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Nancy Pelosi Gets It. Will We?
Long story very short: the president will almost always beat the speaker. To win the presidency, the Right needs not barn-burners but fire discipline. To understand the Boehner fiasco — and for conservatives, it has been a fiasco of our own making — we need to understand a bit of history. We need some perspective, and it would help to start with the first modern speaker, Tip O’Neill.
Tip O’Neill reinvented the House of Representatives. Previous Speakers, like Sam Rayburn, had been effective because they were able to put together large bipartisan coalitions to pass bills. But O’Neill put a partisan stamp on the House: he weakened the committee chairs and did his best to pass bills on party lines. O’Neill’s revolution wasn’t widely understood at the time, however, because O’Neill usually lost legislative battles to President Reagan. Why? Because when the president and speaker fight, the president nearly always wins. The president speaks with one voice, while the speaker frequently gets drowned out by the loudest and dumbest members of his caucus. National Review was right to note that Tip O’Neill shut down the government, but Stiles forgot to mention that O’Neill mostly lost those battles to Reagan.
Newt Gingrich continued the trend that O’Neill started. Gingrich liked to compare himself to British Prime Ministers, who very nearly elected dictators. But when Gingrich tried shutting down the government, the blowback forced him to yield to President Clinton. In Lessons Learned the Hard Way, Gingrich made a rueful admission:
“I am speaking of the power of the veto. Even if you pass something through both the House and the Senate, there is that presidential pen. How could we have forgotten that?”
Hold that thought; we’ll come back to it.
Nancy Pelosi, however, learned from the past. She faced tremendous pressure from the Left to defund the Iraq War and — had she followed the Hastert Rule of only allowing the full House to vote on bills that a majority of the majority party supported — she might well have succeeded. But, knowing that defunding a war would be horribly unpopular and run into Bush’s veto pen, she demonstrated fire discipline against her own party and let Republicans have a temporary victory. Meanwhile, she prepared the groundwork for a Democratic president who could give her the cover she needed to pass big, left-wing bills. She got it with Obama, and her place in history as a powerful speaker is now assured.
John Boehner is now leaving. The tragedy for Boehner is that he was around for the Gingrich years and remembers getting clobbered. In contrast, exactly none of the Freedom Caucus was around for the nineties debacle and — not having learned from Gingrich — they seem hellbent on learning the veto lesson the hard way. Five Thirty-Eight crunched the numbers, and the earliest any of them were elected was in 2002 (Reps. Scott Garrett and Trent Franks). Boehner clearly remembers the power of the veto pen, but the Freedom Caucus has no fire discipline: they want a conservative agenda now and will burn down the barn to rid it of rats.
Given the limitations of not controlling the presidency, Boehner did a solid job. He passed Trade Promotion Authority and did something that hasn’t happened since Eisenhower was president: he actually cut federal spending. The sequester worked. These aren’t just modest accomplishments in the face of the most left-wing president since Johnson; they’re the sort of thing that, to my knowledge, nobody predicted.
Those criticizing Boehner for not pushing a conservative enough agenda are like the man who criticizes a Usain Bolt for not being as fast as Secretariat. Boehner wasn’t dealt a strong hand of cards, but he played them as well as anybody humanly could.
The smartest conservatives — Paul Ryan, Jeb Hensarling, Trey Gowdy — have all ruled out runs for Speaker because they know that many of the base’s demands are impossible so long as Obama is president. Defunding Planned Parenthood, for example, isn’t going to happen in this congress. It will only happen with a Republican president, and for that, we need fire discipline in the House.
Boehner had it. Will his successor?
Published in History, Politics
Tip O’Neill was the last speaker to leave under his own power and on his own terms, handing off power to his designated successor. Since then, Wright, Foley, Gingrich, Hastert, Pelosi, and now Boehner have been, in one way or another, forced off the field.
The Newtster’s balanced budgets happened because revenue boomed unexpectedly; Boehner, by contrast, was able to use the sequester to actually cut spending—not enough to balance the budget, but still an achievement.
Gingrich overpromised and underdelivered, which is why he left after the 1998 elections. Boehner has done his best to tamp down expectations, and to remarkable extent has delivered more than I thought was possible.
When looking over your list, were any of those Speakers drunk and crybabies while in the House Chamber? Remember, the Speaker represents the Republican Party when the President is a Democrat.
Gingrich represented what the majority of the Republicans wanted – lower spending, tax cuts, etc., and stood up to Clinton. He delivered on his “Contract with America,” unlike Boehner, who after the 2014 vote immediately capitulated to the Democrats before the new Republican Senate was seated.
Do you have any credible evidence that Speaker Boehner was drunk the House Chamber?
How was Nancy Pelosi forced out? Democrats lost the 2010 mid term election, big time, and there was a normal transition of the gavel to the majority party. She retained her party’s leadership.
I am not sure that equates to the other speakers who left while their party was still the majority.
I am not insinuating that Boehner is being forced out due to corruption or anything else untoward. He is retiring of his own free will and while I disagree with him I don’t think there is anything untoward about his departure.
Brent is clearly right here, with the the caveat that Boehner is leaving in the fact of a vote to oust him. I don’t know how successful it would have been, but its not a good sign.
I withdraw direct evidence of being drunk in the House chamber, other than the indirect evidence of his crying.
TPA didn’t gut the Constitution. Congress will vote on whatever the ultimate trade bill is.
The Constitution specifies a 2/3 majority in the Senate to ratify a treaty. That an 11 nation 2,000+ page international partnership does not rise to the level of treaty is laughable.
Yes, they will vote on it and a simple majority is all that will be required rather than the much higher hurdle in the Constitution.
If that isn’t gutting the specific limits in the Constitution I am not sure what is.
Perhaps it is laughable to you but it isn’t laughable from any sort of legal point of view.
Do you consider all trade agreements “treaties” or is it just this one you don’t like? If so, current TPA didn’t gut the Constitution, it was fully gutted by the Trade Act in 1974 and the OTCA in 1988 under which GATT and NAFTA were implemented.
As for me, it is bad enough that we need the President and a majority of both houses of Congress to have to approve, under normal course, which companies domiciled in a different country from which I may purchase a good or a service. I most certainly don’t want to have to get the approval of the President and 2/3 of the Senate.
Trade agreements that are transparent and deal solely in trade may or may not rise the level of a treaty.
A treaty amongst 11 nations that has never seen the light of day does in my opinion.
The TPP hasn’t seen the “light of day” yet because it has not been fonalized and hasn’t been sent to Congress for a vote. You understand that the TPP is not the law of the land yet, right?
Yes, but can you name a treaty that has been given fast track authority that has not received a simple majority?
Mike was kind enough to provide a link to an arms control agreement that failed specifically because it didn’t have fast track authority.
Perhaps in the case of 2,000 pages of omnibus multi-national treaty the 2/3 hurdle is a feature, not a bug.
He gets my support. Anyone who’s related to the “Sausage King of Chicago” has to be good.
It’s really just FTAs that the question arises with. The votes have sometimes been close, but they’re essentially the same statute being passed repeatedly with regard to different countries. It’s not surprising that the votes are similar for each. Even if the votes were identical, that wouldn’t make them unconstitutional.
The bills are long (NAFTA is the only statute I own a copy of, and it’s chunky), but there isn’t a lot that gets hidden in them. The stuff that people mostly lie about is investor state dispute resolution (basically a slightly expanded Takings Clause) and that’s pretty short. The Phytosanitary rules and the various different classifications are long, but the latter are generally just restatements of the law for clarity rather than actual new law and the former bit has been, so far as I can tell, totally uncontroversial.
It’s less complicated than a budget bill, which is what most of it most closely resembles, and they’ll have more time to evaluate it. Go back and look at previous FTAs and you’ll find that legislators were more than able to evaluate them in a timely manner.
The TPP is even simpler, since the bulk of it is reaffirming trade agreements that already exist; our new FTA with Australia is going to look a lot like our old FTA with Australia, only now it’ll be part of a larger document rather than being a standalone thing. There’ll be changes, but they’re not going to be particularly hard to understand, assuming that you’re competent to understand them at all (which some legislators aren’t, but that’s true for all legislation, and that’s why they have staff and advisers).
Also, because when Newt came into power, there’d been two of the best deficit cutting bills in modern American history (1990 and 1993). Newt didn’t contribute a lot more cutting, but he took advantage of them. Boehner, on the other hand, had to actually pass laws to bring the budget down. Newt had some achievements, too, but to get the big conservative bargains he had to also go along with S-CHIP, HIPPA, and such. Both Newt and Clinton were more inclined to compromise and come up with grand bargains.
The latest polling I know of went like this:
There’s a lot of patriotic American Texans out there. The malcontents are loud, but Texas is America. Y’all’ll just have to accept being part of the greatest country on earth.
I agree, but I think that what makes the American Constitution robust and European constitutions and a lot of state constitutions weak is that the Constitution means what it says. Abortion and other Kennedy opinions aside, it’s really very literal. The fact that you feel like a statute regulating trade with foreign nations looks like a treaty is neither here nor there. So long as it’s a statute wholly encompassed by an enumerated power and it doesn’t violate any of the negative rights, it’s compliant. When you make everything constitutional, you make the constitution a political document. Keep your constitutional claims to stuff that’s actually in the document and you’re building your house on solid rock.
What do you believe will be opaque about the TPP?
A statute can deal with trade with one or two countries, but a statute that regulates trade with eleven countries is a treaty? I don’t follow.
You’re right, of course, that the statute will have to be published before it’s voted on; 30 days before the bill is introduced, and interested Congressmen can become Designated Congressional Advisers and get in on the act early. If there are any changes required in trade remedy laws, the House Ways and Means Committee and Senate Finance Committee get to see them 180 days before signing, and there are similar provisions for other fields (fishing, textiles, etc.). It’s a super transparent system. This isn’t the first time that we’ve done this, and there are always complaints about it being conspiratorial, and those complaints are always unfounded.