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The Power of the Purse
Last week, Mona Charen published a post on Ricochet, defending the Republican establishment. She began by observing that “The Republican Party is choosing an odd time to commit suicide,” and she rightly drew attention to the fact that “in the Obama era the Democrats lost 13 US Senate seats, 69 House seats, 910 legislative seats, 11 governorships, and 30 legislative chambers.” The only thing that “stood between Republicans and real reform at the federal level was the White House,” she observed, “and the Democrats were sleepwalking toward nominating the least popular major player in American politics.” Then, she rightly noted that the Republicans had “managed to find someone who is even less acceptable,” and she added a few choice words about Donald Trump – all of them, alas, plausible, but (and this may turn out to be important down the road) not all of them, as they pertain to the future, certain.
For the most part, I share Mona’s misgivings. I have followed Donald Trump in the tabloids for decades, and I am no admirer of the man. But I think her analysis of the situation that catapulted him into prominence unsound. Here is what she had to say:
And what sin has brought down this despoiler upon the Republican Party? Why are so many self-styled conservatives complacent about his success? Failure to stop Obamacare? Please. That was never possible with Obama in office. It would have been possible, in fact it was probable, that it would have been replaced if Republicans held majorities in Congress and got an agreeable executive. Now? No. Failure to get control of the border? Illegal immigration from Mexico has slowed to a trickle and, in fact, more Mexicans are now leaving than coming. Failure to defund the Export-Import Bank? Yes, crony capitalism is disgraceful, but . . .
Here are a few words of praise for the Republicans. The Republican Party has become more reform-minded and more conservative over the past 30 years. The Arlen Specters and Bob Packwoods are pretty much gone. In their places are dynamic, smart, and articulate leaders like Tom Cotton, Ben Sasse, Cory Gardner, Bobby Jindal, Scott Walker, Paul Ryan, Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, Ted Cruz, Suzanna Martinez, and Marco Rubio. The party has become more conservative and more ethnically diverse.
Between 2008 and 2014, when Republicans were the minority in the Senate, they blocked cap and trade, the “public option” in Obamacare, and card check. Republicans declined to give President Obama universal pre-K, the “Paycheck Fairness Act,” expanded unemployment benefits, a higher federal minimum wage, varieties of gun control, mandatory paid sick leave, a tax on multinational corporations, higher taxes on individuals, and more. They passed bills authorizing the Keystone pipeline (which was vetoed) and trade promotion authority (the one issue Obama is not wrong about). They endorsed entitlement reform.
The American system is slow and balky by design. It requires maturity and patience to achieve your political goals. Democrats have been remarkably strategic, returning again and again to cherished objectives, whereas Republicans have told themselves that leadership treachery rather than Madisonian architecture accounts for their frustration.
In Mona’s view, the Republicans did as much as they could have done. In her view, the source of our present troubles is not a failure on the part of the Republican establishment to deliver. It is, instead, as she has argued elsewhere, the severe criticism directed at that establishment by the likes of Ted Cruz, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, and Jim DeMint and his merry lads and lasses at the Heritage Foundation, who asserted that the Republicans had betrayed their constituents.
With this assessment I beg to differ. I believe that the indictment is just and that the Republican establishment is guilty as charged. On Saturday, Mona’s colleague at National Review Andrew C. McCarthy put on display some of the evidence:
“In the House and the Senate, we own the budget.” It was August 2014, the stretch run before the midterm elections, and Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell was making promises to voters about how he and his party would face down Barack Obama’s lawless presidency. Put us in charge, he explained, and a Republican Congress would defend Americans by using the main tool the Framers gave them, the power of the purse:
That means we can pass the spending bill. And I assure you that in the spending bill, we will be pushing back against this bureaucracy by doing what’s called placing riders in the bill. No money can be spent to do this or to do that. We’re going to go after them on health care, on financial services, on the Environmental Protection Agency, across the board. All across the federal government, we’re going to go after it.
But wait, couldn’t that lead to a government shutdown? Weren’t Republicans supposed to be the grown-ups in the room who would “restore regular order” and “make Washington work”? Locked in his own reelection battle, McConnell was having none of it. President Obama “needs to be challenged,” he thundered, “and the best way to do that is through the funding process.” Republicans would place scores of spending restrictions on the president — “that’s something [the president] won’t like,” he told Politico, “but that will be done. I guarantee it.” A GOP-controlled Congress would dare Obama to veto bills in order to preserve spending on his transformational agenda. If a shutdown happened, that would be the White House’s problem.
In other words, McConnell and his fellow Republican leaders talked the brave talk when courting voters who wanted the financing plug pulled on Obama policies that are crushing ordinary Americans — the impeachable non-enforcement of our immigration laws that costs Americans jobs, depresses American wages, and stresses American communities; the unfolding Obamacare debacle that deprives ordinary Americans of the doctors and insurance they had, corralling them into plans with premiums and deductibles so high that the “coverage” is illusory.
Alas, when voters trusted them to follow through, when it came time to walk the walk . . . the GOP went AWOL.
Of course, if McConnell was the only Republican who had advanced such a claim in 2014, one could limit the blame to him. But let’s face it: something of the sort was uttered by virtually every Republican candidate running for the House or the Senate that year. They recognized the wave of resentment in the general public directed at Barack Obama and the Democrats, and they rode that wave with considerable bravado (as they had in 2010). Put bluntly, they promised to make use of the power of the purse, and they did nothing of the sort – not, at least, with regard to the issues about which the voters were worked up.
One could reply by saying that this is all well and good, that McConnell and his colleagues went a bit far, that it is understandable that the voters are miffed, but that the Republicans really could not have accomplished more than they did. One could say, “The American system is slow and balky by design,” as Mona did, and one could blame its “Madisonian architecture.”
There is something to this. Because of that architecture, it is difficult to do much of anything. New initiatives are hard to push through. But it is not so difficult to undo things. One simply has to turn off the spigot by refusing to appropriate money for them, and that is what Mitch McConnell and his colleagues promised and failed to do.
One could respond that they could not risk a government shutdown (though they claimed, while running for office, the opposite). But this response makes no sense. It is the President who shuts down the government by vetoing the budget. “Never mind that,” one could then reply. “They would get the blame. They have gotten the blame every time they tried.”
This, too, is true – but it ignores one thing. Every time they tried they lost their nerve and backed down. Cowards who back down always get the blame. Think about it. Can you think of a single instance in which a man has taken a bold, brave stance and then later backed down in which he did not become an object of contempt?
This matter is more important than it might seem. The truth is that modern liberty depends on the power of the purse. All of the great battles in England in the 17th century between the Crown and Parliament turned ultimately on the power of the purse. The members of Parliament were elected at least in part with an eye to achieving a redress of grievances, and that redress was the price they exacted for funding the Crown. Our legislature has given up that power. Our congressional leaders claim – once the election is over – that they have no leverage. If that is really true, then elections do not matter, and a redress of grievances is now beyond the legislature’s power. Absent that capacity, however, the legislature is virtually useless. Absent that capacity, it is contemptible — and let’s face it: the President and those who work under him have showered it with contempt.
There is a lesson to be learned from the current mess: Congress needs to reassert in a dramatic fashion the power of the purse, and the Republicans need to start keeping their promises. To do that, however, they will have to show a bit of backbone.
I will not defend Donald Trump. I will not assert that those who have backed him in the primaries are conducting themselves in a rational manner. But I will say this: they would not be backing the man if they did not feel betrayed, and they feel betrayed because they have been betrayed.
Look at it this way. In 2010 and 2014, the Republican Party was more successful electorally than at any time since 1928. What have those elected done with the mandate they received? Look above at Mona’s list of their accomplishments. It is, for the most part, a list of things that Barack Obama asked them to do and that they did not do. The real question is this: what concessions did they extract from the President? What did they, using the power of the purse, force him to do on behalf of their constituents? And the answer is: next to nothing. It is no wonder that so many of this year’s primary voters are spitting mad.
If the Republican Party is in the process of committing suicide, it is not due to the party’s constituents. It is due to the leaders who failed them. My guess, for what it is worth, is that in November the Republicans will lose their majority in the Senate and perhaps even the House. That is the sort of thing that happens when one gives short shrift to the concerns of one’s constituents.
Published in General
The fact that there’s a large contingent of voters who don’t trust Washington politicians has nothing to do with the fact that Washington Politicians have shown themselves to be utterly untrustworthy these past two years?
No, I just don’t think it’s a new phenomenon. I don’t think if you took a time machine back to 2014 and polled Trump voters they would have expressed a strong trust in politicians then, either.
I usually don’t get out my shell, but on Monday I just happened to be talking to a blue-collar worker here in the very poor, non-unionized Bible Belt portion of Missouri. We were committing about how Missouri is losing one of the nation’s last aluminum smelters and how Arkansas is doing a much better job in keeping its steel industry booming apparently for off-shore petroleum projects. He mentioned something about unfair (foreign) competition. I mentioned environmental regulations, but it was this election eve conversation that convinced me that Cruz might be sunk in Missouri.
Betrayed? What am supposed to say? “Hey, there’s this smart guy who has argued cases before the Supreme Court. He fought against this Ex-Im thing and some TTP trade thing — that he was for before he was against it.”
Trump can sometimes talk like these folks. At least he sounds mad, frustrated, and blue (if not blue collar) when talking. George W. Bush had a way to talk to these people that his brother Jeb lacked.
The thing that should alarm conservatives is the more favorable popularity of Sanders in general election polls are compared to Hillary. If not for Trump, 5% of total voters who are typically Republican presidential voters might vote socialist instead.
A lot of tough talk from all the rock-ribbed conservatives who know that all these representatives lacked was a little back-bone. It might be news to some, but we ain’t exactly an easy mob to represent. “Touch the third rail but don’t touch that rail, Hey!, Why haven’t you touch that rail yet? Don’t worry, we’ll find someone to touch rail for you! Don’t!,” I, for one, am completely bamboozeled by the new leadership and Spkr Ryan’s move to regular order and pushing varied and more targeted budgets. I actually believe it is a necessary step to a more conservative process. Silly me.
I think if the Republican Party could speak in one voice, it would say in a relieved voice, “At least you won’t have the GOP to kick around, anymore!”. Good riddance to a viable party and everyone keep dreaming of a Reagan that never was. Take your feelings of betrayal, disillusionment and disappointment and filter it through a dream-catcher, for all the good it’ll do.
P.S. The blue-collar worker’s two Missouri counties went for Trump +23 and +26 while my county was +8 for Cruz who visited a few days ago.
If Cruz had visited some of these forgotten areas that overwhelming voted for Mike Huckabee instead of Romney or McCain in 2008, I think he would have easily picked up those extra 1,727 votes for 12 more statewide delegates.
A superb post.
My definition of the Republican Establishment is “those who prefer the comfort of the status quo.”
Ans it’s not always the poor counties that feel betrayed. St. Charles County, Missouri, is the richest county in the state and one of the top 100 richest counties in the country. It was for Trump. St. Louis County and Jefferson County went for Trump as I think this area used to have more automotive plants just about anywhere outside of Michigan. All of Alabama went for Trump including Huntsville and the Gulf Coast, all of Florida except for Miami, Louisville, and all of Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Hawaii. I guess vacation areas like Hawaii, Florida, Nevada, and the Gulf Coast have been hurting too, and see Trump as the solution.
The people who feel so betrayed by the Republicans in power, who made all those promises and didn’t keep them, are going to vote for Trump, who makes all kinds of promises that he won’t keep, and they know it. Some of them they don’t want him to keep, such as his promise to let 75 million households avoid any income tax. Some don’t make any sense, like his promise to make Mexico pay for his wall. Some are empty, such as his promise to solve the entitlement problem through doing nothing but reducing fraud, waste, and abuse. Some are illegal like his promise to kill the families of terrorists. Some are meaningless platitudes, such as his promise to fundamentally change the United States. Oops, my mistake, I meant to make America great again.
It’s both of those: hardline ideological conservatives and the “fed-up” hardhat types. The two biggest vote getters by far? Ted Cruz and Donald Trump, the standard bearers for said groups.
I would posit that the latter group is bigger not just because of blue collar workers crossing over to join Trump’s crowd, but also that some of Trump’s people are probably former ideology types that have given up hope on the philosophy, to some extent. I count myself in that group to a degree (though not completely), and have met many of the same, people who probably would have been in Cruz’s camp years ago, but reality and events have changed their minds: the seemingly endless losing wars, the economy, the continuing rot of the country’s social fabric. Some of these are people going “Kirk? Nock? Laffer? Buckley? That stuff just doesn’t work in the real world”.
It may be time to admit that conservatism, at least as defined by the likes of National Review, is simply a spent force.
You are correct and we are about to abandon the best chance we’ve had to really reverse the erosion of liberty on many a decade by nominating the man least likely to support or even understand true liberty over a field of good to pretty good options. So this voter rage, like most such thing will be counter productive. I weep for my grandkids. Hope I’m wrong, please give me some reason to think so.
The problem with National Review is that they purge the dissenters. National Review should not be neo-con or paleo-con, libertarian or religious, internationalist or nationalist, etc. It should be willing to debate with right-leaning and moderate thinkers that aren’t nuts.
I listened to Nassim Taleb’s interview at reason.org. He says that fragility of individual components promotes strength for the entire unit while strength of the individual components promotes fragility for the entire unit. National Review should loosen the grip on thought to promote strength for the magazine as a whole.
I’m somewhere between you and Mona. Could the Republicans have done more? Probably. Would it have caused institutional turmoil? Somewhat. To turn off the purse on all issues we don’t like when we’re in power will have the counter effect when we’re out of power. The Dems will turn off the purse on military, policing, border security, and so on when they are in power. This kind of wild shifting between the extremes occurred in Britain from the 1940s to the 1980s, and finally they found a way in their politics to be more stable. It really doesn’t serve a nation to have wild swings in policy back and forth. Executing this kind of power with the purse is a similar unstable fluctuation. Congress had to balance fighting the Executive Branch without causing an institutional change that would hurt the nation in the long run. Still, could the Republicans in Congress have done more? Yes, I think so, but I understand the reluctance to make an institutional change that will have been a precedent going forward.
I share your pessimism, and I, too, hope that you are wrong. It is still possible that Ted Cruz will pull a rabbit out of a hat, but the odds are not great — and the party regulars are not rallying behind him. John Kasich will stay in as a spoiler, and he seems to be angling for the vice-presidential nomination. His decision to follow Trump in refusing to debate is telling.
We could have a Democratic sweep followed by a craven Republican surrender.
Could they have done more than nothing after winning the greatest landslide the party has won since 1928? Could they have pressed the President to acknowledge that mandate and give ground? Or do elections no longer matter?
To the extent this is true, and it may be, it’s similar to the national forgetting of the Constitution. The people have forgotten the foundational importance of freedom and individual initiative.
Followers of Trump, Sanders, and Clinton all want Uncle Sugar to take care of them, to give them jobs or to protect their jobs. They are not interested in the conservative ideal of government getting out of the way.
It’s not the people I’m worried about forgetting their constitutions. I remember the Tea Party, and the constitution figured prominently in it. I’m worried about the politicians.
The problem is that nothing ever seems worth fighting for to the republican politicians. They seem to believe that there will always a better time, a better day, when they’re better positioned for a fight. So, we feel defenseless against the spending, DEBT!, taxation, growing regulations, loss of individual freedom, and even from the retaliation of our own gov’t (IRS))
The democrats are willing to risk a lot for their agenda – just look at what Obamacare cost them. Do you think they regret it? No way. Maybe a couple of their members, but as a group – they’d to it again! Because it’s in place. And now republicans aren’t even talking about repeal anymore – just ‘fixing’ it. Its forever now. Their side takes risks and, over time, achieves their agenda, while our side is timid and afraid to risk, and loses everything over time. What a tragedy.
What percentage of the American people made up the Tea Party?
People think free stuff and guarantees of a comfortable life sounds better than freedom. No one is telling them what all this free stuff is really going to cost them. They don’t really understand where this road leads.
They don’t really teach our founding principals in school anymore. Parents don’t teach it to their kids*, and the Republican leadership never talks about it – never takes the time to sell their own views.
A few years ago, I was listening to Eric Cantor interviewed by some blond on NBC or CBS, whatever). She was asking him about meany republican spending cuts. “Don’t republicans care about the poor?” What a huge opening for Cantor to talk about how big government ultimately harms the very people it claims to help – how socialism makes us all ultimately more poor and limits our options. And I watched closely, but he was just back on his heels and didn’t seem to know how to answer her. He just sputtered a little about how republicans care too. Did he not know the answer? or did he not believe in limited government?
I agree with you there. Where I disagree is using the method of cutting off funding for a passed legislation as a means. Either over turn the law, or you have Senatorial norms to follow on funding it.
Where did I say not to fight for it? I said the means of cutting off funding would be a bad national precedent. Democrats would do the same when they’re in power, and so we would have wild fluctuations of laws every time control switched hands. Wild fluctuations would be bad for the nation, and frankly would not be conservative with a small “c.”
As long as the filibuster exists, what you propose as an alternative will not happen. What you are in fact proposing is surrender. The power of the purse is the only power we have or are ever likely to have.
You forget that the Democrats have already on occasion cut off funding for something that they did not like. Remember Vietnam?
We have lived through more than eighty years in which the Democrats have repeatedly initiated radical changes and Republicans, afraid of “wild fluctuations,” have acquiesced when they came to power. What you counsel is called surrender.
Downballot congressional republicans need to position themselves as a check on executive power. However, how many times in the past have we heard “This time we mean it!”.
Maybe, just maybe, the leadership can earn back a few points if they stick with their principles: do not bring up the supreme court for a vote, actually pass a conservative budget and let Obama veto it — shut down the government if you have to.
Manny: I don’t know what ‘conservative’ means anymore, with a capital or a small ‘c’. I’m for limited government. And federalism. And freedom (personal freedom, not the freedom for force your neighbors to underwrite life’s risks).
It’s a tough row to hoe, suffering seven and half years under Obama and then being abandoned by the very ones we thought were on our side. It is basic human psychology that we reserve our greatest anger for those whom we once trusted, when we realize they have betrayed us.
An astute observation. This is why most murders take place between family members, close friends, and lovers.
Don’t forget, the Budget Deal last December — where the Democrats got all of their priorities funded and Republicans got a little favor in for the oil companies that donate to them — wasn’t presented by Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell as “Sorry, folks, it’s the best we could do.” No, they tried to tell us that fully funding Obama’s priorities and getting one minor concession in return was a HUGE Triumph! And then, to promise meaningless symbolic votes on Obamacare and defunding Planned Parenthood later was just the mustard on the excrement sandwich.
Well said Dr. Rahe.
But no reasoning could have ever led our Republican Masters to budge – the self-deluded always double down.
It seemed we might avoid Kurt Schlicter’s prophecy, but no – we’re going to nominate a vulgar man of no particular principle; the media will destroy him trivially (it’ll be a treat to watch) and then we’ll elect a black widow spider.
There are three strategies by which individuals prosper in society beyond the family: we can render to others something of objective value, we can persuade others to act to our benefit, or we can take what we want by force. What if our society’s trajectory runs thru those phases? Then we’re watching the transition between the second and third. Shammat, Lessing called it. I’m going long on tar, feathers, and lead.
But nobody as fallen as the Republican Left will ever grow, short of the pain of loss. I had so wished to avoid 8 years of that harpy in our face.