A centrist rebellion is what Congress needs

Matthew Yglesias, Tribune News Service

If there’s one thing everyone in the House of Representatives can agree on these days, it’s that they are mad. The most radical House Republicans are angry that former Speaker Kevin McCarthy didn’t deliver on all the promises they extorted from him to give him the job in the first place. Moderate Republicans are furious that Democrats didn’t bail out McCarthy after he tempted the wrath of the radicals by agreeing to move a continuing resolution and avert a government shutdown. And Democrats are upset that the whole shutdown drama even happened at all, since it could have been avoided had McCarthy just stuck to the deal he made to resolve the debt ceiling showdown earlier this year.

It’s possible to adjudicate the balance of rage, but the simple truth is that moderates in both parties have been unduly passive — not just in this Congress, but for the last several. It’s not as if better models don’t exist. Power in the Alaska legislature, for example, is shared by a coalition of moderate Republicans acting in tandem with Democrats. Something similar happened several years ago in New York — except it was a group of moderate Democrats breaking with the majority of their party to form a caucus that controlled the state senate in tandem with Republicans. All of which raises the question: Could something like that work in Washington? First, given the current partisan makeup of the House, the speaker should clearly be a Republican. For the government to function, it would need to be someone who is willing to tell members such as Matt Gaetz to go pound sand. For that to work, the speaker would need Democratic Party votes. And to get those votes, the speaker would need to give the Democrats something.

The question is what that something should be. Here’s an idea: a guarantee that the minority leader can force a floor vote on some number of bills each session. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has called for a process that would “facilitate up-or-down votes on bills that have strong bipartisan support.” Perhaps that could simply mean he is entitled to call a vote on some set number of bills each session. It doesn’t need to be a large number, but it can’t be zero. That, after all, was the origin of the entire crisis in the first place. To become law, a spending package needs to pass the Senate (where it requires bipartisan support to get 60 votes) and be signed into law by the president. Under the circumstances, there’s no real point in worrying about what can command unanimity among House Republicans. And there’s no reason to doubt that a bill supported by Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and President Joe Biden can also get a majority in the House.

But the terms of the party cartel that govern the House meant that McCarthy wouldn’t bring a bipartisan bill to the floor for a vote. That meant a shutdown that he was going to take the blame for. Then, at the last minute, he changed course, and agreed to move a version of the bill that had bipartisan support in the Senate — except with aid to Ukraine stripped out. It’s not entirely clear why he did that — most House Republicans support Ukraine aid — but it’s possible that he was trying to bait Democrats into voting it down, so he could then blame them for the shutdown. Senator J.D. Vance even jumped the gun and tweeted: “Shout it from the rooftops: Democrats are trying to shut down the government over Ukraine. This is a national scandal.” But Democrats didn’t take the bait. As a result, there is no government shutdown, no Speaker McCarthy and, critically, no aid to Ukraine — even though most members of both parties support it.

It’s normal for a legislative majority to use its power to control the legislative agenda. But these kinds of party cartels need not block all action. The entire “Reagan Revolution” of 1981-82 took place because then-Speaker Tip O’Neill allowed the House to vote on conservative bills that were supported by a coalition of Republicans and conservative Democrats. The Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002 passed the House with 41 Republican votes and 198 from Democrats, even though Republicans held a majority and could have blocked its passage. A decade or so later, near the very end of his speakership, John Boehner moved a number of bills that his far-right Republican colleagues opposed, effectively sealing a kind of political murder/suicide pact.

Notice the change? In O’Neill’s day, the moderate members insisted that if he wanted to keep his job, he had to allow them some votes. By Boehner’s time — and even more so now under McCarthy — it’s the radicals who are making demands, while moderates are left to pick up the pieces and point fingers. To an extent this is natural. People with more moderate views tend to be moderate in temperament as well, or at least less inclined to take drastic action.