Rather than continue to battle with the relatively new House “Freedom Caucus,” John Boehner decided to announce the end of his tenure as Speaker, leaving the door open for somebody else to take the reins. Kevin McCarthy, thought by many to be a certain successor, dropped out, citing an inability to win on the House floor. A few tested the waters before a panicked mass tried pushing the job on once-conservative hero Paul Ryan. The conservative right rebelled, and it’s not clear at this point if he’ll consider running for the largely thankless job.
How we got to this point, strangely, has its roots in the breakdown of appropriations bills and “regular order.”
Since taking back the House in 2010, and as the GOP majority has grown, the more conservative wing of the party—aided by activist groups, think tanks, and partisan publications—has demanded more wins. They didn’t get them.
It’s unclear how many wins were achievable, or how winning would even be defined. But the clarion call for more wins grew to a steady drumbeat after the GOP took back the Senate in 2014.
With the breakdown in the appropriations process, the potential for legislative victories is greatly diminished. The opportunity to determine government priorities and spending levels in 12 bills has generally been reduced to one or two yearly opportunities for a legislative fight.
Boehner, reluctantly, gave the conservative wing the fight they wanted in 2013: A showdown over Obamacare funding. It resulted in a shutdown that yielded minor changes. Obamacare has been funded by Congress ever since and nobody looks back at the episode as a win for Republicans, other than that it didn’t damage their electoral prospects in 2014.
The latest issue has been Planned Parenthood. Hoping to capitalize on the massive unpopularity of the gruesome Planned Parenthood videos being released, the next shutdown showdown was the conservative wing’s opportunity to take away grant money given to the abortion provider.
Only Boehner didn’t bite and conservatives recoiled, with Rep. Mark Meadows renewing a call for Boehner’s ouster.
The goal of the House Freedom Caucus, in theory, is to be the conscience of conservative governance. In practice, that conscience, like an ideologically pure angel on one shoulder (opposed by a squishy establishment RINO devil on the other) is supposed to do big things and keep the House on a conservative track.
It hasn’t worked out that way. Whether that’s Boehner’s fault, theirs, or the rules of the Senate, is a topic of debate.
Some House conservatives, like Trent Franks, says that the “primary cause of the division in the House is the filibuster in the Senate.”
On its face, this theory seems odd, since amending or abolishing the filibuster would likely yield one thing: lots of vetos. But there is some logic behind it. For starters, it would make a veto-happy president look like “the bad guy” and, were regular order restored, it gives conservatives more opportunities to wage fights on a whole host of issues.
With less than two years in his presidency to go, and no hope of a second-term big bipartisan achievement on the horizon, it seems President Obama would be happy to play the role of bad guy.
Overriding a veto, as outlined in the Constitution, wouldn’t change, of course. So, if Franks’s opinion is correct, and the filibuster is the reason House conservatives are mad, would outcomes be any different without it?
Likely not, at least for big-ticket issues like Obamacare funding. A bill that lacks the votes to overcome a filibuster with a 60-vote threshold would not likely yield 13 Democratic votes needed to get two-thirds of all Senators needed to override a veto. The Keystone XL pipeline, an early test vote in the newly-led GOP Senate, was instructive. With solid Republican backing, the veto override drew eight Democrats, five short of what was needed.
It’s been nearly a decade since Congress passed, and the president signed, all 12 appropriations bills: it last happened in fiscal year 2006. Even then, continuing resolutions were needed as a stopgap to get it done. Since 1977, Congress has only passed all 12 appropriations bills “on time” (read: not requiring a CR) four times.
While Congress hasn’t been perfect or on time in dealing with appropriations in the past 40 years, lately things have taken a turn for the worse.
Democrats took over Congress in 2007, near the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, and that’s when regular order really began to break down. Six of the normal 12 appropriations bills were passed. The rest were rolled together into an omnibus spending bill that conservatives criticized.
In 2008, that number dwindled to two, with Bush vetoing one and signing another. The rest of the spending bills were packaged together.
With the exception of fiscal year 2010—the last time a budget resolution was agreed to, and when seven appropriations bills became law—it’s been continuing resolutions and budget deals ever since. Sequestration has roiled and angered both sides.
In 2011, Paul Ryan became chairman of the House Budget committee. The GOP-led House’s attempts at restoring regular order were rebuffed by the Senate, so Ryan teamed with Democratic counterpart Patty Murray in the Senate that year to come up with a two-year spending bill that recently expired.
The expiration of Murray-Ryan led to the charge to tie continued funding of the government to the defunding of Planned Parenthood.
So here we are. A lame duck speaker, a lame duck president, and a GOP majority unsure of what to do, or who to lead them. If some get their way, the filibuster may be the next casualty. And once it’s gone, it’s likely gone forever.
