Insecure intramajorities
The House speaker dilemma is the culmination of years of democratic dysfunction
It’s been a while since I’ve last posted. Things are busy but going well abroad! I’ve wanted to write a more in-depth post for a while, and I finally had an opportunity to this weekend. Moving forward, you should expect regular content again. As always, thank you for reading.
The House leadership crisis has just entered its third week, which is particularly troubling since the House cannot debate on spending bills until a new speaker is chosen. Aid for Israel cannot pass without a functioning House. Nor can Congress deliberate a bill to fund the government, which will shut down on November 17th unless something changes.
I do not know how this saga will end, nor do I have the unwarranted confidence to pretend that I do. However, I do like pretending that I’m a political scientist when I’m just “a guy who’s read a couple of books” – and one book I’ve been thinking about recently is Frances Lee’s Insecure Majorities (2016). Her basic argument is that when the minority party in Congress always thinks that it could become the majority, it focuses more on winning elections and less on cooperation with the governing coalition. Landmark legislation used to be bipartisan. But at some point in the last thirty years, those in the party out of power realized it was really bad to let the President or Congress or whoever pass meaningful legislation because it would hurt their chances of winning the next election.
Our politics have calcified, which means that moving forward, our elections will always be very close. And so long as we have small margins of victory and narrow majorities, it will almost always be better for politicians to obstruct than to cooperate. We can see this in the current House Democratic caucus, which has unanimously supported Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries in each of the seventeen Speaker elections. To clarify, I am not blaming the Democrats at all for the current speakership crisis. I’m just saying that in a world where Democrats are sixty seats short of the majority instead of six, they’re probably more open to cross-party collaboration.
Most of Insecure Majorities focuses on interparty dynamics. But the internal revolt within the Republican caucus suggests a new lens to which Lee’s analysis applies – within the majority party. Just as Democrats have no reason to make the majority’s lives easier, neither do far-right members of Congress. It’s a lot more fun to be one of eight members of a ragtag band of rebels than one of 218 members of a party without control of the presidency or the Senate. Usually, there is a countervailing incentive — you want to be a productive legislator because you can tout your accomplishments when running for re-election. But these members come from just safe districts - Matt Gaetz’s is R+19, for example - which means they’re a lot less concerned about being held responsible for Republican failures than your average House representative. The most recent round of redistricting has produced the fewest number of competitive House seats in decades. Your representatives don’t worry about getting your vote anymore! And that means that they get to do weird shit like wear a scarlet letter instead of debating legislation.
As a quick aside, this situation is especially weird because there seems to be zero long-term strategy behind the Freedom Caucus’s behavior. Normally, politicians want power because they want to achieve something with it. For example, Joe Manchin really likes being the 50th vote in the Senate because it means that he can protect his interests, like coal and energy permitting reforms. Past coalitions like the Tea Party and the Blue Dog Democrats used their membership to extract concessions from party leaders. In contrast, it’s unclear what Matt Gaetz wants to achieve with his newfound attention: some think he wants a good punditry gig, while others believe he’s setting himself up for a future gubernatorial run. Personally, I think he just feels an overwhelming compulsion to be as unlikable as humanly possible. But that’s not really political science anymore, is it?
More important than Gaetz et al.’s antics is where we go from here. The two-party system has always been frustrating for voters. And gridlock and partisanship have been eroding the legislative branch’s power for decades. But the complete breakdown of the House of Representatives is both a new low and an existential threat. No matter how this crisis ends, it will have splintered the two-party status quo badly enough to alter future Congressional dynamics. Because intraparty coalitions in the majority can avoid accountability through gerrymandering, they can escape the fundamental assumption of democracy – that the representatives should be held accountable to the people. We need to recognize these motive shifts and realize that someone that has no intention of working with Republicans should not be allowed to call themselves a Republican. The two-party system is a shield for bad-faith behavior. There are broader problems of affective polarization and gerrymandering that will prove difficult to solve. But in the short term, both parties should recognize it’s in their immediate interests to marginalize politicians that go rogue whenever they so choose.
That’s what I think the Republicans’ takeaway should be. But maybe instead, they’ll realize they need a compromise Speaker candidate and select the most popular active politician in their party: Donald Trump. Nothing would surprise me at this point.