Republican: Expect 'two years of good old-fashioned gridlock' if GOP wins House

Voters should expect "good old-fashioned gridlock" in Washington if Republicans win control of one or both chambers of Congress, one GOP lawmaker said.

Rep. Rob Bishop (R-Utah), a vice chairman of the House Republican Policy Committee, told students at Utah State University on Friday that a GOP-held House might not be able to accomplish too much as long as President Obama's in the White House.

"The most you can expect is two years of good old-fashioned gridlock," he said at an event on the campus, according to a report by the university's paper, the Utah Statesman.

Indeed, the extent to which Republicans will be able to follow through on their election-year vows to voters is a subject for debate. The GOP is seen as most likely to threaten to take back the House, while winning the net 10 seats it needs in the Senate is much more of an uphill climb.

Even if the GOP does win back both chambers, it will still be forced to deal with Obama as long as he is president and retains the authority to veto any legislation a Republican Congress might send to his desk.

Republican leaders have made clear that compromising with Obama and Democrats isn't necessarily on their agenda if they take back the House or Senate. But they have also expressed wariness of the kind of government shutdown that Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) forced during his budget negotiations with President Clinton in the 1990s. Clinton was able to use the shutdown as an effective political cudgel against the GOP going into the 1996 elections.