Ignore the punish at the polls bit. Before that and relevant to the op, who becomes the Speaker and how does that person get elected to the spot with ten of the GOP declaring themselves indie?
And now the NYT is taking the first steps of discussing this what-if.
Yes? And how would that “backlash” manifest itself? What would it result in?
Let’s go back to first principals.
The Speaker is whoever can muster 435/2+1 votes. Strictly speaking, party affiliation doesn’t matter. Typically in a two-party system there’s enough party cohesion that the majority party can select somebody to their liking and the minority party gets to watch and put up with the outcome, having no influence.
We are (probably) entering an era of what’s *de facto *a three-party House. The Ds being the largest single party, but the two right-leaning parties forming a majority. I’ll label the two right-leaning parties the Es for the traditional Establishment small-r republicans and the Ts for the Tea Partiers and Trumpists. Those last two groups aren’t synonymous, but they have a lot of overlap, especially along the dimension I’m about to discuss.
In my formulation, the Es and Ts like one another only a bit more than they like the Ds. Mutual suspicion runs high. On some topics the the Es and Ts will easily make common cause; on others they’ll be sworn enemies. Mature (mostly E) participants can do give-and-take; immature (mostly T) participants will live by “my way or the highway.”
IMO the reality of geographic sorting is that many congressional districts are now “safe seats” for one or the other of the Ts vs. Es and almost as unwinnable for the other (E vs T) as they are for the Ds. Which leads to the conclusion that an E legislator fears being primaried along E lines, not along T lines. And vice versa.
Selecting the Speaker in that environment resembles selecting a PM in a 3 (or more) party parliamentary system. So let’s look there for precedents.
The thing that most closely resembles a PM assembling a multi-party cabinet in exchange for support is the Speaker influencing who gets congressional committee appointments. Albeit those aren’t in the Speaker’s gift to nearly the degree they are the typical PM’s.
The fact the US has scant experience in coalition politics suggests to me this will more closely resemble forming an Israeli cabinet than, say, the fairly recent Tory/LibDem cabinet of 2010. IOW, gonna be a noisy contentious fight on the surface that conceals a murderous war under the covers.
IMO how this plays out with who depends a lot on which specific legislators win which specific districts. The larger and safer the T faction, the more unpredictable the outcome. A critical question will be the narrative that emerges from the overall election. Is T-ism seen as a spent force, a one-time anomaly? Or is it seen as a surging new force in politics; one poised to perhaps displace E-ism? Both E & T legislators will be handicapping which way that flow is moving as they decide who to stake their 2-year terms on with an eye to their own re-election in 2018.
What incentive does Paul Ryan have not to accept whatever demands are made of him from the Freedom Caucus?
I don’t agree with a central point of this analysis.
A lot of right wing conservative are going to be less demanding if the Republicans have a very small majority than they were when the Republicans had a much bigger one. (Especially if the notion of some sort of power sharing with the Democrats is on the table.) So you can’t just extrapolate from the level of opposition Ryan faced in becoming Speaker to what might happen if the Republicans lost a bunch of seats.
For some reason posters seem to be assuming that the lessened majority weakens Ryan’s bargaining position, and thus strengthens his opponents. ISTM that the opposite is true.
Some of their demands would piss off Establishment Republicans. They are still in the minority. A new Politico article discusses the current disarray in the Freedom Caucus over Ryan but also mentions:
LSLGuy, first one quibble. Not 435/2+1 votes but a majority of those voting. Thus could win with less than 218 if some abstain.
Otherwise I pretty much concur that the GOP is functionally fractured into those, as you label them, E and T parties, but even within those parties no assurance of great party discipline meaning ability to deliver the group as a whole in return for certain concessions. In Israel they can deal knowing that Livni can deliver all of Hatnuah, Herzog all of Labor, and so on. In our House? Not within the T group anyway. And in the face of some concessions would not be in the E group either.
That latter bit addressing Richard Parker’s question. Besides the fact that Ryan wants to actually get some things done and that completely caving to Freedom Caucus demands would completely block that ambition, is that even if he did, enough T members would still likely withhold their support that he could not win. And some E members would resent the minority demands enough that they’d withhold as well. Again, the hypothetical assumes a thin enough “GOP” majority that there is little room for any defection from either E or T members.
F-P we are not talking about the standard order right wing conservatives. Many of those are likely more in the E group that the T group even. We are speaking about if not true believers then those whose careers are predicated upon positioning themselves as such, to the “no compromise” ethos. Some who feel that the lack of enthusiastic support of Trump by some of the E group must be punished. Interesting thing about the desire to punish out of a sense of being wronged - we will do so even at great cost to our own well being. Moreover I think some of the E group fears or at least dislikes the T group more than they do any Clinton agenda.
Oh, eta about the abstain bit. I can imagine a scenario in which many E group abstain and therefore allow a moderately centrist D to win a majority of those who voted without hitting the 218 mark but without them having to vote for a Democratic Speaker.
Most of these people are those who preach - and generally believe - that the conservative brand would attract more support if they acted on their consciences, unlike those cowardly RINOs. (Much the same as their counterparts on the Left, including many fine SDMB members.) But if their intransigence actually leads to some sort of power-sharing arrangement with the Democrats, as you envision, they will be killed.
I don’t think Ryan wants to actually get some things done. But even if he did, he must know that he won’t be able to do so regardless of what deals he makes for his speakership. Even if you paint him as optimistically as the facts allow, the best case scenario is that we wants to make policy and the way to do that is to lay low and keep the House majority until they get the Senate back. I don’t think he has any incentive to fight the Ts.
In my mind, the only issue is whether the Es will defect, as opposed to just threatening to do so. What do they stand to gain? The defector Ts stand to gain because they benefit politically by making trouble, regardless of the consequences. I don’t think defector Es get the same benefits, presuming their districts reflect their E-ish-ness. So what’s in it for them? I would have thought their best strategy would also be to just lay low. Maybe the Freedom Caucus forces them to take some tough votes by setting up bad rules. But that seems like Twentieth Century political thinking to me. How many House races this year turned on the candidates voting records?
Agree with much of Richard Parker’s comments just above. A quibble to two …
Ryan (or any E speaker) can still accomplish some policy in the face of a D Senate. Mostly by passing bills that sound plausible but which die a fiery death in the D-controlled Senate. By so doing Ryan moves the Overton window, forces the news media agenda, and can more readily label the Ds as the obstructionists over the “reasonable” E-led House.
Better yet if the House can pass something GOP-reasonable, then have the Senate defang the worst of it and pass it to the President in the name of bipartisanship and “getting things done”. A concerted E effort to spin the final outcome as restraining the worst of the Ds and getting their “victory” into permanent binding legislation as opposed to just temporarily blocking D ambitions via obstructionism will be persuasive to some E voters.
To be sure he’s not going to win many standing ovations from the Ts over this.
Agree overall that the $64billion question coming out of the election is whether the Rs as a whole embrace the idea that they need more radicalism to win, or that they need less radicalism to win. IMO the truth is that they need less at the presidential level, less in the E districts, and more in the T districts. And some districts sitting on the E/T boundary could go either way next time.
As hard as squaring a circle is, it’s even harder to square a wildly scalene triangle. Gonna be entertaining to say the least.
That approach works much much better for Democrats than for Republicans, largely due to media bias, IMHO.
Because everything depends on how the media spins it. If Party A passes something that has no chance of passing due to opposition from Party B, is that Party A “getting things done” and Party B “being obstructionist”? Or is it Party A wasting time on pointless partisan fighting and Party B refusing to yield to that tactic? Depends on who you sympathize with, IME.
The Republican House passed all sorts of things that had no chance of passing the Senate, e.g. multiple repeals of the ACA, and I don’t recall it ever being depicted in the manner you describe.
Is there any bill that would get a GOP House majority that, when rejected by the Senate, will make the Senate look bad? I’m having trouble imagining it.
Tax cuts? Either the Senate will pass 'em, or they’re big enough to be unpopular.
Ending Dodd-Frank/Obamacare/CFPB? Senate will reject without political consequence.
What’s on the GOP agenda that is popular nationally and that the Senate wouldn’t pass?
What I take away from this discussion is that the House cannot do anything until a speaker is selected. Does that include counting the presidential electors’ ballots? If they fail to count them, what happens?
Aside from that (oh and the small matter of the budget) the House hardly needs a speaker since it does nothing anyway. I guess it would prevent them from passing more bills repealing Obamacare.
You’ve both got a point if we consider the media (F-P) and the electorate (RP) to be a single mass. IMO they’re not. Or at least not any more.
IMO the E goal ought to be to drift a bit left and capture the many centrists who’ve become reluctant Ds over the last decade-plus. Oddly enough, if there is a meaningful E/T split within the commonly-held narrative, that gives the Es the freedom to stop their futile chase of T-legitimacy.
Meantime, the E narrative, spun in the E-centric press / social media / blogosphere / pulpits, is about them getting stuff done as I described. Yes, the hardover Bernie-esque leftists and the Ts will both be denouncing the Es to the skies in their respective echo chambers. For essentially opposite crimes against humanity.
The mainstream D press and its echo chamber will be loudly skeptical out of habit if nothing else. But the softer edges there may well soften over time. Again with constant loud cheerleading from the left edge of the E press and its echo chamber.
For sure, if the Es hope to have significant influence on the national scale they’re going to need to find growth & support wherever they can. I’m *not *suggesting this is a guaranteed winning strategy for them; I *am *suggesting it’s the least bad strategy available.
In 15 years the Es may be like the Lib/Dems were in 1990-2005 Britain. Both in terms of location on the spectrum = centrist but with oddball priorities and in terms of national impact = close to nil.
n/m
I don’t think that there is any way a Democrat would be speaker if the house is majority Republican. Republicans take party voting block unity much more seriously than Democrats do, and any Republican who voted for a Democrat as speaker might as well change his party affiliation, as he would have no future within his party.
I think most likely something would be worked out within the Republican party as an obviously dysfunctional Republican Congress over the long haul isn’t good even for the freedom caucus, and I don’t see Democrats lending a hand to help them out of the mess they made. If there is any cross party line votes, I suspect it will be Democrats who just want to get back to work voting for a moderate Republican after having been granted massive concessions, by an entirely discreditied Republican party.