We’ve become accustomed to the Republicans voting in lockstep and I think many of us just cannot emotionally compute a future where the old paradigms are broken down. It’s true that the Republicans, as a party, are more ideologically united than the Democrats. All things being even, we should expect to see the GOP voting as more of a block. Republicans also seem to line-up behind their leaders in an almost instinctual manner, while the Democrats have approximately the opposite impulses. I think we will still see many party-line votes. But we’ll also see individual Republicans crossing the aisle to put their cosponsorship on bills. And when they do, we can expect to see Democrats slobber all over them, as in this case:
McCain, back to the daily Senate routine after his failed White House bid, joined Sens. Feingold, Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) and Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) on Wednesday to unveil a landmark bill they will try to add as an amendment to the economic stimulus legislation…
…[McCain] heaped praise on McCaskill, the junior Democratic senator from Missouri, for her work fighting wasteful spending on the Armed Services Committee.
She returned the favor.
“I’m so respectful of John McCain,” she said. “I am tickled pink to be here on stage with him.”
Yes, I know that your first response is to throw up a little in your mouth. None of us want to hear that kind of garbage from Senator McCaskill. But that’s how the Senate works when it isn’t paralyzed by partisanship.
The reason that the Republicans were able to show such startling unanimity during the Bush years was because they were bound to win in the end. The worst that could happen is that they would fail to pass what they wanted, but nothing could pass (and get signed into law by the president) without their say so. Now things are reversed. No Republican can get their name on a piece of legislation unless they are willing to cosponsor it, and that means they have to vote for it, and that means there is no unanimity.
There are a few Republicans that will vote against every spending bill just on principle. But most Republicans will want to have some influence over policy and something to take home to the voters in the states and districts that they can call their own. They might be tempted to vote against Democratic bills, but if the bill is going to pass anyway, they will be tempted to get something out of it rather than consistently coming up empty. There were two votes in the House today. One amended the Presidential Records Act bill and the other was the Presidential Library Donation Reform Act. One hundred and fourteen Republicans voted for the first and 141 voted for the second. In other words, over 50% of the GOP caucus voted for the first two ‘free’ votes of this Congress.
Get used to it. It sucks to be in the minority.
