by publius
Arlen Specter claims that several Congressional Republicans are secret stimulus supporters. It’s all so very tragic – the stimulus support that dare not speak its name. Who knows if he’s correct, but it sounds very plausible to me. Especially this part:
I know it’s fashionable this week to treat the near-unanimous Republican opposition as a failure of the Democrats. But maybe – just maybe – the lockstep opposition is a symptom of a deeper problem within the Republican Party. Maybe it’s even a sign of how ideologically rigid the GOP has become.
I’ll be honest – the unanimity surprised me. I know the fiscal stewards in the GOP caucus are vigilant about spending, but the stimulus bill should have been harder to resist. For one, it has big public support. Second, it’s going to help a lot of people in a lot of struggling congressional districts. And while I understand the GOP leadership’s political tactics, it still seems weird that the virtually the entire caucus felt brave enough to vote against the bill (especially when at least some supported it).
The more likely explanation for all this comes from Specter – simply put, many of them feared a primary challenge. The specter of Toomey looms large in their heads.
Unlike Specter though, most of the remaining GOP legislators are from districts where they don’t really have to worry about general elections. To them, the only potential threat is a primary challenge now that GOP districts are fewer but more ideologically homogeneous. In these districts, it’s not what the median voter wants, but what the (*shudders*) median GOP voter wants.
But that’s not really surprising. What’s more interesting is that the more vulnerable GOP officials from moderate districts also voted against the stimulus. Indeed, for those who serve Obama districts, it was borderline irrational to oppose this bill – unless of course you’ve concluded that a primary challenge is more dangerous. Specter’s anecdote provides some support for that view. The "seething" anger at Crist provides another interesting data point in support.
So assuming that primary fears explain a lot of these votes (if you disagree with that assumption, you’ll obviously disagree with the conclusion), I think the real story here should focus on the GOP, rather than on the Democrats. The vote shows that the GOP has become so ideologically rigid and ossified that its rank-and-file is afraid to stray from the party line – or to challenge orthodoxy. (I would argue that the lockstep support for Bush stemmed from these fears as well).
Of course, lockstep submission can be an effective tactic if your leaders are doing smart things. But if they’re forcing you to take increasingly extreme positions, then that forced discipline becomes a real long-term problem both for you individually and for the party.
And even assuming the leadership’s tactics are right on this particular issue, the fear to experiment with new ideas and to embrace new policies (e.g,. Douthat-style Sam Club-ism) will ultimately cause levels of harm that more than offset whatever fleeting points the great genius Mark Halperin decides to award this week.
I realize you’ve adopted one of two valid spellings of the word, but just to achieve slightly greater distance from the unnecessary pun, shouldn’t that be “the spectre of Toomey looms large in their heads”?
Also note that while I agree with much of your post, and I think this really is an issue of pressure from some combination of the party’s base and its power brokers, I think you’re wrong to focus on Primary battles. We’re seeing the same fall into lockstep from people from districts with no Republican party (well, one person at least, Joseph Cao), from retiring lawmakers (Voinovich is one example, though I’m sure there are others), and we’re seeing the perfect example in Judd Gregg, who sacrificed mightily to rejoin his compatriots in reading from the Republican script of No Collaboration.
There are in theory a lot of levers that the Party can use to bring lawmakers to heel other than Primary battles, ranging from mere social exclusion and disapproval to, potentially, genuine employment consequences for those Republican lawmakers who don’t toe the line and for their kin. Not to mention the importance of dynasties in modern American politics, even those with no immediately apparent heir – consider Mitt Romney, able to invoke the name of George Romney to some effect decades after George left office; and then consider the importance a lawmaker might therefore feel of maintaining good family ties to the Party.
You’re using Gov. Crist as an example of a Republican not sticking to the “Obama Fail” platform of the GOP. And there’s a good reason for that: Crist is facing a massive state deficit that can’t be resolved unless that stimulus money comes through. He can’t afford to campaign against it.
That Miami Herald article you linked to has Sen. Martinez (who is retiring from the Senate as fast as he can, by the way) complaining that Crist “doesn’t get it.” Sorry, Senator. Crist does get it. He’s one of the few Republicans who has thought outside the box and as a result has retained high popularity numbers at a time the rest of the GOP is sinking. You’re absolutely right about how the lockstep mentality of the Republican Party is going to kill them in two years. Can’t even warn them, because outside of Crist (and maybe Jindal) they won’t listen.
Publius: //I’ll be honest – the unanimity surprised me.//
?????
Perhaps the GOP caucus factored this into their vote.
from Publius’ link: //The percentage of Republicans favoring the package rose slightly from 24% to 28%//
//The vote shows that the GOP has become so ideologically rigid and ossified that its rank-and-file is afraid to stray from the party line – or to challenge orthodoxy. //
If a democrat believed a particular course was best would he be ‘ideologically rigid and ossified’ if he stuck with it? Ot is it just republicans who are rigid and ossified if they stick with their beliefs?
As for suffereing in two years: i dunno, Depends on how good a liar the R politicians is. If he/she calims credit for the money that shows up, he/she can spout the usual Republican bullcrap and still get re elecgted. Afger all there has always been a big discrepancy between what republicans say and what they do. Claiming to oppose the stimulus while claiming credit for the money is no more hypocritical than running as a fiscal conservative while simultaneously advocating for tax cuts and tax support for red state parasitic economies. Or claiming to be against big government while advocating legislation to limit access to abortion or birthcontrol. Republicans have always run on slogans that had little or nothing to do with the policies they actually support. So I think that they can demogogue about evil big spending liberals while claiming credit for the benefits of the money and get their voters to fall for their baloney again.
So I dunno. They might not do that badly. They are pretty good liars.
// if they’re forcing you to take increasingly extreme positions//
Objecting to spending $800 billion is not extreme. The opposite is true.
// the fear to experiment with new ideas and to embrace new policies will ultimately cause levels of harm that more than offset…//
Let’s borrow $800 billion and experiment with it.
You don’t think it’s a good idea? You must be a sissy scaredy-cat then.
from Publius’ link: //The percentage of Republicans favoring the package rose slightly from 24% to 28%//
Right. 24% is a lot higher than 0%.
d’d’d’dave, before we have a discussion of *Democratic* ideological rigidity and ossification, it would be nice to have an example of when Democrats were as ideological as the Republicans were with the stimulus.
Do you have an example of comparable rigidity (0 House members and less than 10% of the Senate caucus on a subject the other party overwhelmingly supported) on any even vaguely controversial subject?
I’d have loved to see that on plenty of subjects (e.g. torture, warrantless wiretapping and some of the crazier tax cuts), but we didn’t… and I, at least, can’t recall an instance where we have.
I’m sure Specter is right, party discipline can be a terrifying force, and it’s hell having been elected from a district full of people you disagree with and despise, but still have to suck up to. But plenty of politicians are willing to subject themselves to that hell for the opportunity to be in Congress.
I’m also quite sure some of the Democrats who voted for the stimulus thought it was a steaming pile of BS, are sweating what their constituents will do to them come the next election, but just couldn’t afford to cross Reid or Pelosi.
Given that Democrats have taken the majority by winning a bunch of seats in districts that are fairly conservative, holding the “No” vote by Democrats down to 7 in the House must have required enough pressure to turn coal into diamond. The Republicans, naturally, don’t have nearly so many marginal members at present.
“Do you have an example of comparable rigidity (0 House members and less than 10% of the Senate caucus on a subject the other party overwhelmingly supported) on any even vaguely controversial subject?”
’94 ugly black rifle ban:
Number of Democrats voting for the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act: 50/53 (94.3%)
Number of Republicans voting for the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act: 45/47 (95.7%)
Vote in the House? Indeterminate, they were too scared of voter retribution to hold a rollcall vote, they made it a voice vote so members who had to deny voting for it could lie without being proven wrong.
Here is the roll call vote for the bill Brett says there wasn’t a roll call vote for. And in case he tries to pull some shenanigoats about which version of the bill he’s talking about, here is the roll call for the original House version.
I wish I could find a way to monetize this.
dave asks:
Ot is it just republicans who are rigid and ossified if they stick with their beliefs?
Beliefs?
Arlen Specter claims that several Congressional Republicans are secret stimulus supporters.
The percentage of Republicans favoring the package rose slightly from 24% to 28%
Profiles in courage, every one of them.
Meanwhile, in other news, the economy continues to shed jobs at the rate of about 600K a month.
But if the stimulus flames out, at least the R’s can say “told you so”. And they will.
Hey, what can I say, fooled by wikipedia.
Let’s borrow $800 billion and experiment with it.
Damn right. You don’t spend hundreds of billions of dollars in borrowed money on an experiment, you spend it on invading and occupying foreign countries for the hell of it. Any other use is the height of irresponsibility.
“I know the fiscal stewards in the GOP caucus are vigilant about spending”
Really? What makes you believe that the guys who just added $5 Trillion to the deficit are “vigilant about spending”?
Russell
I believe this refers to the electorate rather than the congressmen:
//The percentage of Republicans favoring the package rose slightly from 24% to 28%//
I wish I could find a way to monetize this.
What, do you want to cause hyperinflation?
d’d’d’dave: If a democrat believed a particular course was best would he be ‘ideologically rigid and ossified’ if he stuck with it?
You apparently missed the entire point of this post, which is that (according to Specter) many Republicans don’t believe that opposing the stimulus was the best course, but are doing it anyway.
Florida’s an extreme example because we’ve really got the wingnuts in charge in the legislature here. That Herald article said that without federal help, Crist is faced with unpopular program cuts or even more unpopular tax increases–that description really only fits the legislature. The average citizen wouldn’t mind a small rise in the sales tax if it meant that their schools would keep all their teachers employed (we don’t have an income tax, so our revenue options are limited).
But the legislature is dominated by Norquist disciples–gerrymandering taken to the extreme here–so forget any sort of tax increases. Crist isn’t stupid. He needs that money, and if his legislature is too stubborn to give it to him, then he’ll get it from elsewhere if he can. The Florida Republican party is lucky they’ve got him, because they’re far too conservative for the populace.
It’s very interesting how most comments here paint all republicans with the same brush with respect to their votes on the stimulus bill.
Some of the votes are surely related to the politician’s view of the next election. But most are simply based on their view of effective fiscal actions. Republicans have long favored tax cuts so why would they approach this differently. It seems reasonable to castigate them for their views or for their votes, but not both.
I was mid-career with a family to support when Reagan opposed Carter for POTUS on a platform to reduce taxes and reduce spending. At its worst, the absolute numbers were worse than we have now. All interest rates, including mortgages, approached 20%. Inflation exceeded 10% and unemployment was higher than we have now. One thing that seems different now is how we view the future. It seems now that we are pretty well convinced things will get much worse whereas back then people were optimistic that conditions were going to improve.
I’m no economist and I know events are not always as correlated as they appear, but tax cuts and spending cuts coupled with a severe recession were followed by an economy that improved substantially. So I cannot just reflexively join a chorus that claims these actions are wrong.
Brett, even before Phil posted the House vote, I’m not sure how the Senate vote you posted says anything about Democratic ideological rigidity. With over 90% of both parties supporting it it looks like a “motherhood and apple pie” bill… It might be a silly bill (in this case it isn’t but post-office namings attract similar support, I believe), but I don’t see how that says anything about the *ideological* rigidity (or even positions) of the parties.
I think what’s interesting about this is that if the assumptions in the article are correct then those who have a preoccupation with bipartisanship should factor those assumptions into their analysis. If the Republicans are locked into partisan positions due to the dynamics within their party, then that should be the primary narrative about what is happening with respect to bipartisanship.
What’s also interesting is that if the Republican senators that voted with the Democrats are knocked out by primary challengers, doesn’t that make it all the more likely that those seats will be taken by Democrats? For example, isn’t a conservative Republican much less likely to win in Pennsylvania than Specter is in the next election?
I’m no economist and I know events are not always as correlated as they appear, but tax cuts and spending cuts coupled with a severe recession were followed by an economy that improved substantially. So I cannot just reflexively join a chorus that claims these actions are wrong.
I’m no economist either, but I know that the underlying circumstances that caused the Carter economy were drastically different from the ones that currently plague our economy. Carter inherited higher marginal tax rates, for starters, so tax cuts then could stimulate in a way that current ones can’t. (The Reagan economy was also never as good as Reagan lionizers like to claim it was, but that’s another discussion.)
It’s very interesting how most comments here paint all republicans with the same brush with respect to their votes on the stimulus bill.
Number of Republicans in the House: 178
Number who have voted “aye” to any form of the stimulus bill: 0
If “same brush” means “they vote a strict party line”, consider them so painted. Except it ain’t folks here doing the painting.
I agree that the economic conditions leading up to the Carter disaster were different from what got us where we are now. Isn’t this always true? I also agree that the years following that are not remembered as a boom economy, but I bet we would be happy to have the equivalent over the next few years. I think it is also true that what has seemed like a good economy over the past two decades was mostly in our imagination as we leveraged our future to enjoy those times. That’s the payment being extracted now.
There is no free lunch. We all hear this until we don’t ever want to hear it repeated, but I think it will stick around since it never sinks in. And whatever delusions people operate with, I do not believe it attaches to an ideology. I suspect substantial numbers of liberals and conservatives put their money with Bernie Madoff and I know many of the so-called financial wizards of Wall Street used to call themselves republicans until they lost their money and ours and now that they want to be bailed out they act like they never even heard of fiscal conservatism in government.
One of the keys to understanding what’s going on and how to deal with it is experience. I didn’t think to much about the importance of experience when I was younger, but now I can see why it is always touted as a valuable piece of planning and decision making. The best way to survive events such as we are experiencing now is to hedge against every possible eventuality one can imagine. Obviously, for people who have nothing or not much, there is not a lot they can do. But I can say, frankly, I have watched people (supposedly educated smart people) do some really stupid things lately and many of them have now reached the stage where they have nothing. Now they actually have some experience to base their future judgements on.
Clearly, it is Mr. Martinez who “doesn’t get it,” but in that he appears to be joined by most of the GOP, which apparently thinks Sarah Palin is the right candidate for their future. Gov. Crist knows that he is the governor of a 21st century state with 21st century problems, while the GOP, including in Florida apprently, is stuck in the 19th century. The GOP clearly risks becoming the party of those who do not like the reality of the 21st century, be it climate change, science issues such as stem cell research and evolution, or a world which cannot be simplified into a cold war, or WW2, us v them, not to mention the reality of the role of government in these times. Of course, as a Democrat, I can live with all this, but the GOP needs someone who is willing to try to change the party thru a presidential candidacy. Even though that person will not be able to win the GOP nomination in 2912 probably, he or she could set the stage for a new GOP that could yet succeed in the 21st century. The 2008 youth vote should have clued the GOP in about the future, but as this point they seem unable to cope with the change. This should be the story from the stimulus debate, although to the media, of course, it is not. I think the GOP believes that they can do ok in 2010 by turning out the base, but I think they miss the power of the Obama brand to get Dems out in 2010.
Some of the votes are surely related to the politician’s view of the next election. But most are simply based on their view of effective fiscal actions.
How could you possibly be in a position to know this? Especially based on the profligate fiscal shenanigans Republicans engaged in for the past 8 years?
“If a democrat believed a particular course was best would he be ‘ideologically rigid and ossified’ if he stuck with it? Ot is it just republicans who are rigid and ossified if they stick with their beliefs?”
To answer that, we’d need evidence of many Democrats who, during the Bush administration, stuck with what they thought was right.
In 2000, Clinton’s last year, the surplus amounted to $236 billion. The forecast ten year surplus was $5.6 trillion.
In 2009 George W. Bush and the Republicans in Congress have left us:
Meanwhile the outstanding National Debt is $10,769,994,288,531.
Possibly the people who voted for the clowns who brought us this might wish to rethink the appropriateness of bringing up the problems of deficit spending and increasing debt.
Phil,
You make a valid point. Perhaps a number of them are coming back to the principles they originally got elected on after getting an understanding of the displeasure of their constituencies as reflected in the last two elections. The fiscal misbehavior of republicans in Bush’s first six years was obvious. Many seem to suffer from some sort of multiple personality disorder.
I spend a lot of time in Arizona and there are several steadfast fiscal conservatives there, but I don’t include John McCain. Maybe most of those who wavered in the last eight years figure they better get back where they belong and then just see what happens to the economy as a result of the stimulus bill.
Michael Berube, who understands that there’s a time for patient, civil discussion — and then there’s a time for healing mockery and derisive hoots. Turn, turn, turn.
Do treat yourself to the whole thing.
Perhaps a number of them are coming back to the principles they originally got elected on after getting an understanding of the displeasure of their constituencies as reflected in the last two elections.
Or perhaps they believe in different sets of rules and different strategies depending on whether they’re in or out of power. And also perhaps the “fiscal conservativism” of Republicans is really pretty much a myth.
Maybe most of those who wavered in the last eight years figure they better get back where they belong and then just see what happens to the economy as a result of the stimulus bill.
GOB, with respect, two things.
First, anyone in Congress whose response to the current situation is to “get back to where they belong and just see what happens” needs to find themselves a new line of work.
Second, “see what happens to the economy as a result of the stimulus bill”? You have to be kidding me.
The economy is in the tank. The major investment banks are insolvent, everyone is stuck holding paper that they can’t sell without going broke, the economy is shedding 600K jobs a month.
Worrying about what the stimulus bill will do to the economy is like worrying about whether the defribillator is going to hurt a patient with a flatline pulse.
I don’t get folks in Congress who claim that government is the problem. If they really feel that way, they should get the hell out, because they’re only doing harm. They should go do something they believe in.
If they want to “get back to where they belong” that badly they should resign their office and take their chances in the private sector. If that’s where they think the action is, that’s where they should be. They can go with my blessing.