Weak Parties With Strong Partisanship
More on an ongoing saga.
In the comments section of yesterday’s post “Government Shutdown Looms With No Deal in Sight,” I repeatedly asserted that thinking of the “Republican Party,” or even its House caucus, as a single thing was a mistake. Here’s a more detailed illustration of what I mean:
POLITICO Playbook (“Why Congress could sleepwalk into a shutdown“):
We’re one week out from the government again running out of money and it’s not looking pretty. No one wants a shutdown before Thanksgiving, but no one can tell you right now how this will all end.
This morning, we thought we’d break down what we DO know — or what we can pretty easily surmise based on the state of play.
1. There are growing pains in the speaker’s office. New House Speaker MIKE JOHNSON is having a hard time getting up to speed on the worst job in Washington. Despite vowing to move appropriations bills, he’s had to pull not one but two funding measures from the floor amid GOP infighting. (Sound familiar?)
While he wants to avoid a shutdown, we’re told by senior Republicans that he’s struggling to decide what he wants a continuing resolution to look like. If he passes a “clean” CR without partisan provisions, he lets down the GOP base and conservatives. But if he demands concessions and embraces a showdown, he could undercut his majority-makers.
Johnson, we’re told, is still trying to win support for this “ladder CR” idea. His most recent pitch is to tell skeptical members that he’s not talking about a bunch of deadlines — just two: passing one tranche of appropriations bills into January and the second into February or so.
It’s unclear that the argument will work in his chamber. And Democrats in the Senate flat out hate it. “That’s the craziest, stupidest thing I’ve ever heard of,” Senate Appropriations Chair PATTY MURRAY (D-Wash.) said.
2. The Senate isn’t waiting any longer With Johnson still mulling his options, Senate Majority Leader CHUCK SCHUMER has filed cloture on a shell bill that will eventually be the vehicle for moving a continuing resolution. Yesterday, Sen. BEN CARDIN (D-Md.) said Democrats want a clean CR that expires before Christmas, a pre-holiday deadline conservatives will loathe.
That timeline, we’re told, is still fluid. Schumer also hasn’t decided whether he’ll try to add the White House’s $106 billion national security supplemental to the CR to make a point — though if he does, it wouldn’t pass. Which leads us to…
3. The White House supplemental request is out of the picture — at least for this round. While talks have ratcheted up between Senate Republicans and Democrats over a possible compromise linking Ukraine funding and a border security package — a strategy Johnson has said he’s open to — neither side appears anywhere close to a deal.
4. Israel aid is probably stalled for now — or is it? House Republicans’ $14 billion assistance package for Israel was always DOA in the Senate — not necessarily because it wasn’t tied to Ukraine money as the White House wanted, but because it cut Democratic plans to hire more IRS agents.
But what happens if Republicans agree to strip out the pay-for, then add Israel assistance to a clean CR?
That’s one interesting idea being discussed among House GOP leaders, we’re told. If Republicans are going to have to swallow a clean CR, the thinking goes, they might as well notch a win on something else.
After all, with Ukraine money now being solidly linked to what’s shaping up to be a long, drawn-out negotiation over border policy, why not let the Israel money move in the meantime?
One problem: The White House firmly opposes moving Israel assistance without Ukraine money, as we reported yesterday. Some Republicans, however, insist the administration is bluffing. The big question is, however, if Johnson’s own rank-and-file will view such a move as a win — or just another CR cave.
Speaker Johnson is a leader in name only and, because he’s a relative unknown, I don’t have any real sense of what his game is here. But I do think that he and the overwhelming number (I’d put it at 95% or higher) of House Republicans understand that a shutdown during the holidays would be a bad look and would be happy to have a “clean CR” and/or an addendum to fund Israel. But the fact of the matter is that they’re not in a position to get there.
This isn’t a special pleading for my erstwhile party. I think the voters should punish Republicans for this repeated conduct. Even if the true “MAGA wing” were only 10 percent of the party—and I think it’s probably closer to a third—their ability to control the agenda effectively makes it their party now.
What I’m saying here is pretty much the same thing I was saying when Democrats were getting frustrated with President Biden, Speaker Pelosi, and Leader Schumer for being unable to pass all the things they promised in the 2020 campaign despite having “control” of all the elected parts of the federal government. Because Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema’s votes were necessary to get anything done, they effectively represented the leftward limit of what was possible. That was simultaneously frustrating for Democratic voters and the reality of the situation.
In a normal Congress, Johnson would tell the MAGA extremists to piss off and cut a deal with the right-most members of the House Democratic caucus to pass a CR. Indeed, McCarthy would have done that months ago and passed a whole damn budget.
But the MAGA wing only relented in allowing McCarthy to become Speaker if he agreed to being handcuffed to a set of rules that allowed any one Member to call for a vote of no confidence at any time. When McCarthy finally decided that he simply had no choice but to work with Democrats to keep the government open, the MAGA crazies ousted him.
Johnson is bound by the same constraints and, while I get the sense that he’s more practical than the bomb-throwers, he’s part of the broader MAGA wing. I don’t think he has it in him to cross the crazies and cut a deal.
This is unprecedented, at least in modern American history. And, again, given the binary nature of our system, Republicans have to be punished and forced to reform. Alas, to beat a familiar drum here, the way we elect our political leaders—most especially in the House—makes this incredibly difficult. The folks who put the nuts in office are quite happy with the nuttiness.
Several years back, the Marquette political scientist Julia Azari coined the phrase “weak parties but strong partisanship” to describe this situation.
The defining characteristic of our moment is that parties are weak while partisanship is strong. What we’ve known about party organizations has long indicated that they are weak, with little to hold over candidates or officeholders.
Theories of parties that move away from the formal structures of the RNC and DNC, emphasizing networks of policy demanders instead, seemed to give parties as organizations a reprieve. But 2016 showed the weakness of the networks approach. This idea suggests that officeholders and the various interest groups that constitute parties — labor, environmentalists, the National Rifle Association, etc. — coordinate to narrow the field to a few choices.
In 2016, we learned the weaknesses of the network method of controlling party politics: Voters do not have to listen to elite signals. Elites do not have to listen to each other’s signals. Parties have been stripped (in part by their own actions) of their ability to coordinate and bargain. As I noted back in May, bargaining breaks down when no one has anything that anyone else wants.
The Democratic process went more like we expected — but not entirely. Bernie Sanders’s candidacy and its success showed that the coordination process is weak there too. There was nothing particularly wrong with what happened this year — the contest was largely substantive, and Sanders was an unexpected but in many ways conventional candidate. But what happens when there’s not a potential candidate like Clinton — famous and powerful? A crowded, uncoordinated field could easily open things up to an inexperienced, unvetted, or extreme candidate.
But while parties as organizations are weak, parties as ideas —partisanship — is strong. This is what studies of Congress — which document the increasing gap between Republican and Democratic votes — are telling us. This is what obstructionist politics tells us. Polarized presidential approval, the Republicans lining up behind Trump — all of this is telling us that party identification matters to people. A lot. And much of these partisan feelings manifest in a negative way, with distrust and dislike for the other side.
This combination is fairly unique in American politics; the only other time it was obtained was in the early republic, when the different sides were clearly opposed and the modern party system had yet to form. And, I submit, it is a particularly dangerous combination — parties can’t control whom they nominate. But their adherents — elites and ordinary voters alike — are prepared to support them.
Strong partisanship with weak parties makes for a couple of fairly serious problems for a democracy. The destabilization of institutions, for one. It’s hard for institutions — elected ones like Congress, the presidency, or state governments — to have legitimacy when partisan motives are constantly suspect. This is also true for other kinds of institutions, like courts and, as we’ve seen most recently, law enforcement agencies like the FBI. Citizens view much of what these institutions do through a partisan lens.
Suspicion of institutions doesn’t just undermine courts or Congress — it also undermines party politics as a whole. Party politics is really important for democracy; most political scientists still share E.E. Schattschneider’s observation that democracy is “unthinkable” without parties to do the work of campaigning, to organize stable coalitions, and to help citizens make sense of political choices.
She wrote that just before Donald Trump’s election. Things are almost certainly much worse now.
James, in the end, Pelosi had a similar razor-thin margin, and did far more.
They should be aware if they shut down the government, especially over a holiday, they can kiss the White House goodbye for four more years.
@Barry: True, but the difference now is Johnson doesn’t have “a game” he’s just swimming with the sharks with no cage.
A perfect description of the Democrats.
That IS what you meant, right?
Standard liberal fare. Appearances and superficiality are everything.
Shut it down, with no back pay when it gets restarted. The insulation of government employees from any financial penalties when their employer screws up is part of the problem.
Yep.
Shut it down, all of it. Shut down the FAA, send the flight controllers home. Send all the soldiers and sailors back to their homes, and padlock the military bases. Turn off the satellites, anchor the aircraft carriers, ground the fighter planes. Send the Border Patrol agents home, leave the border gates unmanned. Close the doors of the FBI, ATF and tell them to leave their investigations on their desks. Recall the CIA officers to wait at home until they can get paid again. Shut the federal prisons and let the inmates run the place.
SHUT. IT. DOWN.
@Barry: Without any doubt, Pelosi was a more skilled Speaker than McCarthy or Johnson (indeed, she was arguable one of the most skilled of all time). But she was not working with the kind of division the GOP has. Despite media attempts to make The Squad into a leftwing version of the Freedom Caucus, that was never the case.
As I have argued elsewhere, the GOP has all the ingredients of two parties but all of the structure of our politics forces every into the existing binary structures making negotiations and coalition dissolution and reformation impossible.
@alanstorm:
Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.
More people need more skin in more games. The problem in America is too much ungamed skin. Shut it down and halt Social Security payments while we’re at it — they voted for this or not! And the postal service — too many Americans get too many packages!
To follow on to my comment: James used the term “no confidence” to describe the ouster of McCarthy. I would note that normally in other systems wherein the party leader faces that kind of vote it sparks a new election or, at a minimum, requires the rebels to have a new leader who can demonstrate majority support as a condition of replacement (i.e., it has to be simultaneous, not first ouster, then a new leader is chosen).
Good post.
The government isn’t shut down yet, but time will tell. What voters will do depends on how this plays out and how severe the effects are. Chances are, no one will remember this in a year.
@Barry:
I think people under-rate how uniquely smart and skilled Pelosi is. She’s the Michael Jordan of House leadership. There’s simply no one on the GoP side who comes close to matching her. And, given how the power of the Speaker has grown, it’s a job with a high skill floor.
@Gustopher: Heck, if the problem is government employees, then I guess when the government shuts down we should furlough the military?
People like alanstorm and his attempt at being clever at the expense of the evil federal workers forgets that the biggest bureaucracy in the land is the Defense Department (it is, in fact, the largest employer in the US).
Have I mentioned that members of the Armed Forces get subsidized housing and government health care?
@Gustopher: Yeah! And Amazon, FedEx, and UPS get too much “last mile” delivery service that they’re paying NOTHING!!!!!!! for, too!!!!!¡¡?¿;!!+!!!
@Andy:
Except in the majority of jurisdictions wherein the competitive balance is so skewed that the outcomes are foregone.
To engage in wishing, I wish that there really was an effective way for voters to register their views on this rolling debacle.
I have some hope that on the margins this will all matter, but I lament the lack of a real democratic feedback loop. This situation directly illustrates one of my core concerns.
@Chip Daniels: Indeed.
@alanstorm:
I doubt you know this, but this pretty much reveals that the GOP claims of standing for personal responsibility and defending freedom is absolute bullshit.
Oh, and calling Joyner a liberal says way more about your worldview than it does about his. He is an actual conservative; you are something else.
@Andy:
Oh, Andy. You’re just a Leftypinkocommie.
@alanstorm, did I do it right? I did good, right?
@Steven L. Taylor:
Having been a federal employee who went through many shutdowns, I agree that furloughed people should get back pay, but it does cause problems when managers have to decide who gets free paid leave via a furlough and who has to continue to work with greatly reduced staffing.
@Steven L. Taylor:
I don’t think the median voter cares much.
@Steven L. Taylor:
This is why I want the filibuster gone. It props up the status quo and prevents the country from feeling the effects of electing a lunatic caucus until there is a huge lunatic caucus that cannot do the simple things. It allows for more sloganeering than governing while leaving the country on legislative autopilot.
It allows small-c conservatives who prefer the status quo to make common ground with folks espousing nonsense like alanstorm’s brilliance, feeling safe that it won’t every really happen… until it does.
@Andy:
I think the is key to what I think is your misdiagnosis of the problem.
The system does not assess the view of “the median voter” nationally. None.
Moreover, the median voter is actually defined at the district level and the districts are drawn to skew the median.
In general, median voter theory, especially as understood in the general discourse, assumes that the system plays to the middle in a normal distribution of partisan views. That’s not what our system, does.
And I may be misreading you over the years, but I think that you also think this is what happens, but it isn’t.
For Congress specifically, primaries drive nominations and then districts skewed one way or the other dictate outcomes.
And the presidency is likewise not a contest to win the middle, it is a contest to win a set of very specific states. If we had a national popular vote, we could talk about where the median is and what that could tell us.
@Chip Daniels: Just close the doors at Treasury, turn off the computers. No bonds redeemed, no bonds issued. How long before the financial system locks up? Days? Hours?
@Steven L. Taylor:
Also, I think the personality traits that associate more with leftist politics tend more toward pragnatism, less towards “my way or the highway.” And, the GOP has the modified/enhanced “Hastert Rule” where the Speaker can only advance bills that can pass with only GOP votes. Pelosi was not bound by that kind of bullshit.
@Michael Cain:
One of the reasons why “normal” or “median” or “average” voters don’t seem to care very much about government shutdowns is because almost all shutdowns aren’t actually shutdowns in any real sense; The borders are still defended, the planes still fly, the Treasury still operates, the SS checks and Medicare reimbursements still churn out like clockwork.
The entire process is like some strange Kabuki inside baseball drama going on in a galaxy far far away but if you’re a regular Joe going to work and picking up the kids it just doesn’t matter.
And even the breathless politicos who demand “SHUT IT DOWN!” don’t really stop to think about the 99% of the government which is like your computer operating system, absolutely indispensable but silent and invisible right up until the moment it stops.
@Steven L. Taylor: I would add that I doubt any system would play to the actual median voter. It could play to the median engaged voter, or the median opinion leading voters, but the median voter is far too disengaged to matter much, at least in any large country not under imminent threat.
@charontwo:
While this is true in our current circumstances, I don’t think it is inherently true. We are in a feedback loop where the crazies are attracted to the durm und strang of the Republicans, and their increasing numbers drive pragmatists away.
@alanstorm: You would appear to be entirely unaware of labor law “The insulation of government employees from any financial penalties when their employer screws up is part of the problem.”
Of course punishing employees for owners / employers error is something akin to beating the brother of the kid who made the error. Nonsensical and mere lashing out.
@charontwo: Ah … it is quite amusing how each side flatters itself as to their own presumed personality traits….
Of course historically one can see that affirming either Leftist or Rightist is more X (pragmatic, non pragmatic) is typically nothing more than self-affirming motivated reasoning.
@Steven L. Taylor:
Then, let me put it another way – the vast majority of voters do not care about a government shutdown. And by “care” I mean having enough concern to change their voting behavior, either by voting for someone they would not normally vote for, or by getting energized enough to vote when normally they wouldn’t. Especially when the next election is a year away.
Basically, what I’m saying is that government shutdowns are historically not a salient issue for most Americans, and the reason for that is that government shutdowns don’t affect the vast majority of Americans.
My perspective is probably skewed by the number of shutdowns I dealt with in government service, and how most of my friends, family, and associates who were not in the government were not even aware that a shutdown was happening, or perhaps only saw a headline and thought nothing more of it.
And I would just note that the effects of a near-term shutdown are entirely speculation at this point since the CR is still in effect, and the House may pull its head out of its ass and get another CR in which case this entire debate becomes moot.
Things would obviously be different if Chip, Gustopher and Micahel got their way in which a shutdown would be an immediate crisis, but that is not how it works.
@MarkedMan:
@Lounsbury:
That was not pulled out of thin air. There are actual psycological studies by actual psychologists supporting what I posted
@charontwo: We’re in agreement then. Given the way the world plays out, it could have just as easily happened that the Javits contingent won out and the Dixiecrats stayed in the Democratic Party and today we would be talking about the threat of Fascism that started when Lyndon Johnson was embittered by losing in ’64 and went all in on racist dog whistling. Hell, it’s not that far outside the pale. When I was a kid the left was known for literally blowing up buildings and robbing banks for “Freedom!”. If you had told 14 year old me that the greatest threat to democracy in my lifetime was going to come from the party of Eisenhower I would have put you down as a complete nutter.
On a tangent, considering how little I thought of the “Olds” at that time I would be mortified at my (and to be clear, at 63 I acknowledge Olds-hood) current condescending attitude of, “well, I’ve been through a couple of cycles already and am starting to see how the pendulum swings”. Imagine! Two million years of human(like) societies respecting the wisdom of the tribal elders, and I only understood the value of having lived a long time and seeing a few things when it benefited me! What a coincidence!
@Lounsbury: This is interesting. You and MarkedMan said essentially the same thing to charontwo. MarkedMan’s comment resonated, at least to this set of ears, as a reasoned response noting that the effect noticed may be only transitory. Your response sounded like alanstorm, or as you put it to him,
Thanks for the object lesson. Feast heartily, troll.
@Andy:
Except for the ones who may have wondered, “Hmmmm… I wonder if Andy’s being affected by this. Meh, probably not, he’s pretty good at handling his money; I would think he has enough reserves.”
@MarkedMan:
I never really got into the old-folks-is-fools thing – my great grandparents escaped Russia steps ahead of a pogrom, my grandfathers worked their asses off all their lives, and my Dad was lifer Army with two tours in Vietnam, all of which limited my natural know-it-all arrogance a bit. A lot of Boomers had parents who survived the Great Depression and World War 2, can’t imagine what those kids thought they had to say.
What I’ve noticed though is that as an old (69) my accumulated wisdom is not really transferable to the yutes. Some shit you only learn by living. And the take-away lesson will be something as true and yet useless as, ‘Power through.” I narrowed my life lessons for my kids down to just a few: 1) Learn to like work, 2) Only a coward hurts a woman, 3) FFS don’t get into crime. Like Daddy did.
Of the two kids one absorbed lesson (1), the son I thought I was telling not to be an asshole to women (2) became a woman, obviating the need for that particular insight, and as to (3), well, so far so good. At least no one’s been arrested. Fingers crossed.
What I should have done is teach them how to handle money, but I’d have had to learn myself, first.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I don’t think you’re being fair to @Lounsbury. He isn’t a troll. I have no reason to believe that he is insincere when he posts. Ditto @JKB or @alanstorm. At the same time, the former is of a completely different category from the latter pair.
Don’t take this the wrong way, but your differing reactions to @MM and @Lounsbury likely has more to do with your viewpoint of their respective tones and voices than it does substance.
Being an insufferable asshole who appears to ignore valid criticism has muted @Lounsbury’s commentary around here. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t raise interesting points. I understand your reaction, and I’m not trying to let him off the hook, but it’s kind of on the rest of us to evaluate posts without acknowledging the speaker’s baggage.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: Hah! I intially missed your reply, as it contained a certain word in red that makes me automatically skip over a comment. Just now though, I was searching on my commenter name to find something else and it popped up. Maybe I should go back and read…
Nah! Life is too short!
@Michael Reynolds:
As I remember it (and I may be giving myself too much credit through the hazy mists of time), it’s not that I thought the old folks were fools but rather that when I thought about them at all I discounted what they said because the world had changed so much from how it was when they were growing up. I realize now that the world has not changed much, and never changes much, in an awful lot of ways, and seeing cycles play out 2 or 3 times does give you a bit of useful perspective. Sometimes it also takes a lifetime of reading as well as a lifetime. For instance, the current attitude amongst many that media used to be fair and unbiased and it has degenerated because of the internet flies in the face of history. Whatever brief golden age we had in the MSM had more to do with the country rallying to a common cause in WWII, and it was neither as golden or as long lasting as is currently thought.
Maybe makes that insight easier to internalize, but it’s still good advice…
I wonder how much this can be attributed to the phenomena of the parties no longer being key to campaign money and the semi-successful crusade against “pork”. My impression from reading about the career of LBJ is that these had been truly devastating sticks and irresistibly scrumptious carrots.
Am I right in making the edit bolded above? You might want to fix that in the OP.
@Kurtz: Okay. I may well be weighing language and connotation too much. That’s why I specified “to these ears.”
@DrDaveT: Yes. I went with “unable” but same concept.
@alanstorm:
You want superficiality masqeurading as seriousness? Clearly you want Republicans.
… Drag Queen Story Telling Hours are ‘grooming’ events.
… School curriculums that teach students that Slavery was a job apprenticeship program.
… Cut the Secretary of Transportation’s salary to $1 in order to leverage your demands against another Republican shutdown.
Republican radicals are to good governnance as Agent Orange is to Orange Juice.