Congress has to contend with the reality that a key minority of its members have a vision of their jobs that abjures core legislative work as illegitimate.
The budget-process contortions in both houses of Congress just now can be a little hard to parse. A lot of them have taken the form of battles over procedure, which can get mind-numbing pretty quickly. At various times, the House has been intensely focused on rules votes and the Senate has been mired in arguments about suspending the prohibition on non-germane amendments on appropriations bills. These procedural squabbles matter, but they are ultimately proxy fights. The real battle is a dispute about how to exercise leverage in the modern Congress. It’s now happening mostly among Republicans, and it divides Republicans more starkly than Democrats in Congress, but it’s a disagreement that has been evident in both parties when they’ve had to make governing decisions in recent years.
The best way to grasp that dispute might be to break down what we’re seeing into three distinct dynamics.
The first important dynamic to understand about Congress in an age of narrow majorities is that the chamber that is harder for its majority party to manage sets the tone for the institution. In the last Congress, that was the Senate. Democrats had a narrow majority there, as they did in the House, but because of the filibuster, and of the nature of the Democratic caucus, the Senate was much harder to wrangle. Speaker Pelosi’s Democratic House majority didn’t want to do anything until the Senate acted, since whatever they did would likely be for naught. And so the House became a rubber stamp on bills that had passed the Senate, and the substantive work of Congress mostly happened in the upper chamber.
In this Congress, it is the Republican House that has the greatest trouble getting anything done, and therefore it’s the House that sets the tone. The Senate has certainly tried to assert itself some, but the demands of getting things through the House have dictated a lot.
That is really key to what is happening in the Senate this week. Senators from both parties had agreed last week (by an 85–12 vote) to get the budget process moving with a so-called “minibus,” which would combine three appropriations bills into one. The idea was to force the hand of the House a bit on spending levels. But precisely for that reason, a number of Republican senators, led by Wisconsin’s Ron Johnson, refused to provide the unanimous consent required to bundle those bills. Senate Democrats tried to suspend the relevant rule (which prevents that bundling because it restricts the kinds of amendments that can be made to appropriations bills), but didn’t have the Republican support they needed to do that.
Johnson’s opposition to bundling those bills is rooted in part in a desire to appropriate through individual bills, which would give Republicans more chances to propose amendments. But it is also very much a function of his and some other Republican senators’ desire to avoid jamming the House — on spending levels, on Ukraine funding, and on the sort of bill they end up voting on. Those senators are particularly sensitive to the needs of the House Freedom Caucus members. They don’t want to be seen to undercut those members, since the HFC is at the center of the drama that the party’s populist activists are focused on right now — a drama that has everything to do with how leverage works in Congress.
The Senate will surely try to assert itself again — whether on this bill, on Ukraine, or in general. And in a divided Congress, one house isn’t going to be a rubber stamp for the other. But it’s clear that much more can get through the Senate than the House, and that gives the House some added power and initiative. Eventually, whether in this process or in the year-end appropriations process that will likely follow, there is probably going to be some negotiation between the White House and House Republicans, and the Senate will basically need to accept what emerges. We’re very far from that now, and it may take a government shutdown and further drama to get from here to there, but that seems the likely destination.
The second dynamic to keep in mind is that everyone believes they are trying to help Congress work like it’s supposed to, but they disagree about how it’s supposed to work. This is hard for each side to believe about the other right now. The House Freedom Caucus members and their Senate allies seem to their opponents like self-destructive nihilists who don’t care about Congress, or the country. The leaders (and most members) of both parties strike those HFC conservatives as establishment hacks who just want to defend the status quo, enrich their cronies and patrons, and avoid rocking the boat.
The HFC members and their friendly senators (like Ron Johnson) are making a kind of process argument — insisting that the appropriations process should involve a dozen separate bills, each of which can be amended and debated, rather than a massive and indecipherable “omnibus” behemoth (or a few smaller but still massive “minibus” behemoths) patched together in the leadership offices and foisted on most members. Their opponents in and out of leadership are making a process argument too — insisting that legislation has to be negotiated in a divided Congress and that giving up the only leverage you have by declaring you’ll never agree to anything only helps the other party and guarantees a worse outcome.
Both groups have a point, but their different points suggest very different understandings of what is supposed to happen in Congress. Because they view their opposition as an establishment blob that just wants to make comfortable deals, some of the HFC members have come to view the legislative process itself as a form of corruption. They say they want a more open legislative process, but they fault fellow members for negotiating with Democrats at all, or for looking for deals on spending levels, which is actually what an open process would involve. They implicitly disagree with their colleagues about whether it is necessary to negotiate with the other party in order to achieve anything. Their view is that their party’s job is to avoid such negotiation, and that preventing it is how they ought to use the leverage they have as members of Congress — that this is what they owe their voters.
This is not the view of all the Freedom Caucus members, as this week has made particularly clear, but it is the view of enough of them to paralyze the party right now. It is a view with deep roots in a particular kind of Republican approach to Congress, which evolved over the four decades in which Democrats controlled the House, from 1954 to 1994. Republicans were congressionalists at the beginning of that era, but by the end of it they had transformed into presidentialists and they had come to view Congress as a den of corrupt miscreants. That attitude didn’t really change even when Republicans took control of Congress in 1994. The Contract with America was mostly an indictment of congressional corruption, and the Gingrich-era Republicans never really shook off the sense that there was something sinister about Congress working as a legislature — a venue for bargaining and accommodation.
In more recent years, this critique has melded uneasily with a criticism of overbearing leadership in both houses, which is actually a very different kind of argument. Some HFC members, like Representative Chip Roy, are advancing the latter case — a case that leadership is too strong and everyone else in Congress is too weak, which is a serious case and seems largely right to me. They want members to be able to legislate, rather than just answer to party leaders. Some of their supporters in the Senate make this case too — like J. D. Vance, who has shown himself to be a substantive and legislation-minded senator so far, willing to work with anyone from either party where there is some chance to advance his priorities. But other HFC members, like Representative Matt Gaetz, use similar-sounding process arguments as a way to denounce legislative work as such. They don’t actually want weaker leaders and stronger members, they want leaders who will enforce a more purist party line and members who will refuse to negotiate with Democrats.
So for instance, Representative Dan Bishop of North Carolina voted against the rule required to advance the Defense Appropriations bill in the House on Tuesday, and after doing so he put out a statement saying: “I took down the rule — as I vowed I would — because the Conference continues not to have moved 12 appropriations bills at the spending level agreed to in January.” But the rule he took down was a necessary step to moving one of those appropriations bills. Bishop presented his opposition to the process involved in appropriations as rooted in an insistence that this process happen, but at its core it is a recoil from the core work of legislation.
The same is true regarding the attitude of some of these members toward a cross-partisan spending deal. They treat the prospect of getting Democratic votes for a continuing resolution as a betrayal, but they are not themselves willing to vote for a measure that could actually get enacted, and so they leave their fellow Republicans with no choice but to fulfill their prophecy of betrayal. Consider what Representative Ken Buck told Punchbowl News on Tuesday about whether Speaker McCarthy was in danger of a motion to vacate the chair and remove him from the speakership:
“The thing that would force the motion to vacate is if Kevin has to rely on Democrat votes to pass a CR,” Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.) said. “I don’t think it has legs until Kevin relies on Democrats.”
Buck, however, admitted “I don’t see how we can pass the bill [a CR] without Democrat votes.”
In other words, Buck thinks the speaker should be thrown out unless he manages to do something Buck thinks is impossible.
This can easily seem irrational, but it’s more like an expression of a different understanding of the role of Congress and its members than the one that most members (and the Constitution) have. I think it’s mistaken, but it’s not incoherent. Buck, Bishop, Gaetz, and others implicitly take their job to be both expressing and acting on the view of their core constituents that the party establishment has to be resisted. That resistance is an end in itself, even if it does not achieve any substantive legislative goals. In fact, fighting and losing is a kind of confirmation of the underlying dynamic they are playing out. So for these members, it is more important to avoid being part of the Washington game — the game of making deals with people you and your voters think are destroying the country — than it is to advance any substantive agenda. Being betrayed confirms that they are right to be intransigent.
These members aren’t a majority of House Republicans, or anything close to that. They’re not even all the Freedom Caucus members, as I’ve noted. In fact, the tensions between these two kinds of Freedom Caucus members have risen to the surface a bit in this process, as when those (like Roy) who want more legislating to happen negotiated some continuing-resolution language with a group of moderate Republicans only to see it rejected by other HFC members. But because the Republicans’ majority is extremely narrow, there are enough members who don’t want the House to legislate that the House Republican conference as a whole is stuck trying to bridge these two different ways of thinking about how to be a member of Congress.
Kevin McCarthy has actually shown himself to be pretty adept at playing this game so far. He has grasped that it needs to be played in stages, because the recalcitrant HFC members want to look strong and then to look weak, and it’s possible for the leadership to give them that sequence of outcomes. But it’s a very hard game to sustain in the face of the substantive pressure to govern.
Our system of government is designed to compel partisans to work with each other. That’s one of its great strengths. But that does mean that it is a poor fit for a conception of politics in which bargaining with people you disagree with is understood to be a betrayal and a failure.
In a sense, the question at issue is: What do you get when you win a seat in Congress? The answer the Constitution suggests is that you get a seat at the table, and what happens at that table is negotiating, bargaining, and accommodation toward government action in response to public problems. You get to represent your voters in that process, and to negotiate on their behalf so that their interests are accounted for in the final outcome. That’s how representative democracy makes it possible for differences to be accommodated and addressed in our frequently divided society. Lots of people (especially on the left, but also on the right) have always been frustrated with that answer, and called for a system in which winning an election gives the majority party a mandate to act on its own. But our system doesn’t work that way; it prioritizes coalition building over policy efficiency, and rightly so.
But in our time, some populist members of both parties have implied that what you win when you win an election to Congress is a voice, and that the best and highest use of this voice involves voicing a critique of elite power, and where possible acting on that critique to obstruct and disrupt the uses of that power.
Obviously these views coexist to some degree, even within the self-understanding of individual members of Congress. But they are quite distinct views of what the institution is for, and the gap between them is at times a very practical problem for Congress, particularly when voter expectations are shaped by the more populist view.
This points to the third dynamic we can see in action this month on Capitol Hill: Electoral incentives are badly and in some respects increasingly misaligned with legislative incentives. The nature of the modern primary system means that many members of Congress are most concerned about voters who do not want them to give ground or compromise. This effectively means they find it politically dangerous to do the job the institution exists to do. This misalignment is obviously very bad for our system of government. And responding to it constructively would require us to really think about what we value about that system.
Simply put, the design of the Congress makes a significant amount of cross-partisan bargaining necessary, but the nature of the primary system (as it interacts with our polarized political culture) now makes such cross-partisan bargaining increasingly unlikely. The question for would-be reformers is which of these institutions needs to change. Should we look to change Congress so that cross-partisan bargaining is less necessary, or to change some of the incentives confronting politicians in our party system so that cross-partisan bargaining is more likely? Should our institutions lean in to the worst vices of our polarized politics, or counteract them?
Most progressives since Woodrow Wilson have argued for a Congress that requires less cross-partisan bargaining. They have sought stronger party leadership and discipline and the elimination of supermajority requirements and assorted mechanisms of restraint. Conservatives have generally disagreed, and the argument that Freedom Caucus Republicans make against the power of party leaders and in favor of something like regular order suggests on its face that they disagree too. But these very Republicans are most responsive to electoral pressure for more disciplined partisan purity and less bargaining with the other party.
Those pressures should not be mistaken for the unvarnished voice of the people. Electorates are structured by electoral institutions — the sorts of questions asked of voters often shape the kinds of answers they provide. And the contemporary party-primary system frames an electorate that too often is distinctly unfriendly to the demands of legislative work. That primary system is not sacrosanct. It is not as important — or as established or legitimate—as the constitutional system. And it is increasingly clear that enabling members of Congress to do their jobs is going to require some reforms of party primaries, and therefore of the incentives members confront.
But that is long-term work. In the meantime, Congress has once again to contend with the reality that a small but meaningful minority of its members have a vision of their jobs that abjures core legislative work as illegitimate. Speaker McCarthy has to manage his way through that challenge in stages. And it sure looks like one of those stages is going to have to be a government shutdown.