From the New Republic, a look at the three factions within the party today:
The biggest problem with Obama’s fever metaphor is that it treats Republicans as monolithic. This wasn’t such a stretch during his first term, when the GOP calculated that relentless obstruction was the best way to undermine him, a goal they were united around. Back then, his gain was the GOP's loss, and vice versa. But with Obama having run his last campaign, the game is no longer zero-sum. Up to a point, Republicans need not fear his rising popularity, so long as they become more popular too. And this has created divisions within the Republican Party.
It’s useful in particular to sort House Republicans into three groups: moderates, pragmatic conservatives, and hard-core conservatives. The moderates have to run in closely divided districts and prefer to hew to the center when possible. The pragmatic conservatives tend to be in somewhat safer seats. But because they’re in a stronger position politically when their party is more popular, they have an interest in boosting the party’s overall image with voters. Finally, the hard-core conservatives are either jihadi extremists who value ideological purity above all, or pols who worry more about potential primary challengers than their general election opponents. They have no problem if the party is scorned nationally so long as they preserve their conservative bona fides.
This seems a good way to approach discussing the party in the US House this semester - moderates, pragmatic conservatives and hard core conservatives. I'm reasonably sure this dichotomy does not apply to the US Senate or the Texas Legislature. It might be useful at some point to not only figure out which members of Congress fit each label, and understand why this is the case.
The NYT hits a similar theme and describes the emergence of what it calls the Vote No/ Hope Yes Caucus:
The Vote No/Hope Yes group is perhaps the purest embodiment of the uneasy relationship between politics and pragmatism in the nation’s capital and a group whose very existence must be understood and dealt with as the Republican Party grapples with its future in the wake of the bruising 2012 elections.
Ron Bonjean, a Republican strategist and once the top spokesman for J. Dennis Hastert, a Republican and former House speaker, described the phenomenon thus: “These are people who are political realists, they’re political pragmatists who want to see progress made in Washington, but are politically constrained from making compromises because they will be challenged in the primary.”
It seems that an emerging group of members of Congress want to overcome the dysfunction that has vexed the institutions recently. We will see how successful they are in doing so soon enough.
