“We Have Become A Midterm Party”: RNC Chair; ‘We’re Cooked As A Party’ With 2016 Loss
Republican National Committee Chair Reince Priebus had hoped for a very different kind of 2016 election cycle. As we discussed a while back, the RNC chief intended to curtail the number of debates, front-load the nominating process, and effectively stack the deck in favor of established, electable candidates. Before the process even began, GOP lawmakers were also supposed to take lessons from the 2012 losses, pass immigration reform, and take steps to broaden the base.
The party, the argument went, would position itself for victory in 2016 by avoiding an embarrassing circus and steering clear of a madcap process that tarnished the party and its candidates alike.
The execution of Priebus’ plan has worked out quite differently, and when he sat down yesterday with the conservative Washington Examiner, he looked ahead to next fall.
…”I think that we have become, unfortunately, a midterm party that doesn’t lose and a presidential party that’s had a really hard time winning,” Priebus said. “We’re seeing more and more that if you don’t hold the White House, it’s very difficult to govern in this country – especially in Washington D.C.”
“So I think that – I do think that we’re cooked as a party for quite a while as a party if we don’t win in 2016. So I do think that it’s going to be hard to dig out of something like that,” Priebus told the Examiner.
It’s a fair assessment. Looking back over the last six presidential elections, Democrats have won the popular vote five times. If Dems expand that to a six-out-of-seven advantage, it will be that much more difficult for Republicans to characterize themselves as a national governing party.
What’s less clear is the practical implication of defeat. When Priebus imagines the Republican Party as “cooked … for quite a while,” I’m not entirely sure what he means in applied terms. Does the RNC chair think another defeat would be an impetus for dramatic intra-party change? Does he envision a splintering of the party in which right-wing members break off?
In the same interview, Priebus added that he doesn’t “anticipate” another rough cycle next year. “I think … history is on our side,” he told the Examiner.
As a factual matter, he’s entirely correct. Looking back over the post-WWII era, parties have nearly always struggled to hold onto the White House for three straight elections. Democrats do, in fact, go into 2016 facing historical headwinds.
But it’s nevertheless easy to imagine Dems prevailing anyway, leaving Republicans “cooked.”
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, October 16, 2015
“Obstruction And Destruction”: Republicans Will Be Destroyed If The Far Right Keeps Clinging To Its Unachievable Agenda
While Washington waits to see who the next speaker of the House of Representatives will be, the far right seems to be doing everything in its power to destroy the Republican Party.
When current Speaker John Boehner announced at the end of September that he would retire, he said that he did so because the controversy surrounding his leadership wasn’t good for his party. Other Republican leaders called on House Republicans to work on “healing and unifying” in the wake of the leadership upset. Unfortunately, the opposite is happening, and the badly needed party unity looks like it may be an elusive goal.
Instead of working with party stalwarts to find common ground, the far right continues to campaign against candidates for speaker they consider to be too “establishment.” The New York Times reported that their latest target is Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., Boehner’s current draft pick to run for the House’s top spot. Ryan hasn’t even decided if he will enter the race yet, but is already being criticized for being “too liberal.” Ryan’s positions on immigration and his past work to find consensus on fiscal issues seem to be the cause for the ire against him.
The criticism is misplaced and calls into question the intentions of those who are lobbing it. Ryan has long been one of the most conservative members of the House. Additionally, as the vice presidential nominee in 2012, he was standard bearer for his party. To categorize Ryan as “too liberal” for his party’s conservative base is a bridge too far.
As Rep Tom Cole, R-Okla., told the Times, “Anyone who attacks Paul Ryan as being insufficiently conservative is either woefully misinformed or maliciously destructive. Paul Ryan has played a major role in advancing the conservative cause and creating the Republican House majority. His critics are not true conservatives. They are radical populists who neither understand nor accept the institutions, procedures and traditions that are the basis of constitutional governance.”
It would appear that the goals of the far right are not governance, but rather obstruction and disruption. Without fail, it has consistently pursued policy goals for which there is no likelihood of consensus and has viewed any type of compromise as a defeat and a betrayal of conservative causes. This stance is not realistic in a democratic government, nor is it responsible. The far right forgets that the foundation of democracy is based on compromise and that the principal job of a member of Congress is to participate in activities that keep the government operational. Threatening government shutdowns and turning the House into a chaotic mess because the most conservative members don’t get their way is an abdication of this basic duty.
That’s bad for the American people who elected them, but even worse for the Republican majority that’s trying to govern them. The far right’s obstructionist activities have made their party look divided and ineffective. It’s possible that their interference with the speaker’s race could leave the party in an even more vulnerable position without an effective leader. If the party can’t “heal and unify,” as its current leaders have suggested it should, how can it move forward?
Politico reported that Rep. Justin Amash, R-Mich., said the far-right movement isn’t about pushing conservative ideals, but rather about changing the way the House works. If that’s truly the case, Ryan’s idealism shouldn’t matter. In reality, it seems the far right is more interested in pursuing its unachievable policy agenda at any cost. And while that may seem like good politics right now, it may ultimately be the party’s undoing.
By: Cary Gibson, Thomas Jefferson Street Blog, U. S. News and World Report, October 16, 2015
“Our Current Distemper”: “Asymmetric Polarization” Emanating From The Radicalization Of The Republican Party
As we head towards what will probably be another fiscal crisis in December, perhaps managed by a caretaker Speaker of the House, coinciding with the frenzy of a presidential nominating contest in which nearly all Republicans are running against their own party’s leadership, it’s a good time to step back and remind ourselves how we got to this juncture.
In pursuit of perspective, Bloomberg View‘s Francis Wilkinson interviews Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute and Thomas Mann of the Brookings Institution. As you may recall, Ornstein and Mann published a book in 2012 entitled It’s Even Worse Than It Looks, which broke from the usual “balanced” assessment of blame for the nation’s problems that prevails in the MSM and much of academia and pointed at the phenomenon of “asymmetric polarization” emanating from the radicalization of the Republican Party.
Now that the political dysfunction they analyzed has if anything intensified, have Ornstein and Mann changed their minds about any of this? No, as you can quickly see from the interview. But I’d point to a succinct quote from Mann that addresses the preconditions for recovery:
There is no clear path out of our current distemper. The solution, like the diagnosis, must focus on the obvious but seldom acknowledged asymmetry between the parties. The Republican Party must become a conservative governing party once again and accept the assumptions and norms of our Madisonian system. That will likely require more election defeats, more honest reporting by the mainstream press and more recognition by the public that the problem is not “Washington” or “Congress” or “insiders” or politicians in general.
The burden is on the GOP because they are currently the major source of our political dysfunction. No happy talk about bipartisanship can obscure that reality. Unless other voices and movements arise within the Republican Party to change its character and course, our dysfunctional politics will continue.
Remember how annoyed much of the punditocracy was on Tuesday night when Hillary Clinton listed “Republicans” as among the “enemies” she was proud of earning? That reflexive annoyance, not Clinton’s “partisanship,” is a big part of the problem.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, October 15, 2015
“Burning Down The House”: Newt Gingrich’s Mean-Spirited Republican Party Lives On In Donald Trump And The House GOP
This is the House that Newt Gingrich built as speaker, in front of us, still alive and well. The house that Donald Trump is building for us all will feel a lot like Newt’s, but more palatial, with more gold “TRUMP” signs all over.
Trump’s leading presidential candidacy is no fluke, but the direct result of Gingrich’s fiery ascent to House speaker in the 1994 Republican revolution. Fueling each: angry white men who feel disenchanted by the political order. They make a potent force, and the rest of us should beware and prepare.
The House that Newt built in 1995 was full of angry white Republican men, the majority that ran on the so-called “Contract with America.” I saw the whites of their eyes in the Speaker’s Lobby off the floor. As a rookie reporter, I liked to ask them to tell me their favorite points of the contract – if they even remembered them. Often, they didn’t.
Policy was not their strong point, as they stormed the house of American democracy. Many in the new majority were from the South and Midwest. Gingrich personally recruited them to be candidates.
One other thing stood out: They did not accept the constitutional authority of the president. Especially not Bill Clinton. They came loaded for Clinton – the fire of their fury daily stoked by Rush Limbaugh, who was honored as the class of 1994 mascot at Camden Yards in Baltimore. Yeah, they lavished love on one of the best haters of our time. It was remarkable to witness.
John Boehner, the shallow House speaker who’s stepping down soon, was a lieutenant in Newt’s army, which came to power 20 years ago. He was more than just a placeholder for Gingrich’s Republican revolution; he supported its churlish know-nothingness toward immigrants and women’s rights, and its insurrections against the president – this time, Barack Obama. The press tends to paint him as a sympathetic son of an Ohio “barkeep,” but he’s just one of the boys.
The wind blowing the aggressive Trump into his confounding first place in the Republican primary trails? It’s all in that tornado in November 1994. Overnight, the House and the Senate changed hands to Republican control. The sea change was stronger in the House. It was remarkable to witness and worth remembering.
Brazen and mean-spirited, the House class of 1994 came to Washington ready to burn down the House. An anti-government force, many slept in their congressional offices. It’s a charming Republican custom and another way to disrespect Washington. As Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the California Republican who almost became speaker, would tell you: Don’t ever act like you belong here, to this House.
McCarthy got consumed by the beast Newt started: The House Republicans seem to hate governing so much that they can’t govern themselves. Meanwhile, Trump still sails on the winds of rage.
By: Jamie Stiehm, U. S. News and World Report, October 13, 2015
“Devolving The Gingrich Revolution”: In The End, It’s All About The Same Thing Gingrich Was About; “Not To Reform, But To Destroy”
According to Mike DeBonis, the Freedom Caucus usurpers in the House might not be as focused on WHO becomes Speaker as much as HOW he (I don’t think any women are under consideration) wields the gavel.
When the 40 or so Republican lawmakers responsible for the recent upheaval in the House talk about what it would take to quell their rebellion, they do not necessarily talk about the debt ceiling, the federal budget or any other demand of the party’s energized conservative base.
They speak instead about rule changes, committee assignments and the hallowed pursuit of “regular order” — a frequently invoked, civics-textbook ideal by which legislation bubbles up through subcommittees to committees to the floor to the president’s desk and into law.
“The false, lazy narrative is that we want a more conservative speaker,” Rep. Justin Amash (R-Mich.) told reporters at a forum of hard-line House members last week. “But the reality is: What we want is a process-focused speaker. What we need is a speaker who follows the House rules.”
There are those who fear that such a change would make the House even more ungovernable than it already is. But putting those concerns aside, it is interesting to take a historical look at where this “top-down” management the usurpers want to get rid of originated. Paul Glastris and Haley Sweetland Edwards laid it out for us not too long ago.
When Newt Gingrich became speaker of the House in the fall of 1994, he set about almost immediately creating “the most controversial majority leadership since 1910,” according to longtime Congress watchers and political scientists Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein in their 2006 book, The Broken Branch. Under his leadership, backed up by seventy-three conservative Republican freshmen who swept to power that year, the goal was not to reform, but to destroy; not to compromise, but to advance a highly conservative agenda no matter the means.
Sound familiar? Those who suggest that the current iteration of the Freedom Caucus has its roots in the precedent set by Newt Gingrich have a point. But back then the usurpers embraced an opposite means to reach their ends.
Gingrich’s strategy, as he explained it to Mann and Ornstein, was simple: Cultivate a seething disdain for the institution of Congress itself, while simultaneously restructuring it so as to eliminate anything—powerful chairmen, contradictory facts from legislative support agencies, more moderate Republicans—that would stand in the way of his vision.
Gingrich’s first move in 1995 was to dismantle the decentralized, democratic committee system that the liberals and moderates had created in the 1970s and instead centralize that power on himself. Under his new rules, committee chairs were no longer determined by seniority or a vote by committee members, but instead appointed by the party leadership (read: by Newt himself, who often made appointees swear their loyalty to him). Subcommittees also lost their ability to set their own agendas and schedules; that too largely became the prerogative of the leadership. At the same time, Gingrich imposed six-year term limits and required chairs to be reappointed (by leadership) every two years. Finally, Gingrich protected, and in some cases bulked up, the staff leadership offices and increasingly had those offices write major pieces of legislation and hand them to the committees.
These rules, taken together, essentially stripped all congressional Republicans, especially those in previously senior positions, of power; instead, whether or not they advanced in their careers—whether they were reappointed or on which committee they were appointed—would be determined by party leaders based on their loyalty and subservience. (Two years after the Democrats took the majority in the House in 2007, they eliminated the term-limits rule; Speaker John Boehner reinstated it when the Republicans regained control in 2010.) “If you were thinking about the next stage in your career, you did what you were told to do,” observes Scott Lilly. The point of this centralization of power was to give the leadership maximum control of the legislative agenda and to jam through as many conservative bills as possible.
Fascinating, huh? The very rules these usurpers want to throw out are the ones put in place by the original usurper…Newt Gingrich.
Now the so-called “Freedom Caucus” will dress up their aims in talk of “regular order” and “decentralization.” But in the end, they’re all about the same thing Gingrich was about: “not to reform, but to destroy; not to compromise, but to advance a highly conservative agenda no matter the means.”
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, October 11, 2015
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