Why the Fracas in the House Is Good News, Not Bad News

 

shutterstock_225535513Writing over at National Review, Brother Kevin Williamson gets it just exactly right, yet again. An excerpt:

What really has the salon set shaking its head is that the Republican party, which has within it a steep disagreement about tactics, priorities, pace, and style, has decided to settle some of those questions through an authentic democratic process. There is, apparently, going to be a real race for the speaker’s gavel, rather than a negotiated settlement among party leaders organized around the question of whose turn it is. A real democratic fight instead of a backroom party-machine process — that is what CNN calls a House in chaos.

Well, bring on the chaos.

A clean, public and important fight over matters of central importance to the future of the nation.

Bring it on indeed.

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  1. EJHill Podcaster
    EJHill
    @EJHill

    Everybody loves democracy – except the losers.

    The problem with party politics is that people are only useful as a tool to defeat the other party in the general election.

    Once one gets elected to Congress the people become a distraction. Opposition with the party is crushed and starved of funds.

    When the voters change direction that’s intolerable.

    • #1
  2. Z in MT Member
    Z in MT
    @ZinMT

    It seems to me that the House Freedom Caucus is getting all the blame here, but what they are really asking for in this Speakership election is a decentralization of rule making, committee assignments, etc. Their members are frustrated because Boehner’s leadership was very dictatorial, that allowed very little input from the membership, and punishments of members based on perceived non-support of the leadership.

    As Newt said on FNS this morning, it is hard to be a popular speaker when all you have is punishment as a tool. What Boehner and the leadership never figured out was that the House Freedom Caucus members needed to be able to show their constituents that they were at least trying to stop Obama’s lawless agenda. If they had let members offer amendments to bills and gave a few of them plum committee assignments he would have been a lot more popular.

    • #2
  3. iWe Coolidge
    iWe
    @iWe

    Z in MT: If they had let members offer amendments to bills and gave a few of them plum committee assignments he would have been a lot more popular.

    Quite so.

    What we are asking for is actually pretty easy to do: pass bills that clearly delineate the principles we stand for. Make Obama and the Democrats clearly stand against them.

    These are not hard to do:

    Pass a bill that outlaws funding any organization that sells the body parts of black babies.

    Pass a bill allowing people to opt out of Obamacare.

    Pass a bill requiring Congress to be just as much under the law as any private employer.

    Pass a bill allowing people to buy and sell goods and services without any government regulation or oversight as long as the parties specifically sign away their non-contractual remedies.

    And so on…

    • #3
  4. James Madison Member
    James Madison
    @JamesMadison

    There is a rather important quote from Kevin Williamson left out,

    “The fight in the House is an intra-conservative fight, despite the best efforts of our talk-radio friends and the circus monkeys on cable to magically transplant John Boehner et al. from the political tradition of Ronald Reagan to that of Woodrow Wilson.

    Boehner, a Wilson liberal? There is gold to those who can stir the pot and sell corn flakes on radio, TV, and the internet casting this a an upheaval, chaos, etc. If this was revolution, who is the one the revolutionaries have been waiting for? Marsha Blackburn?

    Sure, she might make a great Speaker. But, was that the plan? Or are they just making this up as the go along?

    An open race is good, lets just hope this is over with promptly and the public forgets this fairly quickly. Because to the average person, this appears differently than an expression of the democratic process. This looks like children not playing nicely with each other.

    By the way, is Hillary still running? Because while the press is filled with talk of the GOP leadership vacuum, they are not being forced to admit Hillary has a few problems.

    Bring back Hillary. We miss not seeing her explanations about emails.

    • #4
  5. Barfly Member
    Barfly
    @Barfly

    When the media promotes a Republican, that indicates he’s the leftmost Republican. You can also be sure they’ll turn on him when someone further left (a Democrat, usually) shows up.

    When the media says there’s chaos among Republicans, you can be sure they’re reacting to some issue that endangers the left.

    That the media and the squishes see chaos! is an indication that a positive development is underway. I relish their squeals of fear.

    • #5
  6. SParker Member
    SParker
    @SParker

    Loved (as always) the KW piece and am generally sympathetic to the stated aims of the Freedom Caucus (regular order, wow, what a concept; maybe the Senate will be prodded to take Ben Domenech’s suggestion of taking appropriation bill filibusters by the horns and wrestling them to the ground like in the old days–something about making old men worry about peeing is somehow just very appealing; amazing how the Reid-Pelosi CR regime is now viewed as the time-honored way of doing things.)

    But do unbridled amendments mean a Lazarus for the Ex-Im Bank just when it was almost resting peacefully?   Do we have to wait for a majority to get principled on these things?  Oh.  Well.  Democracy is soooo difficult.

    • #6
  7. Owen Findy Inactive
    Owen Findy
    @OwenFindy

    Barfly: I relish their squeals of fear

    Great quote for a T-Shirt.

    • #7
  8. James Gawron Inactive
    James Gawron
    @JamesGawron

    Barfly:When the media promotes a Republican, that indicates he’s the leftmost Republican. You can also be sure they’ll turn on him when someone further left (a Democrat, usually) shows up.

    When the media says there’s chaos among Republicans, you can be sure they’re reacting to some issue that endangers the left.

    That the media and the squishes see chaos! is an indication that a positive development is underway. I relish their squeals of fear.

    BF,

    Exactly! Have we learned nothing. The Commander in Chief is out to lunch for seven years and now we are baaaaaaaaaaaaaaad because we didn’t toss a Speaker of the House into the hot seat in under a week.

    Ummm Geeee I don’t think so. The left punditry and the squish punditry can just cool their oh so special sensibilities. These special folk can sleep through genocide after genocide and insane domestic program after program.

    We’ll have a Speaker when we are good and ready.

    Regards,

    Jim

    • #8
  9. aardo vozz Member
    aardo vozz
    @aardovozz

    Let’s see if I understand this. Under the current administration,in foreign affairs,we seem to be in retreat everywhere and our allies cannot rely on us.

    On the domestic front,thanks to the current administration,we are over 18 trillion dollars in debt(and counting), our borders are not controlled,  job growth is at best disappointing, health care for our veterans(and everyone else,for that matter) is becoming more of a bureaucratic nightmare,  police shootings result in riots,while the shooting of police causes a perceived decrease in law enforcement, and the theme of the 20th anniversary of the Million Man March is “Justice , Or Else!”.

    With regards to the presidential election, the current democratic front runner could be indicted but is at least a security risk, while the avowed socialist who is running as a democrat thinks we need to pay more taxes.

    It’s good to know that with all of this going on, CNN in its infinite wisdom is able to see that it is the Republicans who are in chaos.

    • #9
  10. BrentB67 Inactive
    BrentB67
    @BrentB67

    CNN and the progressive left (acknowledge redundancy) have to promote the chaos narrative out of fear the republicans are a legislative majority, will most likely be for the foreseeable future, and there is a serious limited government contingent exercising influence in the House.

    Progressives dislike republicans and would rather be in charge of the legislative branch, but even when democrats are not in power republicans can generally be counted on to fund the welfare entitlement state.

    Now there is rumbling the gravy train may be slowing down or detouring to the right so the left has to lash out with the chaos narrative in hopes of bolstering the reliable senior leadership in the republican party.

    • #10
  11. BrentB67 Inactive
    BrentB67
    @BrentB67

    iWe:

    Z in MT: If they had let members offer amendments to bills and gave a few of them plum committee assignments he would have been a lot more popular.

    Quite so.

    What we are asking for is actually pretty easy to do: pass bills that clearly delineate the principles we stand for. Make Obama and the Democrats clearly stand against them.

    These are not hard to do:

    Pass a bill that outlaws funding any organization that sells the body parts of black babies.

    Pass a bill allowing people to opt out of Obamacare.

    Pass a bill requiring Congress to be just as much under the law as any private employer.

    Pass a bill allowing people to buy and sell goods and services without any government regulation or oversight as long as the parties specifically sign away their non-contractual remedies.

    And so on…

    What is still unclear to me is that the House leadership may not share our priorities.

    • #11
  12. Leigh Inactive
    Leigh
    @Leigh

    This is rather low-level chaos, indeed. That said we need order out of chaos in reasonable time. Extended Republican infighting is a bad backdrop to the current presidential campaign.

    I don’t know enough about the parliamentary nuts and bolts to evaluate the Freedom Caucus procedural demands. Some seem reasonable enough on the face of it — though there’s the risk that they’d empower the moderates just as much.

    But though they’re evidently downplaying it now, they did also insist that there be no debt limit increase without entitlement reform. I’m sorry, that’s not happening while Obama is President and I’m not sure we really want it to anyway, not the way it would end up looking. Even if they’re absolutely convinced that they could play that game of chicken with the President and win (and seeing how poor their leadership election strategy has been I don’t know why we’d trust them on that), they can’t do it without the rest of the caucus — and the rest of the caucus is just not going to do it. It only takes a few defections to make a majority with the Democrats, too.

    Now that’s their initial negotiating position. If they’ll go to Ryan and deal — if after pushing their case they’ll back his ultimate strategy on the debt limit and he gives them something meaningful procedurally — maybe this does end well.

    • #12
  13. Leigh Inactive
    Leigh
    @Leigh

    James Gawron: We’ll have a Speaker when we are good and ready. Regards, Jim

    Actually, we have a Speaker. We just haven’t figured out who’s going to replace him so he can go into peaceful retirement. The job isn’t empty. No constitutional crisis in sight.

    • #13
  14. Carey J. Inactive
    Carey J.
    @CareyJ

    Sunlight is an excellent disinfectant. The more – dare I say it – transparent the selection process is, the less likely it is to deepen the base-establishment split. I don’t see much chance of healing the split, short of unconditional surrender by the establishment.

    The only thing that is likely to heal the split between the base and the establishment is for one of the non-establishment candidates (Trump, Carson, Fiorina, or Cruz) to be nominated and elected President. If the establishment sits on their hands and lets a non-establishment nominee be defeated, the GOP is done.

    • #14
  15. James Gawron Inactive
    James Gawron
    @JamesGawron

    Leigh:

    James Gawron: We’ll have a Speaker when we are good and ready. Regards, Jim

    Actually, we have a Speaker. We just haven’t figured out who’s going to replace him so he can go into peaceful retirement. The job isn’t empty. No constitutional crisis in sight.

    Leigh,

    Makes all the whining and kvetching (a sophisticated technical political term) all the more ridiculous.

    Regards,

    Jim

    • #15
  16. Leigh Inactive
    Leigh
    @Leigh

    Here’s what the Freedom Caucus wants. Looking at it I see why McCarthy walked away from it and why Ryan won’t touch it. It’s much more than procedural changes, and if they’re presenting it as that they’re spinning. Some of the procedural stuff looks perfectly reasonable to my non-expert eyes (and one WI congressman certainly makes it sound so). But some — especially when combined with the policy demands — is designed solely to increase their power and give them an essential veto. They want a speaker to commit to pass only bills that receive a majority of the Republican caucus — but at the same time they want protection if they side with Democrats to block bills that have that majority of the caucus.

    A credible would-be speaker won’t tie his hands that way on policy or procedure, or commit to a brinkmanship strategy the majority of the caucus opposes.

    Jordan says they’re open to Ryan if he’ll address their demands, and they’re willing to compromise. Meanwhile Ryan’s letting rumor spread that he’s open to the job — but only with near-unanimous support and without negotiating these demands. They won’t admit it openly, but I think they need him in the end: they’re going to look rather foolish if they let Ryan get away and end up with someone like Kline — or Boehner again. While Ryan’s willing to walk away.

    • #16
  17. The Reticulator Member
    The Reticulator
    @TheReticulator

    Leigh: Here’s what the Freedom Caucus wants. Looking at it I see why McCarthy walked away from it and why Ryan won’t touch it. It’s much more than procedural changes, and if they’re presenting it as that they’re spinning.

    Keep in mind that Politico is jumping to conclusions that may or may not be justified based on the questionnaire itself.  And a questionnaire is not necessarily a list of demands.

    Also, Politico is using the label “hardliners.”  The winner is the side that gets everyone to adopt their definition of “hardliner.”  When Politico is in the business of spinning that label, they are partisans, not analysts.

    • #17
  18. The Reticulator Member
    The Reticulator
    @TheReticulator

    Leigh: They won’t admit it openly, but I think they need him in the end: they’re going to look rather foolish if they let Ryan get away and end up with someone like Kline — or Boehner again. While Ryan’s willing to walk away.

    If Boehner stays, he thereby reveals that his ploy of seeming to walk away was designed to entrench the hardline establishment in its hegemonic position over other Republicans.

    • #18
  19. BrentB67 Inactive
    BrentB67
    @BrentB67

    Leigh, thanks for the link to the questionnaire. What did you find so demanding about it?

    A few of the rules issue I am familiar with because my Congressman chairs the rules committee.

    As far as the policy questions I think their use of the word entitlement, at least as I read it, isn’t coherent, but this is clearly a memo for internal distribution so it may be linguistically correct for the insiders. Outside of that I did’t see anything outrageous or particularly inconsistent with what a lot of them ran on in 2010 and 2014.

    • #19
  20. BrentB67 Inactive
    BrentB67
    @BrentB67

    The Reticulator:

    Leigh: Here’s what the Freedom Caucus wants. Looking at it I see why McCarthy walked away from it and why Ryan won’t touch it. It’s much more than procedural changes, and if they’re presenting it as that they’re spinning.

    Keep in mind that Politico is jumping to conclusions that may or may not be justified based on the questionnaire itself. And a questionnaire is not necessarily a list of demands.

    Also, Politico is using the label “hardliners.” The winner is the side that gets everyone to adopt their definition of “hardliner.” When Politico is in the business of spinning that label, they are partisans, not analysts.

    Great point. I followed the link and read the 21 questions and didn’t find anything particularly outrageous besides some inartful use of the word entitlement. Politico has its own brand of bias.

    • #20
  21. Jamie Lockett Member
    Jamie Lockett
    @JamieLockett

    The Reticulator:

    Leigh: They won’t admit it openly, but I think they need him in the end: they’re going to look rather foolish if they let Ryan get away and end up with someone like Kline — or Boehner again. While Ryan’s willing to walk away.

    If Boehner stays, he thereby reveals that his ploy of seeming to walk away was designed to entrench the hardline establishment in its hegemonic position over other Republicans.

    Or that he felt he needed to stay in order to ensure a smoother transition. But why ascribe to duty, what one can easily ascribe to evil or malice, right?

    • #21
  22. Leigh Inactive
    Leigh
    @Leigh

    The Reticulator:

    Keep in mind that Politico is jumping to conclusions that may or may not be justified based on the questionnaire itself. And a questionnaire is not necessarily a list of demands.

    Also, Politico is using the label “hardliners.” The winner is the side that gets everyone to adopt their definition of “hardliner.” When Politico is in the business of spinning that label, they are partisans, not analysts.

    You’re preaching to a very convinced choir! I realized commenting above that I wasn’t quite clear on their demands and didn’t trust what I had read in the media, and went looking for the primary source. I only linked Politico because it was where I found the link to the PDF (unless I mixed up my tabs). I barely skimmed the article, to be honest.

    Those are my conclusions from reading the actual questionnaire. It’s not a list of specific demands, but it strongly implies certain things are prerequisites for support. And I think the ultimate issue is the brinkmanship strategy.

    McCarthy wanted to be Speaker. If this was a key reason he walked away, it’s not about a few minor procedural changes.

    As for the word “hardliner” — I prefer it to using the word “conservative,” which I’ve seen other outlets do. The media doesn’t need to decide who is or isn’t a conservative.

    • #22
  23. Manny Coolidge
    Manny
    @Manny

    I read Williamson’s piece this morning.  I don’t buy it.  This resembles the 1968 and 1972 Democrats.  There is a rebellious minority inside the party that wants to overthrow the establishment at all costs.  If this were isolated to the House, that would be one thing.  But Cruz calls McConnell a liar on the Senate floor; nearly every conservative talk show hosts is supporting the rebellion; three candidates running for president in the primary ll have no political experience; not a single republican presidential candidate with any experience can muster 10% of the vote, and every single one of them is a non-starter for a good segment of our electorate.  This is chaos.

    Unless we pull this together, this ain’t gonna have a good outcome.

    • #23
  24. Leigh Inactive
    Leigh
    @Leigh

    The Reticulator:

    If Boehner stays, he thereby reveals that his ploy of seeming to walk away was designed to entrench the hardline establishment in its hegemonic position over other Republicans.

    If Boehner were only pretending he wouldn’t be making long phone calls to Ryan begging him to run.

    The problem at the moment (please note the specificity) is not the “hardline establishment.” The majority of the majority was on board with McCarthy, for better or worse. With him out, except for the 30-40 in the Freedom Caucus (and maybe some of them too), the party is virtually unanimously behind Ryan. If that’s hegemony, it’s hegemony by sheer overwhelming majority, and the minority is going to have to come up with another way to be effective other than attempting to wield a veto — because using that veto only empowers the Democrats.

    If the Freedom Caucus doesn’t want Boehner, it seems all they have to do is offer Ryan enough credible support that he thinks he can be successful. They won’t get all they want, but they may well get some of it. They’ll get a debt ceiling increase because that’s inevitable — and if they don’t want bad stuff attached via Democratic votes, they need to vote for Ryan’s version. But they’ll get, perhaps, a more effective response to Obama, and a more forcefully articulated defense of conservative alternatives. At least Ryan can “fight” in the same sense that Trump “fights.”

    • #24
  25. Al Sparks Coolidge
    Al Sparks
    @AlSparks

    The Reticulator:

    Leigh: They won’t admit it openly, but I think they need him in the end: they’re going to look rather foolish if they let Ryan get away and end up with someone like Kline — or Boehner again. While Ryan’s willing to walk away.

    If Boehner stays, he thereby reveals that his ploy of seeming to walk away was designed to entrench the hardline establishment in its hegemonic position over other Republicans.

    I’m not sure what he’s “revealing”, but whether he stays or not, it’s doubtful he’ll actually entrench anything beyond this Congress.  He can (and should) fill out his term in the House, and remain Speaker or not.

    Regardless of whether he stays the rest of this Congress or not, he’ll probably be a lame duck.  There’s leadership elections at the beginning of the next Congress.

    I think the guy is looking to get out and get rich as a one-off lobbyist, like Dennis Hastert did.  If a Republican gets elected president, then the Speaker’s role outside the House is diminished if he’s also Republican.

    • #25
  26. The Reticulator Member
    The Reticulator
    @TheReticulator

    Leigh:The problem at the moment (please note the specificity) is not the “hardline establishment.” The majority of the majority was on board with McCarthy, for better or worse. With him out, except for the 30-40 in the Freedom Caucus (and maybe some of them too), the party is virtually unanimously behind Ryan. If that’s hegemony, it’s hegemony by sheer overwhelming majority, and the minority is going to have to come up with another way to be effective other than attempting to wield a veto — because using that veto only empowers the Democrats.

    If the Freedom Caucus doesn’t want Boehner, it seems all they have to do is offer Ryan enough credible support that he thinks he can be successful.

    Ryan might be the best they can do.  I am not close enough to the situation to know if that’s true.  I take a lot of this with a grain of salt because most of our information is coming from the hardliners in the GOPe, filtered through the hardline leftwing media.

    • #26
  27. The Reticulator Member
    The Reticulator
    @TheReticulator

    I can understand that Ryan or any other candidate for Speaker doesn’t want his hands tied.  So maybe what the candidates need to do is free themselves from the statements by which Boehner and McConnell tied Republican hands by saying there wouldn’t be a government shutdown.

    This was an utterly stupid thing for those two to have done.  It gave support to the narrative that shutdowns are what Republicans do, rather than what a churlish President Obama does when he doesn’t get his way.  It tied their hands by making Republicans responsible for President Obama’s actions.

    They could free themselves from these shackles by explaining how they would work with President Obama to break up the omnibus appropriations system, which has not done what it was originally intended by Democrats and Republicans to do — which was to introduce some responsibility for total appropriations into the budget process.   They could instead let all the various appropriations stand on their own merits, and the President would no longer have to let all other appropriations  be held hostage to one or two items on which Republicans currently want to reform our government.   This would help President Obama be a better President by his own standards, and free him from being tied down by the hardcore extremists in his own party. It would enable him to be the healer of partisan divisions that he wanted to be.

    • #27
  28. Leigh Inactive
    Leigh
    @Leigh

    The Reticulator: This was an utterly stupid thing for those two to have done.  It gave support to the narrative that shutdowns are what Republicans do…

    On the one hand, I agree they shouldn’t have tied their hands.

    On the other hand, they were simply stating fact. They are not going to engage in the kind of brinkmanship that leads to shutdowns.

    There might be some theoretical situation where a shutdown strategy could work, but not with this president and Congress and their history. No matter how convinced Jordan and his colleagues are that it’s the right strategy it will not happen not because leadership doesn’t want it, but because the majority of the caucus opposes it.

    This isn’t leadership vs. conservatives in general, not at the moment. This is a group of hardliners vs. the  bulk of conservatives.

    I’m not relying primarily on “GOPe” and mainstream media. I’m looking at what everyone’s actually saying and the conservative media — with some caution.

    Looked on Breitbart yesterday. They’re all about bringing Ryan down right now. I read a “news” article talking about how his (still nonexistent) bid for the speakership was falling apart. Evidence: all the other people talking about running.

    Not mentioned: Most of those people — Westmoreland, Kline, even Chaffetz — have said they won’t run if Ryan does. I don’t think even laziness misses that. It was blatantly dishonest reporting. I trust them about as much as the NYT.

    • #28
  29. The Reticulator Member
    The Reticulator
    @TheReticulator

    Leigh:

    The Reticulator: This was an utterly stupid thing for those two to have done. It gave support to the narrative that shutdowns are what Republicans do…

    On the one hand, I agree they shouldn’t have tied their hands.

    On the other hand, they were simply stating fact. They are not going to engage in the kind of brinkmanship that leads to shutdowns.

    That was abject, pre-emptive surrender.  It was in effect declaring Congress to be a non-entity in the budget process – surrendering Congress’s role in the government of our country, reducing our three branches of government to two.

    They should instead of have been looking for how they got themselves into the situation where any reform leads to shutdown and should have been working with all their might to extricate our government from that situation.

    • #29
  30. Jager Coolidge
    Jager
    @Jager

    Leigh: On the other hand, they were simply stating fact. They are not going to engage in the kind of brinkmanship that leads to shutdowns.

    Accepting this is as true. In any negotiation there are a number of facts. There are even some facts that you wish to hide from the person on the other side of the table. It may be a fact that they would not shut down the government, but that is not a fact they needed to run to the press with.

    • #30
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