion – the only realistic promise he could give, such was the scale of the Republicans’ triumph in Tuesday’s midterm elections.

“What we’ve seen now for a number of cycles is that the American people just want to see work done here in Washington,” Obama said, according to a pooled report. “They’re frustrated by the gridlock. They’d like to see more cooperation and I think all of us have a responsibility, me in particular, to try to make that happen.”



Republican control of both congressional chambers doesn’t begin until January, but the repercussions of the party’s victories in this week’s midterms is already being felt in Washington, particularly in the White House, where Obama is preparing for two years of isolation. In remarks before the lunch, Obama suggested discussions would include the economy, the world Ebola crisis and military operations against the Islamic State (Isis) jihadist group.

The lunch meeting was also expected to include frank discussions on a host of topics over which Republicans and Democrats have trenchant disagreements, from the Keystone XL pipeline and the Affordable Care Act to immigration reform.

At the start of Friday’s meeting, Obama and his vice-president, Joe Biden, were flanked by 13 congressional leaders from both parties, according to the pool report. They included the outgoing Democratic majority leader, Harry Reid, who is soon to be replaced as the country’s most powerful senator by Republican Mitch McConnell.

The Republican speaker of the House, John Boehner, who is expected to command the largest GOP majority in that chamber for over half a century, was also present with his deputies. “The one thing that I committed to both speaker Boehner and leader McConnell is that I’m not going to judge ideas based on whether they’re Democratic or Republican, I’m going to be judging them based on whether or not they work,” Obama said.

Since the crushing electoral defeats suffered by Obama’s party on Tuesday, the White House has sought hard to portray the president as open to compromise with his Republican opponents.

“It would be a real shame to go straight to gridlock,” White House chief of staff Denis McDonough told NPR in a preview of the meeting, hinting that bourbon might be served in a nod to McConnell’s home state of Kentucky. “I think it should be a productive session.”

Despite that positive spin, a war of words has broken out between Obama, who has pledged to using his executive authority to fix the immigration system, and his Republican opponents, who have said they will fiercely oppose any unilateral action.

The Republican speaker of the House, John Boehner, who will go into the next Congress with a significant majority, and McConnell, the incoming Republican majority leader in the Senate, have said Obama would “poison the well” of bipartisan cooperation by taking action on immigration without congressional support.

The post-midterm election lunch between the president and congressional leaders, which is taking place in the the Old Family Dining Room of the White House, has become a tradition and is typically used by both parties to project a spirit of bipartisan comity.

Republicans and Democrats have an interest in countering Washington’s reputation for partisanship and gridlock, a toxic brand that could hamper candidates in the run-up to the 2016 presidential election.

Obama and McConnell both made overtures towards compromise in the aftermath of Tuesday’s elections, in which Republicans gained eight seats in Senate and expanded their already large majority in the House.

But Boehner, who oversees a more conservative caucus than McConnell and is a longtime adversary of the president, struck a more uncompromising tone on Thursday, promising to schedule more votes to repeal the president’s signature healthcare law and warning Obama would be “inviting big trouble” if he pursued immigration reforms without the legislature.

Obama reiterated on Wednesday that he planned to move forward with executive action that would shield certain undocumented migrants from deportation and grant them work permits before the end of the year.

“When you play with matches, you take the risk of burning yourself,” Boehner said. “He’s going to burn himself if he continues to go down this path.”

Boehner failed repeatedly over the last year to persuade Republicans in the House to even consider a package of immigration reforms that the party’s leadership believe is necessary. He would not comment on whether he could guarantee a vote on immigration reform but said he would talk to his members in coming weeks and signalled his determination to revisit the issue.

“It is time for the Congress of the United States to deal with a difficult issue in our society,” he said. “This immigration issue has become a political football over the last 10 years or more. It’s just time to deal with it.”

The list of topics to be discussed Friday also included items such as simplifying the tax code and dealing with the global terrorist threat on which Republicans could potentially find agreement with the White House.

Obama has already said he will seek congressional authorisation for military operations in Syria and Iraq, which the White House claims are currently legitimised by laws passed in the aftermath of September 11.