Monday, April 1, 2024 | 2 a.m.
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Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called it “a complete catastrophe.” Texas Rep. Chip Roy told CNN “Mike was wrong” to pass a bill extending government financing with more Democrats than Republicans.
In fact, however, GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson did the right thing when he teamed with the Democrats to prevent a government shutdown. But that might not save him from the same fate that befell his predecessor, fellow Republican Kevin McCarthy — unless the Democrats bail him out.
That’s because too many House Republicans favor voting their principles, rather than accepting the compromises needed to make government work. If Johnson had followed their advice, large parts of the federal government would have shut down. Military personnel wouldn’t have been paid. Essential services would have stopped. Financial markets might have crashed.
But being right is no guarantee of survival within the faction-ridden GOP.
No sooner had Johnson succeeded in passing the measure providing $1.5 trillion in federal funding for the rest of the fiscal year than Greene filed a motion to oust the Louisiana Republican, who was elected after a weeks-long stalemate following McCarthy’s removal last fall. Her justification was Johnson’s failure to seek deeper cuts — though the votes for them were lacking in the GOP-controlled House, let alone the Democratic Senate.
With that, lawmakers went home for a two-week Easter vacation, leaving their leader in limbo amid speculation that Democrats might bail him out if Johnson takes another step anathema to the GOP’s right flank, allowing a vote on the Biden administration’s long-sought billions for Ukraine.
And the travail within the House GOP will only get worse, as the growing departure of its more institutionally minded members increases the clout of its ideological hardliners.
In a sense, what’s happening is what the famed baseball philosopher Yogi Berra used to call “déjà vu all over again.” Despite his arch-conservative reputation, Johnson has proved as pragmatic in the speakership as McCarthy.
He has ignored the GOP’s long-held adherence to the Hastert Rule — only considering measures backed by “a majority of the majority” — to pass a series of funding measures with the support of most Democrats. That climaxed with the ratification of the bipartisan agreement McCarthy reached last May with President Joe Biden to prevent a financial default.
That bipartisan pact led to McCarthy’s ouster by the same far-right faction that forced Speaker John Boehner’s resignation in 2015 and Speaker Paul Ryan’s retirement in 2018. And it could happen again in a few weeks.
The underlying reason is that congressional reapportionment designed to protect incumbents of both parties has created dozens of Republican-majority districts in which hardline GOP conservative voters elect like-minded lawmakers at a time when divided government and small congressional majorities require compromises to do the necessary business.
It has created a GOP caucus divided between its “institutional” Republicans, who are committed to ensuring that government functions while trying to reduce its size, and the “ideological” Republicans, for whom preventing action is often more important than facilitating it.
When the voters in 2022 gave Republicans control of the House with only a small majority, they ensured those divisions would hamstring that majority. Indeed, that was immediately evident in the 15-ballot spectacle that saw the GOP’s more ideological members force McCarthy to increase their power to win the speakership.
Ever since, those divisions have resulted in repeated instances in which the GOP leadership has been unable to do routine House business because it couldn’t produce the necessary majorities from its own members. And its proposals are mostly too conservative to attract Democrats.
Unfortunately, ideological domination will likely increase with the retirement of some of the House GOP’s most prominent institutionalists. They include North Carolina Rep. Patrick McHenry, the chairman of the Financial Services Committee; Wisconsin Rep. Mike Gallagher, who headed the House Select Committee on China; Washington Rep. Cathy McMorris Rodgers, chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee; and Texas Rep. Kay Granger, chair of the Appropriations Committee.
Not only have they and many others announced they’ll retire this November, but several decided to leave even sooner, presumably to escape the malfunction pervading the House.
“Electoral politics was never supposed to be a career and, trust me, Congress is no place to grow old,” Gallagher said.
Granger, the longtime Texas lawmaker and former mayor who became the first Republican woman to chair the appropriations committee, announced after that she was stepping down immediately following the budget compromise two weeks ago. Her reason was that the next round of funding infighting would almost certainly extend well past the end of her term next January.
Another possible motive: ensuring that the top GOP spot on the powerful panel goes to a like-minded institutionalist, Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, now chairman of the Rules Committee.
The GOP’s difficulties contrast sharply with the way former Speaker Nancy Pelosi held together a similarly small Democratic majority in the previous Congress to help enact an array of landmark measures.
To be fair, redistricting has given the Democrats their own divisions, between their far-left progressives and their more centrist members.
But even where they differ, most Democrats share both their party’s basic governing philosophy of using government to improve the lives of the American people — and a willingness to compromise to achieve progress.
Former President Ronald Reagan, a Republican, believed that too. But many in today’s GOP don’t.
Carl Leubsdorf is a columnist for The Dallas Morning News.
