“A Congress Divided”: Overcoming The Rigid And Obstructionist Partisanship Of House Republicans
The Senate provided the country a rare and modest glimpse of bipartisanship in its 68-32 passage of the comprehensive immigration reform bill laboriously accomplished by the Gang of Eight — four Democrats and four Republicans. But overcoming the rigid and obstructionist partisanship of the House Republicans will be another matter.
House Speaker John Boehner, like a chief lemming leading his followers over a cliff, warned in advance of that Senate vote, in which 14 Republicans broke party ranks, that his flock would continue its obdurate ways on the politically explosive immigration issue.
“For any legislation, including a conference report, to pass the House,” Boehner proclaimed, “it’s going to have to be a bill that has the support of the majority of our members.” He obviously was referring to the GOP side alone, as if the House Democrats weren’t members of what senators call “the other body.”
It’s a party position that former House Speaker Dennis Hastert often insisted upon in his abbreviated tenure. It was designed to assure that the House Republicans would work their will on the full House in an our-way-or-the-highway invitation to stalemate.
Boehner in adhering to this posture endangers not only the prospect for meaningful immigration reform. He also jeopardizes his party’s political outlook in 2014 and 2016 and his own speakership. He continues to genuflect before the most conservative House Republicans, driven by Tea-Party recalcitrance, who nevertheless increasingly favor his disposal.
The 14 Senate Republicans apparently hope their support of the bipartisan compromise will ameliorate their party’s problem with Hispanic voters, so graphically demonstrated by their 70 percent vote against GOP standard-bearer Mitt Romney in 2012. But the Senate version, heavy on fattened border security but allowing a path to American citizenship for undocumented aliens, will mean little politically if their House brethren refuse to buy into key elements of it.
President Obama did not hesitate to goad the House Republicans to follow the lead of the small band of Senate Republicans who followed GOP Sens. John McCain and Jeff Flake of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and Marco Rubio of Florida in getting off the naysay trail for once.
In all the Republican post-mortems after the Romney defeat, a deafening chorus was heard arguing that the party should address the wide loss of Hispanic, Asian and African-American voters in the 2012 election. Boehner, an astute and practical politician, surely got the message, but appears throttled by the Tea-Party constituency that now dominates his flock.
Until the 14 Senate Republicans cast their votes for the Gang of Eight’s immigration reform package, conservatives in both houses had at least the comfort of knowing they were all in the same boat. The challenge for Boehner, after one-third of the Senate Republican membership voted with the Democrats, is to prevent further leakage in his foundering House craft.
Obama and fellow Democrats, frustrated throughout the president’s first term by Republican congressional roadblocks, are looking to next year’s midterm elections to break the jam, expecting enhanced support from minority voters. The same elections could likewise determine Boehner’s political future if he continues to allow the most extreme elements of his constituency of the right to set a stubborn and resistant course to genuine immigration reform.
At a minimum, Boehner needs to get off his insistence that the House must and will go its own way on the issue, writing a package that can capture “a majority of the majority” membership. Such an outcome will only end in negating a rare example of Senate bipartisanship achieved in a Congress that once marked its most productive and laudatory days under both Democratic and Republican presidents.,
Last November, the Republican brand suffered a body blow with a presidential campaign that only reinforced its image as the party of the white and the well-off. The continuing fight over immigration reform can be a GOP opportunity to combat that view, but not unless Boehner and Co. seize it as their 14 Senate brethren have done.
By: Jules Witcover, The National Memo, July 2, 2013
“What’s A Speaker To Do?”: The Farm Bill Failure Has Disastrous Implications For John Boehner
It’s hard to understate how much of a setback the farm bill’s surprise failure was for an already dysfunctional and divided House of Representatives.
It showed that House leadership doesn’t have a complete measure of the vote counts for even the most basic bills. It provided embarrassment all the way up to House Speaker John Boehner, who took the unusual step of publicly supporting the bill and voting for it. And it signaled possible turbulence ahead for other larger and higher-profile bills, such as one on the issue of immigration.
The debacle brings up fresh new questions about major legislation passing through the House. If Boehner can’t bring his conference together to move a farm bill through to a conference committee, what does it mean for immigration, debt ceiling, and government appropriations bills looming later this summer and fall?
The looming immigration fight, in particular, parallels the farm bill in many ways, though it could hypothetically have even more disastrous consequences for the Republican Party if it fails.
A similar version of a Senate farm bill that earned bipartisan support in a 66-27 vote failed to pass the House. Soon, an immigration bill that now looks likely to earn more than 70 bipartisan Senate votes could present Boehner with the same problem.
“The two are very different issues. However, the farm bill highlights how complicated things are here in the House,” one House GOP aide told Business Insider.
From here, the farm bill faces one of two likely fates — it could either face extinction, or House leadership could put a modified version on the floor. It’s unlikely, though, that a modified bill will come to the floor, considering that it would likely take more food-stamp cuts to earn Republican votes — something that would scare off Democrats. Most likely, a GOP aide said, a one-year extension will be passed, like both the House and Senate did last year.
A final version of any farm bill, even a one-year extension, will likely need a majority of Democrats to support its passage. The House last passed a farm bill extension as part of the bill to avert the fiscal cliff, which passed with a majority of Democrats supporting it. That overall bill required Boehner to break the Hastert Rule.
On immigration, Boehner will have an even narrower path to navigate. He has pledged to not allow a vote on a bill that does not garner majority support from Republicans. It’s clear that breaking that promise, however, is perhaps the only way a bill would pass through the House to become law — even if the Senate bill is watered down to earn more Republicans’ support.
Doing so would likely mean Boehner would face a revolt from conservative members of his caucus. Already, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-Calif.) has warned him on his speakership.
One Democratic strategist, though, said Boehner might have to be willing to buck the majority of his caucus to do something he feels is necessary for the future of the party. The strategist pointed to comments from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) last weekend, who cautioned immigration reform was necessary to keep the GOP from falling into a “demographic death spiral.”
“He might have to decide between the short-term imperative of keeping his speakership,” the strategist said, “and the long-term imperative of the future of the Republican Party.”
By: Brett LoGiurato, Business Insider, June 21, 2013
“Abdicating Responsibility”: When The Speaker Becomes The Bystander, Doing As Little Legislating As Possible
For generations, the balance of power will often shift between the House and Senate, for a variety of institutional and historical reasons. Occasionally, the shift is deliberate — one chamber will decide it doesn’t want the power.
This dynamic is on display right now. Sarah Binder recently published a fascinating item, explaining House Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) decision to do as little legislating as possible, making the Senate go first on just about everything. For Boehner, there’s no apparent downside — he and his caucus don’t get the blame if/when legislation fails; he and his caucus have veto power over key initiatives; and when measures are pending that Republicans don’t like, he and his caucus have time to rally the opposition while the Senate does all the real work.
What’s more, as Jonathan Bernstein explained, Boehner’s “Make the Senate go first” rule forfeits “their opportunity to affect the content of legislation,” but the House GOP caucus may not care since they’re a post-policy caucus anyway.
And all of this tends to work fairly well when the Senate, overcome by gridlock and obstructionism, can’t send the House anything to consider anyway, but what happens when the upper chamber starts to make some progress?
Long mired in bitter gridlock, two groups of Democratic and Republican lawmakers have hashed out once-unthinkable bipartisan solutions on gun control and rewriting the nation’s immigration laws.
But the rush to bipartisanship could grind to an abrupt halt in the House. Speaker John Boehner is once again trapped in a tough position….
Yes, that certainly is the downside to saying, “We’ll be glad to consider whatever the Senate passes.” Occasionally, the Senate actually passes something, leaving Boehner to ask, “What do we do now?”
Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) told Politico, “It’s clear that the House Republicans have abdicated responsibility for legislation to the Senate.” Quite right. But if the Senate manages to act on gun safety and immigration, the flaws in this plan will become fairly obvious.
Postscript: I should mention, by the way, that the House could, in theory, play a constructive role in governing, but that would require Boehner to largely give up on the so-called “Hastert Rule.” This has already happened three times this year, and Sarah Binder noted a fourth that quietly happened yesterday.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 11, 2013
“Third Strike For The Hastert Rule”: Violence Against Women Act Win Shows Obama Has House GOP’s Number
The Violence Against Women Act passed the House today with bipartisan support. The renewal of the law represents a win for good public policy. It also marks another win for President Obama’s legislative strategy as he reaps the rewards of the conservative movement’s widening schism from the main stream of American thought.
Congress-watchers well remember the “Hastert Rule,” a guideline created by former House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert that said nothing would reach the floor of the House that didn’t have the support of a majority of the majority; in other words nothing could pass that didn’t have the support of a majority of House Republicans. I think that we can safely say that the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act puts the final nail into the Hastert Rule’s coffin—it’s taken three strikes this year and now it’s out.
First 151 Republicans voted against the deal which resolved the tax portion of the so-called fiscal cliff (remember that the “cliff” was composed not only of tax hikes but also of spending cuts, the ones which go into effect tomorrow), while 85 voted in favor of it; then 179 Republicans voted against the Hurricane Sandy relief package with only 49 voting in favor; and now 138 Republicans have voted against the Violence Against Women Act while 87 supported it.
In all three cases the Republican-controlled House passed bills that had been roundly criticized by conservatives. Why? Because they were broadly popular and while individual GOP legislators are undoubtedly voting the way their constituents would like, the party’s leadership has to keep an eye on the broader picture. And what they saw was that the party’s base is on the unpopular side of issues that are poisoning the GOP brand. That’s why the GOP is doing even worse now than it was during the depths of their shutdown-induced toxicity in the mid-1990s, according to this week’s NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. So the leadership made the smart choice—to get past toxic issues while giving their rank and file a chance to vote against them.
The problem for Republicans and House leaders is that Obama’s State of the Union address, as I wrote a couple of weeks ago, which laid out his agenda for the year, is chock full of such items—ones on which he has the advantage of a significant cleavage between mainstream voters and conservatives.
How many more times will House leaders be forced to bring unpopular-with-their-caucus measures to the House floor? And is there a point at which conservatives rebel against it? The famous industrialist Auric Goldfinger was fond of the old Chicago maxim: “Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. The third time it’s enemy action.” Will the right conclude that many more of these votes qualify as enemy action?
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, February 28, 2013
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