GOP senators joining Obama in Tennessee

WASHINGTON – When President Barack Obama travels to Tennessee today, Air Force One will be carrying some unusual cargo: Republicans.

Obama began a three-state tour this week by highlighting areas where he intends to keep going it alone despite new GOP majorities in Congress.

But in Tennessee, it seems, the tour turns from confrontation to courtship as the president is joined by a pair of Republicans whose cooperation will be essential in his ability to score legislative victories this year.

The Tennessee senators joining Obama for the Knoxville trip are both newly minted chairmen of Senate committees that will have a major say over the president’s domestic and foreign policy agenda.

Potential legislation to change the Affordable Care Act likely will start in Sen. Lamar Alexander’s Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, while any efforts to curtail the president’s foreign policy in the Middle East, Cuba and elsewhere will receive tough scrutiny from Sen. Bob Corker’s Foreign Relations Committee.

Both men fit the mold of Republicans who, unlike some of their more tea-party-aligned colleagues, have expressed willingness to work with the president and boast their own executive experience. Alexander is a former governor and Education Department secretary who once ran for president, while Corker is a former businessman and mayor of Chattanooga.

But both senators have shown no reluctance to confront the president and say they won’t hesitate to do so in the next two years.

The president’s trip to Tennessee – his second in more than four weeks – is expected to focus on college affordability and job training, areas that also fall under the jurisdiction of Alexander’s committee.

Alexander said education policy should be a focus for bipartisan cooperation in the next two years, in addition to trade, tax reform and infrastructure, the three areas most often cited by the White House and Republican leadership. It will be a topic that takes up much of the committee’s time, though Alexander also said the panel is “going to try to repair the damage that Obamacare has done.”

“There won’t be as much agreement about that,” he said.