Time to Change How Congress Works
When four members of the House, which works out to 1%, can prevent the other 99% from acting, it is time to change how the parties do business.
The inability of House Republicans to pass their appropriation bills or a Continuing Resolution before the end of the fiscal year is the logical conclusion of Congress behaving like a one-party government. When four members of the House, which works out to 1%, can prevent the other 99% from acting, it is time to change how the parties do business. It’s time to return to regular order where the entire Congress participates in making policy.
One of the most consistent motivations for the authors of the Constitution was the fear of concentrated power. They set up a system of checks and balances to ensure no one branch of government, no regional faction, no ideological movement, or no political party (or interests as they called them) could dominate and dictate outcomes to the rest of the country. The Constitution was designed to promote consensus to achieve transformational change.
From that perspective, the failure of a one-party faction in Congress to do its job is precisely what the Constitution intended. The idea that Rep. Matt Gaetz could block his party, much less the entire House, from performing its essential Constitutional duties indicates that Congress should stop acting like a parliamentary government. It takes two parties to govern – as it should.
Politics has gone from being like a sport where one team wins to a war where one team tries to destroy the other. Like in combat, an army will lose if it is fighting itself. When a handful of members pull the pin from the grenade to threaten to kill their fellow soldiers, that faction needs to be neutralized. No army fighting its opponents will survive if it allows a mutinous fifth column to shoot them in the back while they are manning the front lines.
No army fighting its opponents will survive if it allows a mutinous fifth column to shoot them in the back while they are manning the front lines.
Since the 1990s, Congress has behaved like a parliament with none of the efficiencies. One party tries through Committee designs, rules, processes, and manipulation of Floor procedures to eliminate the ability of the minority party to participate in the legislative process in any meaningful way. Members of the majority party willingly surrender their policy preferences to the leadership in exchange for protection from tough votes on amendments that could hurt their chances for reelection. In political science, this is called conditional party government. Both parties have tried to use this system to affect the Congressional agenda. It only works effectively if the majority party remains cohesive.
But it has its limitations. One party rarely controls the entire process – that is, control of the presidency, a majority in the House, and a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. That trifecta has only happened three times since the end of World War II and then for only two years or less. Following the Lyndon Johnson landslide in 1964, the Democrats had the trifecta (even more impressive considering that it took 67 votes to break a filibuster then). Jimmy Carter had the trifecta for his first two years, but he could not get along with his own party and vetoed more than 30 bills passed by a Democratic-dominated Congress. Barack Obama started his presidency with a trifecta but soon lost it when Senator Edward Kennedy died and was replaced by Republican Scott Brown in the ensuing special election. Republicans have never held a trifecta in the modern era.
So, it is rare for a party to have total control in the best of circumstances. But it becomes tough for a majority to work when the party is not cohesive and has narrow majorities. If there is a dedicated fifth-column faction in the majority party, it becomes impossible for a majority to accomplish its agenda.
The Freedom Caucus gets a bad rap because some of its most prominent members have the biggest mouths. But remember that most of the Freedom Caucus supported Kevin McCarthy on each of the 15 ballots it required to elect him Speaker. There is, for instance, a big difference between Rep. Chip Roy and Matt Gaetz.
I have known Chip Roy since we were both Senate staffers. He is a legislative entrepreneur, astute, creative, and strategic. He understands the idea of leveraging a situation to maximize his impact. But he also understands the role of being an ideological bookend in the House. His job is to pull a legislative proposal as far to the ideological right as possible. He also understands that he does not get to dictate policy outcomes to the rest of Congress. The goal is to bring his party closer to his position, but at the end of the day, support the party’s agenda.
By contrast, I get fundraising emails from Matt Gaetz nearly every day. He is not the deep thinker that Chip Roy is. His is a personal aggrandizement designed to raise money for his own benefit. He sees himself in ideological messianic terms: “…should I make a motion to crush the uniparty.” He asks if he should “bring down the deep state.” He accuses the Republican leadership of “teaching kindergarten classes” because Speaker McCarthy visited with a student tour group on his way to the House Floor. His emails are full of attacks on his fellow Republicans – so much so that in one message last week, he only attacked Republicans and did not even mention President Biden or the Democrats in Congress.
There is a niche political fundraising market for Republicans who hate other Republicans. But raising money by attacking your own party takes some chutzpah (a Yiddish word that is defined as a person who murders his parents and then pleads for the mercy of the court because he is an orphan) when you want to dictate what policy your colleagues must take to prevent you from fragging them. Gaetz is not a serious legislator, but that does not mean his attention-grabbing rhetoric does not have serious consequences.
There is a niche political fundraising market for Republicans who hate other Republicans. But raising money by attacking your own party takes some chutzpah when you want to dictate what policy your colleagues must take to prevent you from fragging them.
As Rep. Don Bacon calls them, the Dysfunction Caucus seemingly has two goals. The first is to shut the government down on October 1, and the second is to hold a motion to vacate the Speaker’s Chair as soon as Speaker McCarthy finds a solution to the shutdown. Unlike the conservatives trying to negotiate, Matt Gaetz does not want a solution – he wants the attention. He knows that no one cares what Matt Gaetz wants if Congress does its job and passes a budget. He only gets the media spotlight if Congress fails. And he wants to try to force McCarthy out of the Speakership, an action he has been threatening since before McCarthy even had the job.
So what can be done? My sister-in-law had a bear on her Florida property a few years ago. Her dog barked furiously and began to chase the bear. And the bear started to run away until it dawned on him, “Hey, wait a minute, I’m a bear.” The bear stopped and turned around, gave a growl, and the dog ran off to hide.
Many of us hope that when Speaker McCarthy finally had enough and told Gaetz to “file your @$*# motion,” the bear has finally turned around.
In legislative politics, the answer to an extreme faction threatening to kill a bill is to find a credible source of votes to replace that faction. It’s called bipartisanship. This happens daily in state legislatures, county governments, and city councils. Amendments are offered to gain a majority for passage. Yes, even if that includes members of Congress in the other party. This is why Gaetz rails against the “uniparty.” He only has leverage if the Democratic party refuses to vote for the bill. Once coalitions start building to win an amendment on the Floor, Gaetz has no more leverage. His ability to prevent the 99% of Congress from passing something depends on his ability to use the Democrats as leverage. In other words, as long as the Democrats are united against the Republicans, Gaetz has power.
In legislative politics, the answer to an extreme faction threatening to kill a bill is to find a credible source of votes to replace that faction. It’s called bipartisanship. This happens daily in state legislatures, county governments, and city councils. Amendments are offered to gain a majority for passage.
You can’t fault the Democratic party for enjoying a moment of schadenfreude as Republicans are embarrassed by their own members on the House Floor, week after week. And yes, it’s not a bad strategy to follow Napoleon’s maxim: when the enemy is destroying themselves, leave them alone. But, presumably, like Republicans, Democrats came to Congress to get things done. They control the Senate and the White House, so the inability to get things done reflects poorly on their party as well. The coming government shutdown will hurt the Republicans since the public always blames the party responsible for the shutdown. But a shutdown’s severe consequences can hurt Democrats, too.
My friend, pollster David Winston, pointed out recently that the economy is teetering on the edge of a recession. The Federal Reserve has been trying to engineer a “soft landing” to their anti-inflationary policies that slow the economy down. But two shocks to our economy could push the United States into a deeper recession. Those two events are the auto workers’ strike and a government shutdown. His polling showed that during the 2013 government shutdown, a record was established for the lowest level of confidence in the Federal government ever. Only 14% approved of the country’s direction (and only 12% of independents who are the key segment in the 2024 election). A government shutdown that helps instigate a recession would likely challenge that all-time low.
It is terrible news for a president to have a recession while running for reelection. So, a recession is a threat to President Biden. But, despite the major factors of inflation, higher interest rates, and a nationwide strike of one of the U.S.’s significant manufacturers, President Biden could point towards a Republican-engineered shutdown as a cause of the recession. And that would hurt Republican chances of retaining their House majority.
In an earlier column, I wrote that Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries could change Washington by announcing that the Democrats would vote present on a motion to vacate the chair, isolating the small faction of Republican dissenters. His goal would be to get the Republicans to allow more moderate Democrats to replace the Gaetz faction on bipartisan amendments. That is how minority parties gain leverage in a legislature – they exploit divisions in the majority by joining one of the competing intraparty rivals to win a majority. Jeffries could join the Gaetz faction and try to remove McCarthy as Speaker. Undoubtedly, many Democrats would urge him to do precisely that, and Washington would hardly blink. But the move that can change Washington would be if the Democrats joined the Republican majority in marginalizing the extremists by offering bipartisan solutions.
In the end, a bipartisan vote will be needed if we ever want to see the government reopen after October 1. The Republicans do not have the same leverage as they did in the debt limit debate since a shutdown, while undesirable, is not the threat a default would be. By interjecting himself now, Jeffries gains leverage for his minority party that can lead to other bipartisan coalitions through the rest of this Congress. It is a win/win; the only losers are those without the votes to carry an amendment. This is not turning over control of the Floor to the Democrats. Nothing passes unless some Republicans support it. In reality, once the party leadership has a credible alternative source of votes, the extremists are more likely to soften their positions.
The price for House Republicans would be that they must allow the entire Congress to participate in the amendment process on the House Floor. This is called “regular order.” The purpose of a Congress – an institution where diverse representatives of the people come together to debate with and attempt to persuade their colleagues in a structured setting that requires mutual respect. The authors of the Constitution did not think Congress should work strictly on party lines like the British parliament. The original Congress did not even have political parties until late in George Washington’s second term.
In other words, the answer to the Republicans’ problem of an extreme faction blocking any progress is to behave as the Constitution designed it to behave. Open the Floor and see who can build a majority on any bill. The final bill will not be as conservative as the Republican majority is. Still, since the Democrats control the Senate and the Presidency, they will never pass an ideologically pure piece of legislation anyway.
In other words, the answer to the Republicans’ problem of an extreme faction blocking any progress is to behave as the Constitution designed it to behave. Open the Floor and see who can build a majority on any bill.
One can hear the faction accusing their opponents of not being sufficiently concerned about the deficit or out-of-control spending. But the truth is that structural deficits and rapidly increasing spending are deep problems that will require a national consensus and bipartisan leadership. One party cannot dictate an answer. It can try to persuade others that they have the right ideas, but any real solution to our deep economic problems will require Americans to work together.
And my last point is this is precisely what Americans are asking for. An August 2022 survey done for the Bipartisan Policy Center showed a bipartisan majority of voters prefer their members of Congress to work collaboratively to achieve solutions and pass legislation. Two-thirds of voters (67%) prefer their members of Congress work collaboratively to achieve solutions and pass legislation. In comparison, 22% prefer their member stick to their principles on legislation, even if it means not getting as much accomplished. This preference for collaboration spans party lines (77% Democrats, 55% Republicans).
Change requires compromise. One of the best examples is the U.S. Constitutional Convention, whose work of genius made ordered liberty possible. As historian Paul Johnson pointed out, when it came time to vote on amendments, every delegate at the convention was sometimes on the winning side and sometimes on the losing side. In other words, no one won all the time, and no one lost all the time. If it was good enough for the Founders, it should be good enough for the 118th Congress.
Terrific post. With a real majority of House Republicans appearing, if ever so slowly, marginalizing arrogant know-nothings like Gaetz, and now bipartisan Senators looking to reinstate dress codes in the Senate, this is the first day I'm feeling a little hopeful.