Unusual Times Call for Unusual Coalitions

There's some really amazing things happening in the House right now that defy the common sense rules about how a majority party should govern. While this trend, so far, only concerns two bills, both were major votes that might actually inspire some optimism in the future, especially since the House needs to somehow pass an unconditional increase of the debt ceiling to avoid causing an economic catastrophe.

You might of heard that Speaker Boehner had to suspend the Hastert Rule in order to get the final package of taxes in place to get out of the fiscal cliff boondoggle. In case this kind of stuff normally puts you to sleep, the Hastert Rule is an operating procedure in the House where the majority party refuses to vote on any bill that a majority of its members don't support. It's mostly a power play. If the Republican party is control of the House, for example, it has an organizational incentive only pass those bills that a majority of Republicans support. If you fracture your party by passing bills that the party itself doesn't approve of, you put yourself in the future for infighting and losing your majority. This tends to be the reason that people equate party strength with disciplined, unanimous votes.

But the most conservative wing of the Republican party is obviously not capable of actually governing. You don't have to look any further than their rhetoric about the debt ceiling to recognize that they have completely lost themselves in the throes of their ideology. Here's how Politico explains the current framework of the debate. As Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen and Jake Sherman write,

The idea of allowing the country to default by refusing to increase the debt limit is getting more widespread and serious traction among House Republicans than people realize, though GOP leaders think shutting down the government is the much more likely outcome of the spending fights this winter.

“I think it is possible that we would shut down the government to make sure President Obama understands that we’re serious,” House Republican Conference Chairwoman Cathy McMorris Rodgers of Washington state told us. “We always talk about whether or not we’re going to kick the can down the road. I think the mood is that we’ve come to the end of the road.”

Republican leadership officials, in a series of private meetings and conversations this past week, warned that the White House, much less the broader public, doesn’t understand how hard it will be to talk restive conservatives off the fiscal ledge. To the vast majority of House Republicans, it is far riskier long term to pile up new debt than it is to test the market and economic reaction of default or closing down the government.

While the crazies make up a majority of the Republican party, they do not make up the majority of Congress. The recent increases in taxes shows that Congress can actually pass bills without them. This is the vote breakdown of the American Taxpayer Relief Act, courtesy of GovTrack.

What's more, the full Hurricane Sandy relief package followed the same pattern. Only 21 percent of House Republicans voted in favor of this bill, and yet it still passed! Here's the GovTrack breakdown for that bill.

If this trends holds, it will be the beginning of a coalition that is almost almost unprecedented in American politics: a majority party that passes bills with the majority of its members in dissent. Take some time to wrap your head around that.

Now liberals shouldn't start jumping for joy. This isn't a Democratic Congress, despite the need for the majority of Democrats to agree with any big bill that's going to become a law. This is a style of crisis politics that will be destructive even if every false deadline is met. This kind of coalition is highly unstable too; the House members crossing the aisle to form this bloc are pretty conservative themselves. The list of Republicans supporting the Sandy Bill includes people like Peter King, Eric Cantor and a bunch of rank files from the Northeast that have an obvious interest in Sandy relief. It would be naive to expect most of them to stick with the Democrats for more than just a handful of votes.

Even if 30 of these drop out, it would still be technically possible to pass a debt ceiling bill. While this is highly unlikely, it's still a strong indication of how much Republican dissent Congress will need to endure if it is going to get anything done. Any clean pass of the debt ceiling, the kind that the President is currently saying he won't back down on, is going to have a Yea column pretty similar to the Sandy Bill. That kind of vote would be a remarkable occasion, a clear sign that the inflexible ideological stance of the Tea Party will continue to force Congress to incredible extremes just to get anything done. We shouldn't be surprised if more seemingly possible coalitions emerge over the next few months.