The Tea Party is not interested in compromise

That's the theme of a handful of recent stories. Here are a couple examples

- ‘People don’t fully appreciate how committed the tea party is to not compromising'
- The Tea Party Doesn’t Want Compromise; It Wants Surrender

Most highlight a recently published book which tries to detail how Tea Party members are distinct from other Republican Party identifiers. The authors uses surveys and other methods to determine that Tea Party members are far more likely to be reactionary (take may country back) and conspiratorial than other Republicans.

- This focus group report on Tea Party members hits the same point.

Some quotes from the book's author: 

So if you look at this postwar discourse in the National Review Online you have some content about limited government, some about social conservatism, and some about national security. That content accounts for 76 percent of that National Review online. Now if you look at the Tea Party Web sites, that only accounts for 30 percent. Then there’s this conspiratorial discourse Hofstadter talks about that says government is really trying to bring about socialism, etc. That’s only about five percent of what you find at the National Review. On tea party Web sites it’s about a third.

So it’s not just that we’re seeing results like 76 percent of tea partiers want to see Obama fail. We also ask if people think Obama is destroying the country. We asked this question of all self-identified conservatives. If you look at all conservatives, 35 percent believe that. If you look at tea party conservatives and non-tea party conservatives, only six percent of non-tea party conservatives believe that vs. 71 percent of tea party conservatives.

So to draw this together, the reason people should believe us is we have disparate data sources that collapse on the same answer. It’s that these people are not the traditional, mainstream conventional conservatives. If you look at tea party conservatives, or as we call them in the book, reactionary conservatives, they don’t want change at all. They want to go back in time.

. . . You’ve got about 52 members of the Republican conference who are affiliated with the tea party in some official way. That’s a bit less than a quarter of all House Republicans. That’s enough in the House. They refuse to compromise because, to them, compromise is capitulation. If you go back to Hofstadter’s work when he’s talking about when the John Birch Society rode high, he talks about how conservatives would see people who disagree as political opponents, but reactionary conservatives saw them as evil. You can’t capitulate to evil.

Though the players may not be willing to compromise, the governing system may be forcing it to anyway.

A lengthy but worthwhile read from Jonathan Rauch:

A funny thing happened on the way to legislative gridlock and fiscal meltdown in the past few years. In paralyzed, polarized Washington, where Democrats refuse to reduce spending without revenue increases that Republicans peremptorily reject, Democrats have accepted spending cuts, Republicans have accepted tax increases, and deficits have come down.

It is true that all of that happened in an ugly, piecemeal fashion, with the two parties lurching from one self-created crisis to another. At one stage, Republicans seemed willing to default on the national debt rather than compromise; at another, an automatic "sequestration" cut spending in what everyone agreed was a nonsensical fashion.

Instead of joining hands in the grand bargain so ardently desired by pundits and much of the public, Congress and President Obama fought their way through a series of stopgaps, each of them greeted as disappointing if not appalling.

Yet the results bear pondering. The cumulative effect of Washington's serial muddling has been to stabilize the national debt as a share of gross domestic product over the coming decade, according to Congressional Budget Office projections. The resulting level, by many accounts, is still too high, and more remains to be done about long-term increases in health-care spending and other entitlement costs. But the near-term debt emergency is over.

To get here, Congress cut spending by about $2.6 trillion over ten years, and raised taxes by about $700 billion (according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities). After adjusting for padding and assorted gimmicks on the spending side, that ratio of spending cuts to tax increases looks remarkably close to the ratio of between 2-to-1 and 3-to-1 recommended by many of the mainstream economists and pundits who called for a grand bargain.

And at least as important, all of that fiscal tightening happened at a pace that slowed but did not abort a delicate economic recovery. Too much deficit reduction would have caused a recession, aggravating the debt problem; too little would have left the underlying crisis untended. Unlike Europe, America seemed to have gotten both the pace and the magnitude of the fiscal adjustment about right.

In short, the system acquitted itself quite well, and better than any of the individual actors within it — steering a course between hostile political factions and dangerous economic outcomes. Somewhere, James Madison is smiling.

Figuring out the factions in today's US House Republicans Conference

A couple articles attempting to ferret out the conflict between the US House and the President describe the internal workings - factions and motivations - within the House Republican Conference.

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.

Some thoughts on compromise

A worthwhile review of two books on the subject. It would be useful to consider, every step in take in this class, about why compromise is so difficult, and the degree to which this is - and possibly isn't - an obstacel to good government. 

Abolitionists: The Lunatics of the 1850s

Maybe we shouldn't sell nutbags short. And maybe compromise is overrated.

The Tax Deal as Stimulus

From the NYT:

A year ago, President Obama and the Democrats made the mistake of assuming that an economic recovery was under way. This week’s deal to extend the Bush tax cuts shows that the White House’s top priority is avoiding the same mistake again — even if it has to upset many fellow Democrats in the process. |

Mr. Obama effectively traded tax cuts for the affluent, which Republicans were demanding, for a second stimulus bill that seemed improbable a few weeks ago. Mr. Obama yielded to Republicans on extending the high-end Bush tax cuts and on cutting the estate tax below its scheduled level. In exchange, Republicans agreed to extend unemployment benefits, cut payroll taxes and business taxes, and extend a grab bag of tax credits for college tuition and other items.

Alexander Hamilton, Toxic Assets, and the Location of the Nation's Capitol

While discussing the financial crisis in class, I've tried to make the point that there is nothing new under the sun. The following op-ed from the Boston Globe (and an approving second from Salon) reminds us that this is true for the current dilemma over how to handle toxic assets. Alexander Hamilton, it turns out, had to deal with what we now call toxic assets when he was Treasury Secretary:

When he took office the new republic was drowning in a sea of wild financial speculation and crushing debt from the Revolution. To pay off these obligations the 13 states and the Continental and Confederation Congresses printed paper money to the point where it had become worthless. When the printing press could no longer suffice, they resorted to borrowing funds. Altogether by the time Hamilton took office the states and the federal government owed more than $77 million, a sum roughly equivalent to more than 10 times the government's budget. In a decade and a half of incessant printing and borrowing, these obligations had been sold, resold, bartered, and bundled so many times that no one understood their "real" value. Unless Hamilton could bring sense to this financial mess the republic might collapse.

Hamilton proposed that regardless of their "real" value the federal government should assume these debts at their face value. Southerners saw this as a power grab by northern bankers and merchants aimed at enhancing the power of the federal government over the states. Worse, they argued, it would reward greed and double dealing.

Speculators would make out like bandits, and since they tended to live in northern states, so would the north in general. So southern senators and representatives could kill the deal if they wanted, but he goes on to remind us that a solution was arranged in a dinner with Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison. In exchange for their agreement to not actively oppose the proposal, Hamilton would support placing the nation's capital in Virginia.

The article points out the importance of compromise in order to solve major problems, but also -- though the author does not state this outright -- that speculators tend to get what they want. Remember that one of the major objectives of nationalization, by which I mean swapping out the Articles of Confederation for the Constitution, was to decrease the risk associated with business speculation. Again, there is nothing new under the sun.