Paul Ryan's Unified Republican Government Is Coming Apart at the Seams
“Welcome to the dawn of a new, unified Republican government,” said a beaming Paul Ryan, just over a week after Donald Trump’s improbable 2016 win delivered control of the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives to the GOP for the first time in over a decade. Eyebrows arched in an expression composed of equal parts glee and incredulity, the House speaker allowed himself a brief moment of public self-reflection. “It feels really good to say that, actually.”
One year later, that unified Republican government is on the verge of imploding. Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell have been unable to pass a regular appropriations bill for 2018, relying instead on a series of continuing resolutions since September to keep the government’s doors open for a few weeks at a time. Now, however, both parties' appetite for these stopgaps has disappeared. Barring a last-minute breakthrough, on Friday at midnight, a government controlled by the same political party will shut itself down for the first time in modern American history.
A government shutdown, like all government shutdowns, would be a disaster by any standard. Hundreds of thousands of non-essential federal employees would be furloughed, and an even greater number would likely continue working while their paychecks are suspended indefinitely. After the October 2013 shutdown, the Office of Management and Budget estimated that the two-week affair cost the government some $2 billion in lost productivity, while the White House Council of Economic Advisors blamed it for the loss of 120,000 private-sector jobs, too.
The problem for Ryan and McConnell looks like this: A spending bill requires only a simple majority in the House of Representatives, which means that Ryan, in theory, can pass something without needing any members of the minority party to cross the aisle. Once it gets to the Senate, though, a bill needs 60 votes to end a filibuster, and in that chamber, Republicans hold 51 seats.
This is the gap that keeps the powers that be on Capitol Hill awake at night. Anything the GOP passes in the House, where Republicans have no incentive to give an inch to their functionally-powerless counterparts, will be too far to the right to pass the Senate. Normally, the solution for McConnell would be to dial back the House's bill a few notches until a handful of moderate Democrats agree to sign off, too. But each one of those proposals has lost too many Republicans to have a shot at making it to the president's desk. If a solution exists that can earn the necessary Democratic support in the Senate and satisfy Republican lawmakers in both chambers, McConnell and Ryan have yet to find it.
How did we get from Ryan’s euphoric welcome to a government paralyzed by its ruling party’s inability to manage itself? The short answer is that this Republican Party is no longer the Republican Party, inasmuch as that term once referred to a cohesive group of people who shared a similar ideology for how government should work. No party is a monolith, of course. But this majority is a series of particularly uneasy alliances between people whose interests, until now, have overlapped just enough to make it expedient for them to share a label. It is an electoral majority, but as the shutdown debate makes clear, it is not a governing one.
The 2008 election of Barack Obama introduced the last period of unified government in the United States, with Democrats winning so many contests in such a convincing manner that many wondered aloud if the Republican Party would have to tack sharply to the middle of the ideological spectrum in order to avoid going the way of the Whigs. The GOP answered those questions in convincing fashion two years later, riding a wave of anti-Obamacare and anti-bailout sentiment to pick up 63 House seats—the largest midterm elections shift since the Great Depression—and securing a majority in the lower chamber that it has yet to relinquish.
Many of these new lawmakers were not like Republicans of old. They were Tea Partiers, members of a nascent far-right faction that solicited the support of deficit watchers, libertarians, immigration hawks, values voters, jingoists, “Don’t tread on me” types, birther conspiracy theorists, and other groups unhappy with the direction in which they believed the GOP was moving, all huddled together under the same big tent. Sarah Palin, the first politician with a national profile who managed to appeal to each of these constituencies, went on to become a sort of patron saint of the movement after her ticket’s loss in 2008. Upstart Tea Party candidates ousted establishment Republicans in primaries (goodbye, Bob Bennett) and beat favored Democrats in general elections (hello, Scott Brown), relying on grassroots enthusiasm to overcome their lack of national party dollars. Aspiring politicians learned in 2010 that even in an era of Democratic power, by striking just the right balance of fiscal conservatism, limited government, and tacit bigotry, they could cobble together enough support to put their candidacies over the top.
While Tea Party mania subsided after 2010 and 2012, the underlying sentiments are still very much around. Senators like Ted Cruz and Rand Paul and Mike Lee have emerged as relatively young and buzzy GOP voices who are famously unafraid to ignore McConnell’s directives, and the 31 identified members of the ultra-right House Freedom Caucus—all but five of whom were elected in 2010 or later—were basically able to scuttle Paul Ryan’s first Obamacare repeal attempt by themselves in March. The presidency of Donald Trump, who took five years to go from unofficial leader of the birther movement to Republican nominee for the White House, is possible because of the secrets to winning elections that the the Tea Party unlocked.
This emergent path to victory—when in doubt, tilt right—has been great for the candidates who followed it all the way to Washington. But over the past year, it has been a disaster for Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, the two men tasked with getting the various factions in the same room and convincing them to agree on something. “The House Freedom Caucus votes almost universally against any spending bills,” says a former Republican member of the House Appropriations Committee. “And if you lose their votes, you can’t pass bills unless you get Democrats, too.” For years, the party's bomb-throwers worked so diligently to erect roadblocks to President Obama’s agenda that they never bothered to agree on an agenda of its own. In 2016, Ryan and McConnell earned the keys to the car, but to their surprise, they’re still fighting for control of the steering wheel.
Because every Republican faction believes itself to be the party’s true and rightful standard-bearer, none of them have much interest in compromising with the fiscal conservatives and small-government aficionados that dominated the old Republican Party—or with anyone, really. As a result, the bitterness that some House Republicans feel for each other right now, according to Harvard Kennedy School professor David King, is probably more intense than the animosity that exists between House Republicans and House Democrats. This Republican caucus is “like a circular firing squad,” says King. “They know they have a numerical majority, but without a governing majority, they understand that they’ll be blamed” if a shutdown occurs.
The de facto requirement that Ryan gin up bipartisan support for a spending bill means that the spending bill isn’t just about spending. Most Democrats have declared that they will not vote for anything that does not protect the hundreds of thousands of young immigrants living in the United States under the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which the Trump administration has moved to dismantle. Chuck Schumer and Nancy Pelosi also badly want to reauthorize the Children's Health Insurance Program, which Republicans—embroiled in their attempts to repeal the Affordable Care Act—allowed to expire back in September.
Everyone, including Republicans, agrees that a “solution” to DACA is necessary. The reason there is no fix yet, says Columbia University political science professor Gregory Wawro, is that the GOP “does not seem to agree on what sort of solution they are willing to go along with.” Earlier this week, Paul Ryan unveiled another stopgap bill that would keep the government open, fund CHIP for six years, and buy himself some time on the immigration battles. But the inclusion of measures that would gut the Affordable Care Act did little to make Democrats, already impatient for the elusive DACA solution that Ryan keeps punting every few weeks, any more receptive to the idea of helping the embattled speaker out.
The involvement in the negotiating process of Donald Trump, who actually cheered on the prospect of a shutdown earlier this year, hasn’t made things easier. The president “doesn't seem to have a clear idea of what he will accept,” says Wawro. “While he has signaled that he wants to work with Democrats, hard-liners in the Senate appear to have dissuaded him from doing so, and he seems to be changing his position depending on whom he has spoken with most recently, or what he has seen on cable news.”
Last week, a bipartisan group of legislators hustled to the White House to present a tentative deal that they believed would avert a shutdown altogether. But when Lindsey Graham and Dick Durbin arrived to deliver the news, the Washington Post reported, they were surprised to find Trump flanked by noted anti-immigrant lawmakers Bob Goodlatte and Tom Cotton. The president was fuming. No deal, he said.
In the days that followed, while meeting attendees argued publicly about which racist, vulgar terms the president used to describe African countries and Haiti, a baffled Graham was left wondering what took place between the time he apprised an agreeable-sounding Trump of the deal and the time he arrived at the White House. “Somebody on his staff gave him really bad advice between 10 o’clock to 12 o’clock on Thursday,” he mused during a Senate oversight hearing. “Somehow,” he told reporters, “by 12 p.m. on Thursday, something happened.” Graham's frustration is understandable, but the answer to his question seems obvious: The extremists got there first.
Trump, who ran on a very expensive campaign promise to Build That Wall, isn’t acting only at the behest of Capitol Hill zealots. Even when presented with deals that have bipartisan support, says Columbia University political science professor Robert Shapiro, the president can’t deviate too significantly from what his base will accept. Given his steadfast refusal to budge on the subject, Trump might see anything less than a fully-funded wall as tantamount to accepting defeat, and at the very least, his public posturing has made it easier for Freedom Caucus-type holdouts to withstand pressure to cave from within the party. Hammering out a compromise bill in this climate, in short, would be a delicate high-wire act for even the most skilled of politicians. Donald Trump is not that.
Barring a whole lot of miraculous, last-minute changes of heart, a unified Republican government is about to shut itself down because it is incapable of getting its unruliest factions to cooperate. Prominent Republicans have already begun blaming Democrats for this development, preemptively sounding dubious alarms about the projected impact of a shutdown on the troops. “For people to hold up funding for our military for these unrelated issues,” said Ryan earlier this week, “and for deadlines that don’t even exist? That makes no sense to me.” Trump, meanwhile, has been tweeting every day that Democrats’ stance on DACA is a pretext. Schumer and Pelosi and company “will threaten ‘shutdown’” over the program, he opined on January 12, “but what they are really doing is shutting down our military, at a time [when] we need it most.”
Trump’s and Ryan’s is a losing argument made by desperate people who know they have no easy way out of their predicament. The Democrats are the minority party. They aren't capable of shutting anything down alone. If Republican leadership, despite their party's nominal stranglehold on power in Washington, find themselves in need of a little help to pass a must-pass bill, their job is to get creative and to strike a deal with their Democratic counterparts. Not so long ago, these types of across-the-aisle concessions were a vital part of the governing process.
If intra-party strife means that Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell cannot or will not do their jobs, that's a problem for everyone. But they would have no one to blame for that but themselves.
