Thursday, January 3, 2013

Can Obama exploit divisions in the House Republican Party?

One of my favorite subjects is factions and the nature if divisions within American politics, and especially with American political parties. Very smart polisci guy John Judis has a piece in the New Republic that includes an analysis of the current divisions with the nation Republican Party - especially among Republicans in the House of Representatives. Remember that since House members are elected from relatively small districts, they are more likely to represent smaller, more ideologically clear constituents.

Judis argues that the compromises Obama made in the recent fiscal cliff deal - where certain issues like sequestration and dealing with the debt ceiling were postponed for two months - were designed to allow him to exploit these divisions when it comes time to negotiate. We will see whether his analysis is correct soon enough, but for now this seems to be a good way to understand the nature of House Republican Caucus. Remember that a party in Congress is only powerful if they are unified. Democrats made gains in the recent election and if a dozen or so Republicans vote with them on issues where they are unified - they win.

Here's Judis' full article, and here is his look at the three key divisions within the party in the House:

There are at least three different kinds of divisions that have become visible. First is between the Senate and the House. Senate Republicans, who are in a minority, have proven more amenable to compromise on fiscal issues. Unlike most Republican House members, many senators can’t count on being re-elected by solid Republicans majorities. McConnell himself comes from a state where Democrats still hold most of the state offices.  

Secondly, there is a regional division in the party between the deep South, which contains many of the diehard House Republicans, and the Republicans from the Northeast, industrial Midwest, and the Far West. In the House vote on the fiscal cliff, Republican House members from the deep South opposed it by 83 to 10, while Republicans from the Northeast favored it by 24 to one, and those from the Far West by 17 to eight. After the Republican leadership refused to bring a Sandy hurricane relief bill to the floor before the end of the session – effectively killing it –  New York Republican Peter King called on New York and New Jersey Republicans to withhold donations to the GOP. New Jersey Governor Chris Christe blew his top at the House Republicans.


Third, there is a division among Republican lobbies, political organizations and interest groups that surfaced in the wake of the election and once again this week. It’s not easy to define, but it runs between pro-business conservatives, on the one hand,  and the right-wing libertarians of the Tea Party and Club for Growth and their billionaire funders. Grover Norquist and Americans for Tax Reform gave their approval the Senate bill. The Chamber of Commerce grudgingly endorsed the final bill, and the National Federation of Independent Business said the tax provisions were acceptable. The Club for Growth, the Koch Brothers’ Americans for Prosperity, FreedomWorks (which itself has fallen under the sway of its most ideological elements), and the Tea Party Patriots opposed any compromise. 

These divisions don’t necessarily augur the kind of formal split that wrecked the Whig Party in the 1850s. Nor do they suggest widespread defection of Republicans into the Democratic Party as happened during the 1930s. There is still far too much distance between, say, McConnell and Democratic Majority Leader Harry Reid. But they do suggest that a process of erosion is under way that will weaken the Republicans’ ability to maintain a united front against Democratic initiatives. That could happen in the debates over the sequester and debt ceiling if Obama and the Democrats make the kind of public fuss that they did over fiscal cliff. 


This analysis applies only to Republicans in the US House. Texas Republicans are far more unified, so we will see little division among members of the Texas delegation - they are ideologically very similar. Same goes for the Texas House, though the nature of local issues makes divisions far more likely in the Texas Legislature, but - with some exceptions - for local policy reasons, not ideological ones. So this analysis does not apply to internal state politics.