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A Reply to Paul Rahe
Paul Rahe makes many good points and I agree with him that Republican politicians over-promised in 2010 and 2014. This does not strike me as particularly new. Further, I don’t agree that over-promising is a capital offense that merits the total dissolution of the party — and that’s what has been achieved.
The betrayal narrative overlooks the fact that most of the country is not solid red. The Republican Party also has to win votes from less ideologically pure parts of the country — places like Loudoun County, VA, and Montgomery County, PA. Most Americans, and yes, even many who vote Republican, hate government shutdowns and let their feelings be known. As the anti-government party, Republicans always get the blame for government shutdowns and always will. (Though at this point, this seems a moot point, since the Republican Party is about to be destroyed.) Republican leaders have to take account of their members who come from blue states too. Jim DeMint famously said he’d rather have 30 true conservatives in the Senate than a majority. He may get his wish very soon.
Prof. Rahe argues that “it is the president who shuts down the government” and dismisses the sorry history of Republicans always getting the blame by asserting that
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?
Well, speaking of over-promising, Sen. Ted Cruz, a key leader of the shutdown effort, did a bit of over-promising himself. During his prolonged effort to keep the government closed until Democrats in the Senate and White House relented, he was asked, by Sen. Rand Paul, if he would ever agree to a compromise:
“My question to the Senator is, If he can’t get everything he wants, if he can’t defund ObamaCare, which is exactly what he and I both agree on, and millions of people across America want us to get rid of ObamaCare, if the Senator can’t, if he stands today and argues and cannot get rid of it, will he accept a compromise?”
Sen. Cruz replied:
The Senator’s question was would I vote for something less than defunding ObamaCare. Personally, no. Why? Because I have committed publicly over and over to the American people that I will not vote for a continuing resolution that funds one penny of Obamacare.
Yet, a week later, when the Republican Party’s approval rating had dropped to its lowest level since Gallup began asking the question (plunging 10 points in two weeks), Sen. Cruz voted to reopen the government without the repeal of Obamacare.
Arguably, shutdown theater cost Republicans the governorship in Virginia and distracted from the very instructive and shambolic roll-out of Healthcare.gov.
Despite their posturing, the shutdown crew never had a game plan. They could not hope to override a presidential veto. It wasn’t a matter of lack of courage, but lack of votes. They were playing to the conservative gallery (amplified a thousand-fold by talk radio hosts who have grown very rich by attacking fellow Republicans) and others who used this futile gesture to raise money.
Was that a “betrayal?” Maybe. But I’m supporting Ted Cruz for president now because there are larger issues at stake — namely, the survival of the conservative movement and the dire necessity of preventing Donald Trump from getting anywhere near the nuclear codes.
That dead elephant in your post, Prof Rahe, makes me weep.
Published in General
Missing from your analysis is the fact that Congress can fund this and not that. The President’s reaction is to veto the whole thing if he does not get what he wants and to blame the consequences on Congress. When he makes this threat, they run and hide. Those who run and hide are always objects of contempt. This battle needs to be fought and it needs to be fought to victory. But victory is not what the Republicans seek. They just want to survive. Victory is, however, what the Democrats seek. And guess what? They get it.
It is certainly not the best way to make policy but it beats not making policy at all — which is what, in practice, you are recommending.
I suggest you familiarize yourself with where all the money goes, what long term commitments and obligations have already been made which can’t be undone by a change in the rules, how changing the rules on a unilateral basis will simply ensure they get changed back when the other party gets control, how designing a new system of rules isn’t done overnight, how people on the appropriations committee are the ones most beholden to special interests, how entrenched both parties are in the status quo, and how uprooting the entire power structure in one fell swoop simply hands over power to the party which wants government to take over everything.
Once you do that, perhaps your head will get dislodged from the very dark and stuffy place it seems now firmly cemented.
Not everyone supporting Trump is a weird tariff-supporting racist.
Perhaps the Republican’s timidity (however real or perceived) is triggering people to move to the “strong horse”
This is no doubt true. But we are not going to get out of the mess unless we begin to rachet things back, and the Republicans — after winning historic landslides in 2010 and 2014 — have not done any racheting at all. Instead, they have allowed the President to keep on moving in the direction his party is tending.
Your entire position seems to be that nothing can be done, it’s all beyond our control, and the big bad Democrats will be mean to us if we do do anything.
Are you sure you’re not a Republican Congressman trolling us?
They tried to do this and were blocked by Democrats. Watch this exchange between Sheldon Whitehouse and Ted Cruz on Crossfire. So, they were left with the choice of give Ted a week or two to make his point, or have a shutdown lasting months. Democrats, without question, not the GOP leadership, are the ones responsible for shutting down the government and making it painful. GOP leadership remembers the wounds of the 1990s, especially the second term midterm, all too well.
Nobody expects all our problems to be solved in a couple terms. No one thinks a century of government expansion, centralization, and corruption will be undone overnight. That is a cartoonish characterization of people criticizing Republican leadership.
What many voters do demand is an honest, unrelenting fight for Constitutional order and individual liberty.
It would be arrogant and foolish to base legislative strategies on an assumption of Republican dominance for decades. Any honest effort must push back at least as hard as Democrats push their tyrannical interests, if only for hope of not losing all gains upon the next Democratic administration or Congress.
Somehow, Democratic Congresses manage to move the needle to their favor under Republican presidents. Yet Republicans can only ever advise us to wait for a scenario of total Republican domination that hasn’t occurred once in a lifetime.
This is absolutely false. Where is cap and trade? Tied up in the courts, not a new law like Dodd Frank. Where is Medicare for all? Dead on arrival. Where is the Gang of 8 bill? Dead in the house. GOP did all of this, sometimes over objection of leadership, but the GOP in Congress stopped the trainwreck.
Are y’all seriously arguing that Republicans should not use the power of the purse because Democrats will do the same? Do you think that possibility escaped the Constitution’s authors when they created that power?
Between a party representing ever more government power and a party claiming to seek less, which do you think will suffer more from defunded programs and agencies?
Go back and take a look at the election results. The GOP has never suffered electorally from shutdowns.
My bad, keep reading, they had small losses but well within the normal bounds of electoral results. Summary:
This is in no small part because the party won’t unite around a plan. The faction of the republican congress that will brook no compromise and demands to have it all at once won’t give the leadership the support they need to proceed on anything, and so we have paralysis. Conceiving and executing a consensus plan of action in the congress has become all but impossible. So you can blame leadership for not being strong enough, but the fact is that the party is divided into realists, idealists, and corrupt status quo defenders, no faction is strong enough to push through a clear agenda, so nothing can get done.
Rather than recognize this and acknowledged the fact that winning the presidency is necessary to have a clearly decided leader of the party to push a coherent agenda, we have people who want to burn it all down and are willing to be conned by the most obvious and oily of hucksters.
Like all powers, the power of the purse has political limitations. If Congress, controlled in part or wholly by a party different from the president, decides to use the appropriation power to create a budget crisis, then there are political limitations on the use of that power. The longer they go, the more they are blamed, and the more direct beneficiaries of government appropriations will be paraded in front of television cameras to pressure Congress into passing a spending measure. So, if you are going to use this power in this fashion, you need to have a strategy and a message that is uniform and consistent.
I might be with you if I felt the republican establishment were working to move us back toward fiscal sanity. But they’re not. They’re just managing the decline.
Look at Paul Ryan, “deficit hawk”. He passed that monstrosity of a budget bill recently without the shame any decent ‘budget hawk’ would have shown. He has lectured us that ‘we need to keep the promises we’ve made”. His earlier “20 year plan” keep spending high in the near-term, while expecting later congresses to do all the hard cutting – which, of course, was unlikely to happen.
How would you negotiate a budget bill with Obama?
We, or I at least, am arguing that ready, fire, aim is a stupid way to conduct politics. The power of the purse should be a powerful weapon but it has been effectively disarmed by generations of erecting structural impediments and corruption. It needs to be fixed for it to be an effective weapon once again, and that doesn’t happen overnight. It also doesn’t happen when there is no clear consensus in the party as to which direction or which plan of attack should be followed. The party is very divided and no faction has a strong enough base for the leadership to form an effective battle plan.
That will only come by gaining the presidency and having someone who will set the agenda and then use the presidency to sell it and ultimately implement it.
Respectfully, if this is all you have.
Dr. Rahe: 1, Mona Charen: 0.
I think it’s good we’re having this debate about whether Congressional Republicans are defensibly useless or indefensibly useless.
Well, the first thing they need to understand is you don’t tell your negotiating partner where your outer limits are, as in “we’re not going to shut down the government!”. (you may not want to shut down the government – but you don’t TELL them that.)
The second thing they need to do is get out of their comfortable offices and away from their crony environments and get out among the people and explain WHY we need to cut spending. They’re such scared-y, lazy people! SELL YOUR POINT!
People hear everyday from the left all the great things government is going to do to ‘help’ them. They also need to hear how much its going to cost them – taxes or lost opportunity – all this free stuff is seriously expensive. But who tells them that? Our representatives don’t want to take the risk that someone will call them a meany.
Republican politicians don’t seem to take risks – so we lose every time.
Again with “establishment” talk. There is no establishment. There are only elected officials who make calculations based on political realities, who can’t just snap their fingers and make everyone get in line. The leadership of the republican congress has an utterly divided caucus. Neither leader in congress has a majority in their caucus to achieve what the tea partiers want. They cannot pass anything because they don’t have the votes to accomplish anything big. The party is too divided right now. This division is blamed on the leadership. But the leadership isn’t responsible for the individual agendas of everyone in congress and the fact that those agendas don’t align.
Can we all agree that legislative strategies depend upon media strategies? Until the Republican party becomes effective at countering Democrats’ lies and controlling the public focus, significant reparations of process and law will continue to be electorally dangerous.
If a political representative cannot play the media game, he needs to find a new line of work and stop pretending to serve voters.
That is part of it, but the bigger problem is that you don’t have a majority consensus in the party as to what the strategy would be even if they were good at using the media.
99% of congressman will bow to the public will and future elections. The opposition party bows to the party in power out of fear from the electorate, not from lack of principle. Why did Bill Clinton tack to the center post 1994? Why did GWB run the compassionate conservative campaign in 2000? Because of fear of losing not from force of conviction
John, I agree that lack of unity in the party impedes its usefulness. As often as the GOP is referred to the party of small government, I and many other Republican voters doubt that claim.
If no other ray of hope arises from this Trump mania, perhaps the party will be forced to take a break from its “big tent” dream long enough to clearly define what we are all supposedly allying for or against. What are the principles or strategies that unite so many variations of Republicans?
Well, you need a big tent to get a majority and if you define too clearly and too narrowly what the causes and solutions are, your are unlikely to be able to rebuild a big enough tent.
There is no substitute for having one clearly recognized and respected leader at the top who sets the agenda and gives the marching orders. That is what the presidency gives you. Unfortunately it appears the GOP will not get this crucial leadership this year and so the division and factionalism is bound to continue apace.
First, people use words like “establishment” to convey a meaning – a shortcut to avoid having to write a paragraph to explain themselves every time they talk about an idea. There is a group of people who can be called the ‘leadership’ who ultimately controls the direction of the group. They DO exist.
Good leadership is hard. And if they’re not up to it – they need to step aside.
No one group can have all they want -in the end, everything is a compromise. A good leader can bridge the gap – and create real compromise.
From my vantage, it seemed the ‘establishment’ didn’t want to compromise with their more limited government members, they wanted to defeat them. So here we are….
Yes, but in the end, you have to stand for something. What does the Republican party stand for? Limited Government, or managed Big Government?
I fear this may also be true of America.
So we have the ‘democracy’ our founders feared? Mob Rule?
This entire discussion overlooks the fact that the front runner for the nomination has taken entitlement reform off the table. The people don’t seem to care much about the size of government.