As the Republicans search for a new and more electable identity they have a fundamental problem. Ever since they took their first major right turn in 1964, they have made a series of bargains in order to strengthen their ranks: the Christian right, the Southern strategy, which validated racism as party policy, the Sagebrush Rebellion, which represented big ranching and farming interests as well as the mining industry, the Club for Growth, a highly conservative organization with a lot of money to pour into primaries to defeat more centrist incumbents. However successful momentarily, this series of deals ultimately cost the Republicans broad national appeal and flexibility.
The emergence beginning in 2010 of the Tea Party as a force in Congress—part grass roots, part developed and exploited from Washington—pushed the Republican Party still further to the right. Conservatives took control of a large number of states and had a significant impact on national policy, and for the first time, there was a sizeable number of House members who despised government and had run on the explicit promise never to compromise.
But politics is predicated on the idea that its practitioners will work out their differences. This was a revolutionary change—no president of either party had been confronted with such an obdurate opposition. “Compromise” had never before been a term of obloquy. Regularly frustrated by these absolutists and those too frightened of the movement to challenge them, Boehner has less control over his flock than any Republican Speaker in memory. It’s not that he’s lacking the political skills; the Tea Party members and the school of fish that follows them won’t vote with Boehner out of party loyalty because they simply don’t owe him anything. They got to Congress with strong financial support from powerful interests and they have their own constituencies.
More than half the governors, including all but one of the nation’s Republican statehouses, have
refused to set up state exchanges through which consumers are supposed to be able to shop for competing insurance plans. FreedomWorks, the most powerful national Tea Party organization, has waged a national crusade to “Block Obamacare” by rejecting the exchanges. The joke is that if a state refuses to set up an exchange the federal government will come in and do it. (Six Republican governors have accepted the Medicaid expansion in the health care law because the offer was too good to turn down.) Another tactic the Republicans have used to fight laws on the books is to block the appointments of the president’s nominees to administer them.
One substantive matter on which leaders of the two parties agree is immigration reform—not just because it’s the right and urgent thing to do but because it’s in their interest. The Republicans panicked about the huge electoral advantage the president got in 2012 from Hispanic voters, whom he carried 71 percent to 29 percent, and who provided the margin of victory in some key states. In their debates in the primaries last year most of the Republican candidates played to the strong anti-immigrant streak that dwells within the party’s rank and file. And at election time—as in the case of other groups the Republicans had baldly tried to
keep from the polls in order to depress the Democratic vote—these efforts backfired, and Hispanics turned out in unprecedented numbers.
But while immigration reform may be seen as the next great civil rights advance the actual hammering out of a bipartisan bill is likely to prove extremely difficult. Such bills have foundered before on fierce regional and partisan differences. And as in the case of other minorities, more than one issue is at stake. As long as the Republicans push for “smaller government”—a euphemism for cutting domestic programs such as education at all levels as well as food stamps, unemployment benefits and Medicaid and of course the tax rates—their appeal to groups they’ve been losing will remain limited. The Republicans are in a deep hole and it’s not foregone that even if an immigration law is passed Hispanics will turn to them in droves.
The Republican leaders are trying to avert the serial cataclysms they have done so much to bring on: the across-the-board cut in federal programs (the so-called sequester) that will be imposed on March 1 barring a compromise; a possible shutdown of the federal government at the end of March; and the return of the debt limit in mid-May. This government-by-crisis has threatened to define the Republicans in Washington as the party of green eyeshaded accountants with nary a thought for the well-being of the middle class, not to mention the poor. (The 2012 primaries were littered with jokes about food stamps.) That it was considered progress that House leaders persuaded the most radical members that shutting down the government was a more reasonable approach than risking another government default—and a second lowering of the US’s credit rating—was a sign of the extent to which the idea of governing has lost its moorings.
The focus on the somewhat hoked-up drama of the serial crises about funding the government has tended to obscure the more fundamental point: the Republicans are succeeding in pushing the president toward precisely the wrong economic policy for a nation still coming out of a severe recession. The Washington debate is dominated by the argument—based more on ideology than on history and betraying ignorance of the fate of European nations that have blundered into ruinous austerity programs—that the most urgent thing to be done is to cut spending. That proposition has become such a truism that neither the president nor a significant number of elected Democrats are willing to publicly challenge it.
Americans who long for a group of moderate Republicans with whom a Democratic president might deal—Bill Clinton enjoyed such help if he didn’t always use it wisely (and thus failed to pass a health care bill)—are in for a disappointment. That Republican Party is gone and the base of the party isn’t going to permit its return, at least not for the foreseeable future. If anything, the party lines are hardening. The Republican leaders are desperately trying to make sure that the kinds of nutcases that have received nominations for Senate seats in the last two elections, at the expense of more reasonable candidates, only to go on to lose what were likely Republican seats, will no longer jeopardize their party’s fortunes. Karl Rove, though his effort to boost the Republicans’ successes through milking donors of over $100 million failed miserably, is setting up an organization to try to prevent likely losers from getting nominated over more trustworthy conservatives. The trouble is it’s not always clear who is going to say something cripplingly stupid, and the whole idea, quietly supported by some party leaders, isn’t sitting well with the grass roots who will not take dictation from “the establishment” on whom they should nominate.
Finally, underlying the rigidity that has characterized the Congress in the past few years is a structural formulation that does not bend with breezes. As Nate Silver of
The New York Times has
pointed out, there are fewer “swing” districts in the House than ever before. “This means,” he writes, “that most members of the House now come from hyperpartisan districts, where they face essentially no threat of losing their seat to the other party,” though Republicans are more at risk of primary challenges. The great shift toward the right on the Republican side occurred in 2010, when participation, as usual with off-year elections, was limited to the most zealous. The result was a dramatic increase in Republican control of entire state governments—from which have flowed the laws, backed by the Koch brothers and other conservative donors, to break up public employee unions and tighten restrictions on abortions to the point of effectively strangling Roe v. Wade, as well as the efforts to fix federal elections through restricting voting rights and perhaps even tinkering with the electoral college and, of course, the highly consequential power of reapportionment.
The country is at a hard place: Is it going to be governable? The great challenge of returning to a workable government is to create parties that can sort out our differences without threat from extremes that weaken the democratic system. People in despair over politics in Washington might be well advised to start paying more attention to who gets elected to their state capitals.
http://www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2013/feb/11/are-republicans-beyond-saving/
