According to reporting by Katrina Trinko of National Review, House Majority Leader Eric Cantor told one member during a closed-door conference yesterday that they had to allow a vote on the Senate version of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) or they would cause a “civil war” within the Republican caucus. It is quite possible that Cantor was correct. South Jersey Congressman Jon Runyan (formerly a red cape for Michael Strahan when he played offensive tackle for the Philadelphia Eagles), led a bloc of 19 Republicans who insisted on a vote on the Senate version. The Republican majority is currently 232-200, which means that 19 defections would put the Democrats in the majority on this issue at 219-213. The way the rules of the House work, whatever a majority wants to do, they can do. If a bipartisan majority wants something that the House leadership opposes, they can create a discharge petition. The way a discharge works is hard to explain but what it boils down to is that if a majority of the total membership of the House signs the petition then they can force a vote on a bill.
What Rep. Runyan demonstrated was that he had the votes to prevail on a discharge petition. Signing a discharge petition when you are serving in the majority is deeply disloyal and is almost never done. But Runyan didn’t have to sign one because his ordinary petition conveyed the message adequately.
Cantor was chosen to send this message to the pro-rape caucus because he was the leader of the pro-rape cause. Cantor still wound up voting against the VAWA reauthorization, but he recognized that his side was defeated and he didn’t want his defeat to become a huge story.
If you are wondering how Boehner could lose his speakership, this is basically how it would happen. It would probably be a coup from the middle rather than a coup from the right. In this case, Boehner caved in because he wanted to cave in. But he could easily face a different issue where he decides to stand with the wingnuts. And then some bloc of about 20 moderate Republicans (mostly from the Mid-Atlantic and Midwest) could cut a deal with the Democrats to elect a new Speaker.
If you think it can’t happen, take a look at comments from Mid-Atlantic Republicans Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania and Pete King of Long Island, New York. Patience is definitely wearing thin since the vast majority of the Republican caucus voted against relief for victims of Superstorm Sandy.
The thing is, if this cookie crumbles, it won’t crumble just for Boehner. If the caucus splits apart in the way I’ve described, it will pretty much be the end of the GOP as a national party.
Update [2013-2-28 22:56:39 by BooMan]: I see from some of the initial responses to this piece that I have left too much unsaid and therefore too much left to the imagination. So, let me expand on this a little to make clear what different scenarios would look like.
Scenario One: Right-wing Republicans grow frustrated with Speaker Boehner repeatedly violating the Hastert Rule and passing bills that the majority of Republicans oppose. They want to replace Boehner with someone more conservative who won’t violate the Hastert Rule. The problem is that the Speaker is elected by a vote of the entire House, and they must receive an absolute majority. This ensures that a Democrat cannot win unless some Republicans vote for a Democrat, but it also means that moderate Republicans can threaten to do just that. A split in the conference would result in Pelosi winning a plurality and that would force a second vote. It would be on that second vote, or possibly a subsequent vote, that the Speaker would actually be chosen, and it is unlikely that the result would be a more conservative speaker.
Scenario Two: Moderate Republicans get fed up with gridlock and inaction, and decide to cut a deal with the Democrats. All the Democrats will agree to vote for a moderate alternative to Boehner in return for certain concessions. The concessions would probably take the form of ratios on committees, but could conceivably involve changes in the House rules or power-sharing arrangements. It’s hard to say, since this kind of haggling ordinarily occurs only in parliamentary systems.
Scenario Three: Pro-Defense Republicans get fed up with the Sequester and make a deal similar in many respects with Scenario Two. The problem here is that it would require a simultaneous split in the Democratic Party, and this is unlikely to occur, especially in the numbers required for success.
It’s really only Scenario Two that has any chance of happening, and it won’t happen unless and until things deteriorate significantly from where things stand today. However, the template for such a split was seen in the Superstorm Sandy vote and the VAWA reauthorization vote, both of which caused almost unprecedented strain within the GOP caucus with strong regional differences.
