What the Republicans did this week on the debt ceiling was a disgrace, and they were rightly called to the mat for it by Carl Hulse in the New York Times.
The House vote to raise the debt limit and stifle the budget wars was remarkable not only for its lack of brinkmanship, but for the vote count itself. The 28 members of the Republican majority who voted for the bill — a meager 12 percent — was the lowest percentage for a majority on passage since the House began publishing electronic data on votes in 1991. It has to rank among the lowest ever for a body defined by strict majority rule.
Not to be outdone, the Senate on Wednesday flirted with a market crisis as Republicans were initially reluctant to provide a handful of votes to overcome a procedural hurdle before clearing the way for the Senate to send President Obama legislation that takes the debt limit off the table until March 2015.
The results in both the Senate and House illustrate the countervailing political forces at work on Capitol Hill and how the current partisan environment makes governing so difficult.
For a bill to pass the House with such scant support from the party in control, most members of the Republican majority had to quietly want it to pass to avoid the real-world consequences — an economy-rattling default — while being able to vote against it to dodge a backlash from conservative activists threatening repercussions. It was the purest incarnation yet of what has become known as the Vote No, Hope Yes Caucus.
The Senate vote was similar. Most Republicans badly wanted the debt limit to be raised — particularly since the House had already left town and Wall Street was unlikely to look kindly on a potential default. They just did not want their fingerprints on it.
The implications for governing are obvious. If many lawmakers are unwilling or refuse to vote for legislation that they understand to be necessary, and even beneficial, out of fear of retribution from an empowered and outspoken wing of their party, reaching agreement on major policy like immigration becomes difficult if not impossible.
As a reward for voting against something they secretly wanted to pass, Republican members will be rewarded with better scorecards from conservative organizations and may avoid attracting primary challengers. The ideology of the right is completely sub-mental.
The politicians who actually showed enough courage to vote their convictions are the ones who are being abused, who will get bad voting grades, and who could be ousted in a primary. Yet, it’s their own fault for belonging to a party that decided to politicize the debt they racked up during the Bush presidency. The conditions that led to the Great Recession developed during the Bush administration, and for most of that time the Republicans were in control of Congress. To treat the resulting debt as the Democrats’ problem was not only disingenuous, but it was a shirking of responsibility. Now, after years of peddling panic about the debt to their Tea Party base, the Republicans are literally scared to act responsibly and protect the nation’s credit rating and economy. They are terrified of acting in a sane manner. So, the result is that they just allowed a bill to pass that only 28 of their members officially supported. What good is having a majority if a bill can pass that you oppose nearly ten-to-one?
Theoretically, there’s no reason that Boehner can’t use the same kind of majority to pass immigration reform, but there is actually much more sincere and widespread opposition to immigration reform than there was for the debt ceiling.
If people really understood what the Republicans did this week, they’d be so disgusted that we might actually get the 12-14% generic ballot advantage that we’ll need to win back the House.
