At the Washington Post, Jonathan Capehart does an admirable job of explaining why John Boehner failed as Speaker, why Kevin McCarthy would have fared no better, and why Paul Ryan would have to be a full-blown moron to agree to take the job. But he leaves out the most important part.
It’s easy to say that a lot of the Republicans who were elected to Congress since Obama took office are unwilling to be led. Yes, they came in with a mandate to burn-the-mutha-down, not a mandate to work out unsatisfying compromises with the president and his party.
What’s making Congress ungovernable, though, isn’t that there is some innate superiority to being a squishy compromiser over a dedicated reformer. The problem is that these reformers want to use tactics that are so problematic that they can’t find leaders who will continue to employ them after they’ve proven ineffective for the cause and destructive to the country’s credit rating.
Back when our country seriously flirted with defaulting on our debt, Speaker Boehner made it clear to anyone who would listen that it was an insane idea that he would never allow to happen. But he humored his new radicalized majority-making members for too long and the credit downgrade came anyway.
After the last government shutdown caused a huge decline in popularity for the Republican Party, both Boehner and now-U.S. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pledged that there would be no more government shutdowns. They have repeated that pledge over and over again since that time.
As I’ve explained several times, the Republicans who refuse to stop demanding government shutdowns and debt ceiling brinksmanship are not best understood as wayward lawmakers who won’t accept any leadership. They are best understood in the parliamentary sense as being a party in their own right. In our system, they are still called Republicans, but in any other system they would be a minor party that has allied itself with another larger party to form a majority. They would be given some kind of token power like control over a minor ministry, which in our system of divided government would translate to either low-level congressional leadership positions or the chairmanship of low-priority committees. In a parliamentary system, their power would flow from the fact that they could cause the Prime Minister to fall if they withdrew their support. In our Congress, they can likewise bring a Speaker down provided that the Democrats go along with it.
As long as the so-called Freedom Caucus of Republicans continues to demand a continuance of government shutdowns and debt ceiling brinksmanship, they do not belong in the majority and should not have any say in who the next Speaker will be. To be more precise, their preference for Speaker would not win out, and the result would be that they would have to serve in the minority in the House.
That means that they would not get to chair committees or subcommittees and they would have no representation in the leadership.
The Speaker would be chosen by a coalition of lawmakers who express a willingness to actually vote for the funding of our government and who are willing to make a commitment to pay our bills on time so we don’t default on our debts and cause a global meltdown of the global market that depends on the creditworthiness of U.S. debt instruments.
So, Jonathan Capehart has ultimately missed the solution to this problem by failing to diagnose the nature of the problem. The Freedom Caucus has to be sidelined.
This means a shattering of the modern Republican Party, but it’s no one’s fault but the “reformers” who don’t understand the way power works or that they’re quickly forcing responsible people to call for a coalition government as the only way to avoid a global financial catastrophe.
Still eagerly awaiting the arrival of a Republican Willie Brown….
still disagreeing that the comparison makes sense. Willie only had to convince I think two republicans to support him, electing a speaker will need dozens of Dems
Yeah, it’s not a perfect analogy; but all Republican-Brown needs to do is cut a deal like the one Booman describes with Nancy Pelosi and persuade 40 Republicans to elect him speaker.
The 40 Republicans get a disproportionate share of committee chairmanships and leadership positions, but they agree 1) to keep the government functioning, and 2) to share power with Democrats.
Not easy (or likely), but within the realm of possibility…if there’s anyone in the Republican caucus with Brown’s political skills.
it may still go down that way but that’s a lot of people who have to be convinced to do something that sure looks dangerous politically.
I’d say a certain number of Republicans need to be convinced that they’re on thin ice either way. Maybe it would be dangerous politically to form a coalition with the Democrats, but is it not also dangerous for the Republicans if the House spends the next year in permanent crisis mode?
In other words, you need a sufficient number of Republicans who has as much to fear from the general electorate as from the barbarian horde (AKA Republican primary voters).
I’m not entirely sure where you find those representatives, but according to one source that I saw, the Republicans have 208 solid seats out of a total of 247. Could those be the 39 votes? Maybe that’s too simplistic.
Or, I guess another way to look at it would be to look at the Republicans who have already been voting with the Democrats to keep the House functioning to the minimal extent that it is. As BooMan has pointed out, this is already how the House is functioning in practice, so why not make it official?
It’s not like Brat and the rest of the Teabaggers who took Boehner’s and McCarthy’s scalps appeared out of nowhere. Boehner was happy to feed the beast (“Hell no you can’t!”, “I am not going to compromise”, etc.). He was happy to let the Koch Brothers feed the insanity that exists in America.
He got the Speakership by letting the crazies into the tent. He can’t suddenly say, “We’ll sure I’m here because of you, but you’re not going to have any say in what I do now because you’re crazy.” He knew they were crazy when he campaigned for them and donated to them.
OpenSecrets:
I think the GOP leadership knows that if they excommunicate the Teabaggers, then they’ll lose the majority in the House and won’t get it back. They’re not willing to do that.
What will they do? They’ll try to find some way to muddle through. Probably have another few dozen votes to defund ObamaCare. :-/
Cheers,
Scott.
Quite so. If the marginally less insane wing of the Republican party were to excommunicate the totally batshit insane wing, they would be reduced to a rump that could no longer win elections. The winner-take-all presidency in our system basically makes a three (or higher number) party structure non-viable. And there’s too much of a gulf between the marginally less insane wing of the Republicans and the actually existing Democrats for any substantial number of Lincoln Chafee-esque defections. So the Republicans are stuck with each other, as far as I can tell.
Sure he can box them out. He can say members can have a choice of getting committee jobs or joining the Freedom Caucus and he can make all the rules he wants. He is speaker he can do what he wants so long as he has the votes to get/keep the job.
It would also be a hugely popular move with the majority of Americans. How ever since it is presidential election season, and none of the eleventy billion GOP candidates are talking sense along these lines, it would be a hugely courageous think for the speaker to do.
Courageous for the new speaker but, how would this effect the current GOP primary? The end of Trump or the space Jeb could take advantage of?
Hard to say. Normally in a normally, healthy operating party, the speaker wouldn’t make such a move unless he/she had the go ahead from party leaders and the primary front runner.
But since this would be hugely popular I think with most Americans I could see a candidate (not one of the current crop) jumping on the bandwagon. But it is getting late to even get on the ballot let alone put together an organization so that too seems unlikely.
What I find hard to understand how these uber rich donors could fund candidates and campaigns and tactics that ignore basic rules of the house, how laws actually become law and arithmetic. I guess it can’t take too many smarts to make billions making pipe, pumps and valves for the oil industry (Koch bros)
Exactly. I worked in financial services for close to 30 years and while I did not cross paths with any billionaires, all of the businessmen I did cross paths with thought highly of their own smarts. Lots of ego and a discernible lack of interest in the details. Good governance requires attention to and appreciation of detail.
Through my work I’ve worked with many very wealthy business people. Among the most successful, a great many (perhaps even most) were highly evolved and caring and thoughtful people. Few I would say were very politically sophisticated though.
Take it down a notch to the next level of successful people and most are in my experience complete selfish assholes. They became successful by stepping on people, winning everything at all costs. But that will only get you so far and is inappropriate for leading organizations of an size. In short “what got them there will now get them fired”. Some of my work in fact was to try to “fix them”.
They too seem to not know much about politics but will freely quote Fox News thinking everyone must be only watching it too.
I am so sick of our insane fixation on a two party system. Where everyone gets shoe-horned into one of two and only two parties, whether they fit together or not. Where everyone ends up having to choose the lesser of too many evils.
Why can’t there be a Freedom Caucus or a Libertarian party or a Conservative party? Separate from the Republican party, which used to have a few good ideas even if I disagreed with most of them?
Why can’t there be a Liberal party or a Social Democrat party or a Feminist party or a real Green party, apart from the so-called Democratic party which is all too often anything but?
Thanks for your questions. Basically, the answer is: the Constitution.
Not that this was the intent of the drafters, but it turns out that the Constitution provides powerful incentives for the creation of majority parties (or parties attempting to be majority parties) and disincentives for ideologically coherent minor parties.
Not their intent, but it was foreseeable enough that the risk was articulated. They didn’t want to junk the Constitution and start over and the option to ban political parties violated the concept of free association. So, they decided not to decide and hoped that two powerful political parties wouldn’t develop.
Probably drunk off their asses when they decided that. They did that a lot.
I highly recommend reading Playing Politics: The Nightmare Continues by political science professor Michael Laver. Laver demonstrates how profoundly the rules of a political system affect how politics is practiced within it, and how much impact even minor changes in the rules can have. It’s one of the most eye-opening books I have ever read.
Yes, this seems to be one way that significant multi-party divisions manifest themselves in the US Congress and not for the first time.
There are at least two and possibly three analogous groups in the Democratic caucus if they ever considered an issue non-negotiable or were presented with a non-negotiable issue. Potential non-negotiable issues within the Democratic caucus likely are (or should be) capitulation on voting rights, repeal of Obamacare without movement forward toward single-payer, capitulation on abortion rights, reversal of equal protection to the LGBT community, repeal of Social Security or Medicare, or failure to provide care for veterans. If the cross-the-aisle bunch of Vichy Democrats ever started convincing the caucus leaders of moving in those directions, would the various caucuses within the Democratic caucus force a leadership crisis? That is the point at which two parties begin to emerge. And that is also internally when it starts getting very personal among the members, often leading to surprising changes in position just on the basis of personality conflicts of conflicting ambitions and career paths.
You are seeing some of that non-ideological noise in what is happening with the Republicans right now.
The remaining question for the GOP is: Are they ready for Goehmert?
I love your writing, but this has got to be one of the most difficult sentences I’ve ever encountered:
Too many negatives to sort out!
I didn’t like that sentence either.
get rid of the ‘Hastert’ rule and be reasonable and a lot of stuff could get done.
Here’s the thing about the Hastert Rule in this context.
The rule can be explained as a commitment not to hold votes on bills where a majority of the Republican caucus is opposed.
That way, the Speaker can’t pass anything if his party doesn’t support it.
This is kind of reasonable in a sense, although the Speaker is different than the Majority Leader, or is supposed to be anyway.
But, sometimes things need to get done, particularly when the president is from the opposite party. And, sometimes, politicians know something needs to pass but they don’t want to vote for it for both good and bad reasons. Maybe they want to express their displeasure with part of the legislation. Maybe they don’t want the headache of activists bashing them for compromising.
Anyway, it’s desirable sometimes for a Speaker to let something pass even though his party is overall opposed to it. And the Hastert Rule prevents this from happening, which is a problem,
But the appropriations process is different because it is controlled by the majority party. It’s their work product. They need to produce a work product that they can support. They can’t keep shutting the Dems out of the process and then asking for their votes to pass it.
So, the Hastert Rule isn’t really the issue here when we’re talking about government shutdowns. If they can’t pass their own appropriations bills, then the Dems need to write the appropriations bills. After all, they are eventually going to fund the government one way or the other.