Elephant Dung #16: House Republicans face internal turmoil

Tracking the GOP Civil War

By Michael J.W. Stickings

(For an explanation of this ongoing series, see here. For previous entries, see here.)

Poor Republicans. Poor, poor Republicans.

It looked like they were doing so well in 2010, propagandizing against health-care reform and otherwise lying to stir up their base, with the media eagerly repeating their talking points, obstructing anything and everything the Democrats proposed, using the filibuster in the Senate to block any number of Democratic initiatives, and capitalizing on angry Tea Party sentiment to whip up electoral success. Their poll numbers rose, they crested into the midterms, and they gave Obama and the Democrats a shellacking, slashing the Democrats' majority in the Senate and winning back the House with overwhelming force. Obama was down, the Democrats were in a state of apparent disarray, and the Republicans were back, baby!

Or not.

Lame-duckery notwithstanding, Congress used its time after the elections to put a cherry on top of Obama's first two years in office, repealing DADT, ratifying New START, and giving the Democrats hope that all was not lost.

Maybe it wasn't the Republicans' time after all. Maybe it was all something of an illusion, their success having more to do with a terrible economy and low voter turnout than anything else.

And then there was the question of what they would do back in power in the House. Obstruction would still be the name of the game in Congress, thanks to Mitch McConnell et al., and there would be overreach by over-eager Republicans looking to paralyze Congress through hearings and investigations to score political points, but with the Tea Party emerging as a major force in the Republican Party, and with Teabaggers and those sympathetic to them heading off to Washington, it was probably inevitable that the cracks in the GOP would deepen, dividing the party and threatening even the limited power it could wield in Congress. 

Yes, of course, House Republicans voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, a meaningless vote, but since then things haven't exactly gone smoothly: 

Under pressure to make deeper spending cuts and blindsided by embarrassing floor defeats, House Republican leaders are quickly discovering the limits of control over their ideologically driven and independent-minded new majority.

For the second consecutive day, House Republicans on Wednesday lost a floor vote due to a mini-revolt, this time over a plan to demand a repayment from the United Nations. Earlier in the day, members of the party’s conservative bloc used a closed-door party meeting to push the leadership to go well beyond its plans to trim about $40 billion from domestic spending and foreign aid this year, demanding $100 billion or more.

The spending rebellion came after the House on Tuesday rejected what was expected to be a routine temporary extension of anti-terrorism Patriot Act provisions when Democrats and about two dozen conservative Republicans balked at a fast-track procedure. Republicans, still searching for their footing after assuming control in January, were also forced to pull a trade assistance bill from the floor after conservatives raised objections. They found themselves mediating other internal fights as well.

Speaker John A. Boehner conceded that the fledgling majority was encountering turbulence. "We have been in the majority four weeks," Mr. Boehner said. "We are not going to be perfect every day."

There's your understatement of the day. 

Now, Washington has a way of corrupting everyone who steps foot in it, and it's likely that some of these supposedly principled conservatives, many of them Teabaggers of some variety, will ultimately cave. They may want to stand for their extremist right-wing ideals, but such extremism generally doesn't go over well in Congress, not least when you have to compromise to get anything done and when you have to bring home some bacon to win re-election votes.

But what these two votes tell me is that the Tea Party is very much for real not just as a loosely coordinated "movement" at the grassroots level but within the Republican Party in Washington.

The fraying of party unity, if not of a scale or intensity that imperils Mr. Boehner's ability to advance the main elements of his agenda, nonetheless stood in sharp contrast to the record of Republicans in remaining remarkably united against President Obama and the Democrats over the past two years. The infighting foreshadowed potential difficulties for Republicans in holding their troops together for clashes with the White House and the Democratically controlled Senate as well as their ability to corral reluctant Republicans to vote to increase the federal debt limit.

Yes, Republicans like order and stability and are awfully good at being a united front against Democrats, but how long will that last in the current Congress, what with the competing priorities of the leadership, the more conservative (and rigidly ideological) rank and file (including the new Teabaggers), and renegades looking to advance various personal interests, with Obama rising again in the polls and looking extremely strong (along with a strengthening economy), and with Republicans already at each other's throats in anticipation of 2012?

This series -- Elephant Dung -- is about highlighting the divisions within the Republican Party. Much of the time, the divisions are personal, with one leading figure attacking another (often Sarah Palin), but what these latest developments in the House show is that the divisions are also political and ideological, with the various constituencies of the party, usually at peace with one another, eagerly vying for supremacy in the wake of the party's reacquisition of power (at least in the House). There have been such divisions before, there always are to some degree, but what makes their emergence more threatening this time is the rise of the Tea Party, which came out of 2010 with a sense of arrogant righteousness that makes it feel entitled to get its way and therefore not to have to compromise not just with Democrats but even with other elements of its own party, the GOP, mostly notably the less rigidly ideological establishment represented by the likes of John Boehner and Mitch McConnell. 

And I think we ain't seen nothin' yet.