Did you miss the Republican Party that existed before Donald Trump came along? Do you miss the days of John Boehner fighting Tea Party rebels over the debt ceiling and the fiscal cliff or Ted Cruz’s “plan” to cut funds from Obamacare? Do you look forward to the years when the crucial test of conservative purity was commitment to an implausible deficit-reduction plan? The good old days when incompetent and would-be lobbyists battled libertarian ideologues and wannabe pay-TV personalities for the chance to push an agenda of soft austerity and business-friendly tax cuts?
Good news, then: those times are back. The failure of the Republican “red wave” in the midterms of 2022 and the subsequent demise of Trump had a reverse ripple effect. It’s like watching a wall of water retreat, exposing the old coastline, the political topography that the water covered up.
Kevin McCarthy’s embarrassing struggle to claim the presidency and week of chaos in the House of Representatives don’t exactly belong in the Trump era. It is the return of the old world, of the old republican regime with all its dysfunctions, impasses and uselessness.
Not that the flood hasn’t changed the landscape. Some Republican congressmen who tormented McCarthy are Tea Party dropouts, but others are more Trumpian figures, creatures of right-wing celebrity and brand names.
The would-be populist Republicans in the Senate — figures like JD Vance, Josh Hawley and Tom Cotton — are not Cruz-style libertarians in 2013, which could change the Senate’s role in Republican infighting. The national party and its ambitious governors are now more likely to fight over cultural than fiscal issues. And Trump himself is hardly finished.
But in the negotiations over the presidency it has become clear that certain pre-Trump patterns are still resilient. On one side, now personified by McCarthy and his allies, we have the Republican Party establishment trying to run the House centrally, without any specific vision or agenda. On the other, in the factions that resisted him, conservatives with many legitimate grievances about the process, coupled with a political view that are mostly performance gestures and fiscal apocalypticism.
The likely result, as in the Tea Party era, is a Congress unable to govern except through bold last-minute policy and a conservatism that manifests itself in demands for radical and implausible budget cuts, and nothing else.
Part of Trump’s original success lay in the way he pulled the Republican Party out of this impasse, resolutely refusing to campaign for the catechism of the “true conservative” and emphasizing issues that mattered most to less ideological conservatives and swing voters.
He did all of this in demagogic style, but his promises — to win back the jobs lost to China and build new highways, protect Social Security and end illegal immigration — helped the party escape its Barack Obama-era trap when seemed obsessed in Congress with unpopular spending cuts, but was rarely able to negotiate to achieve them.
For the Republican Party in the House today, an equivalent escape is imaginable. Its majority could be used to pass a series of bills with messages on issues where conservatives have (or may have) an advantage with the public: against crime, for border security, which highlights military recruitment and readiness issues, academic funding and incentives aimed at undermining the cartel of elite colleges and influencing educational culture wars, some version of anti-abortion-rights policies.
In each case, the goal would be to position the party on a terrain where the concerns of activists and independent voters can override and set the GOP up for success in 2024.
On fiscal issues, this kind of strategy would recognize the impossibility of either a grand deal of the kind that eluded Boehner and Obama or the imposition of significant fiscal changes on a Democratic-controlled Senate and White House.
Instead, it would propose budgets that primarily seek cuts in places that matter to Democratic interest groups, and govern with deals that include some of the inevitable crooks and tricks, but basically just preserve the status quo.
These deals are what will happen anyway: there will be no radical shift in our fiscal trajectory between now and 2024. The question is whether, along the way to this inevitable outcome, Republican representatives will present themselves as a plausible governing party or whether their internal divisions will produce emptiness and chaos, allowing Democrats and the Biden White House to portray them as the party of sabotage, the enemies of economic recovery.
We will have more clarity when we see the price of winning the race for the presidency or when the debt ceiling talks get here. But we probably already know the answer.
With a wealth of experience honed over 4+ years in journalism, I bring a seasoned voice to the world of news. Currently, I work as a freelance writer and editor, always seeking new opportunities to tell compelling stories in the field of world news.
