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    What Just Happened to the House GOP?

    As you have all seen by now, Republican House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy has dramatically withdrawn from the race for Speaker of the House. As every news story has made clear, McCarthy was undone by the opposition of a group of hard-liners (probably about forty of them). What the news stories don't make clear is that those hard-liners could not have come close to beating McCarthy at the caucus election where McCarthy resigned. The GOP caucus would have elected McCarthy comfortably if he had let them vote. But the forty malcontents who shivved McCarthy refused to accept the result of their own party's election. They were going to vote against McCarthy on the House floor with the Democrats. No news story explains this particularly clearly, but it's that, rather than the details of McCarthy or Boehner's individual political fates, that really suggests a major change.

    The usual political logic is you try to get someone you want as your own party's candidate, but then you stick with your party's choice in the election with the other party. If you don't like Pelosi or Boehner (or Gingrich or Hastert or Wright or O'Neill or ...) you vote against them in your own party's caucus vote. But if most of your party still votes for Pelosi/Gingerich/Boehner/O'Neill, you go out and vote for that person, too. The forty-or-so malcontents in the self-described "House Freedom Caucus" are done playing by those rules. Unless they are given what they want (indeed, apparently almost everything they want), they are going to shiv the elected leader of their own party.

    Boehner didn't lose support among Republicans in the sense that a solid majority of House Republicans did not back him. He resigned from the Speakership because a minority of House Republicans refused to accept what the majority of their own party wanted.

    What this means is that the Tea Party, more or less (the most conservative segment of the House Republicans) has begun to operate like a parliamentary third party. Specifically, they are beginning to behave like the tiny minority parties (often fifth- or eighth- or ninth-parties) who gain disproportionate power in multiparty parliaments like Italy's or Israel's. The major parties in those parliaments, while much larger than the tiny parties, can seldom form a majority coalition alone. Neither Likud nor Labor wins more than 50% of the seats in Parliament. So they have to cobble together coalitions by bringing in various small parties, each of which gets to make its demands. And therefore those small parties get significantly more influence than the number of actual voters they attract would suggest. The tail gets to wag the dog a little bit every time a government forms.

    Now, the Democrats and Republicans have both always been somewhat unlikely and unruly coalitions, with pretty strange bedfellows in each party. But mostly, the Democrats and Republicans have mostly operated like single parties, keeping the fractious infighting on the inside. But the Tea Party/Freedom Caucus/Hostage Takers are no longer playing by those rules. They are willing to sabotage their own party's candidate for Speaker of the House, the same way various small Italian or Israeli parties are willing to sabotage their natural allies' chance of building a governing coalition until enough favors have been extracted.

    Note here that the group of Congressmen doing this is unrepresentative in two ways. They represent a tiny minority of voters, easily less than 10%. And they are on one of the far ends of the political spectrum. It's not the forty most moderate Republicans demanding to call the shots or they'll burn the whole pool hall down. It's the forty most hyper-conservative Republicans, the ones furthest away from the median voter.

    In earlier periods, before the Democrats and Republicans were as cleanly sorted along ideological lines as they are today, a small minority in Congress, suggesting a closely-divided public, usually led to a more moderate, compromise-oriented Congress. There were enough conservative Democrats and enough liberal Republicans that neither party  could make big changes without a big majority. A party with a slim majority in the House could not ram through big initiatives that the other party hated, because the moderates in your own party would vote with the other side. That seemed roughly to reflect the will of the people.

    Now the most-conservative Democrat is more liberal than the most-liberal Republican in Congress, and vice-versa. So there's little danger, especially for Republicans, of House members defecting to the other party. Now the danger is that the hardest-line members of your own party (people who, maddeningly, have no closer political ally than you in the world) will betray you and disrupt the functioning of government in order to get what they want. So the current system gives outsized influence to tiny political groups, who are far from the ideological mainstream and have done various things of which the country deeply disapproves. It is not pretty and it is not fair, but it seems to be what our system is becoming. Of course, it didn't use to be this way.

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    Shorter Dr Cleveland:  We are fucked. 


    And apparently, so are Kevin McCarthy and a female legislator.


    No, actually, they are technically  "fuckers."

    And as the party of family values, they are now in the club.


    I'm going to go with the good and great Charlie Pierce in avoiding those rumors.

    And even if they were true, I wouldn't care. My problem is what the Republicans do in their public lives.


    Exactly.


    Tmc, I cannot second that because my sordid history in these arenas prevents me from expressing views which even tangentially touch upon the moral high ground.

    (Shit, I love it when these self-righteous sons of bitches get caught in the act)

    Oops, sorry.


    LOL.


    Thanks. Only mentioned it as an operative in the process which scuttled McCarthy inside his own party. 

    In any case, I'm going with Charlie Pierce's view that the overriding dynamic in McCarthy's declination is that the Republican caucus is insane.

    Therefore, respectfully, can't go with your thesis of parliamentary maneuvering, as such analysis cannot be credible if the subjects are not acting rationally.

    Seriously, is something new going on here?  And if so, isn't it that a faction is trying to gain control of it's own party by destroying the party from within---which seems to me the thing which has taken our system of government into new territory.

     

     

     


    Oh, they're insane. But it's still, functionally, a third-party maneuver. They're threatening to run a third candidate for Speaker, against the Republican and Democratic candidates.

    Pierce elsewhere compares this behavior to the (decidedly sane) Charles Parnell's maneuvering in the British Parliament: using a disciplined minority voting bloc to prevent the formation of a government until his demands were met.


    Right, I see the functionality.


    While one could see the tea party as third party insurgents I don't think that the best frame to explain the situation in the house or the complexity of the dilemma the republicans face. People talk about the extreme right republicans but there isn't that much difference ideologically between the most extreme right republican and the least conservative republican. The difference is between the pragmatic republican and the non pragmatic republican.

    The 50 or so non pragmatic republican congress persons could easily be marginalized. There's plenty of bipartisan legislation that could pass with both republican and democratic majorities. While democrats are more unified as a center left party they aren't that liberal and democrats want to see government work and most easily accept compromise. Pragmatic republicans probably wouldn't be hurt in the general election for supporting such bipartisan legislation. They'd likely benefit. The problem is they would be primaried and possibly lose. Therefore as soon as sufficient democrats supported the bipartisan laws the pragmatic republicans would pander to the non pragmatics and vote against legislation they actually supported leaving the speaker being blamed for passing laws with a majority of democrats and a minority of republicans.

    Those 200 pragmatic republicans need to make deals with democrats and vote as a block to protect each other but with accusations of rino-ism, the stirred up base, and fears of primaries I don't see that happening anytime soon.
     


    I think there are new dynamics which is the reason I like the introduction of this topic by Doc. And enjoyed your take.

    I think the practice, or threat of, primaries from the right against pragmatic Republicans may have been taken to a new level in our politics. The practice is an arrow in the quiver of tactics being used by the tea party to take control of the party---which I think is their basic strategy. I just don't know what to call it, or how transformative it is in the broad swath of our history.

    One fundamental question here is whether there is any precedent for this particular overt threat against the election of a party's proposed speaker by joining with the opposite party to defeat him. I just don't know the history.  

     


    Just a couple points as I see it. 

    Charles Koch is getting old and he would like to prove to himself that he is better then his abusive dad.  He wants to achieve something his dad couldn't do politically. The window of opportunity to do that is closing.  A new generation is taking over,  

    The far right fringe is desperate in their quest to grab power. Desperate people are not pragmatic. They are reactionary.

    The House has had some stormy past but it was always filtered through journalism. This time in history it is getting played out in front of instant media. Even people who don't pay much attention to politics knows what is happening. People can see it in real time and make up their own minds about the ugly behavior. They run the risk of losing their support.

    Whigs did this over slavery and Presidential nomination which led to their self destruction.  I do think the GOP is a little stronger then that. GOP will certainly take a hit over this if some screw ball ends up Speaker.  


    Speaking of the Kochs, great article today in Daily Beast (or Salon?) on how their original Libertarian goals were self-sabotaged because they overreacted on anti-Obama stuff, helped create the tea party, eventually spawning Trump who as a budding "fascist" is their worst Libertarian nightmare.

    Really interesting point on the Whigs.


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