While 20 hard-right members of the U.S. House of Representatives held the national Republican leadership hostage in Washington last week — forcing concession after concession — something very different was taking place in the Republican-controlled South Carolina House of Representatives.
In this former Confederate state, where Republicans hold 88 of 124 seats in the House of Representatives, the party’s contemporary mainstream has faced challenges from the party’s hard right similar to those that plagued congressional Republicans throughout the tenure of Speakers John Boehner, Paul Ryan and now Kevin McCarthy.
Instead of acceding to the hard right, though, South Carolina Republicans turned the tables and demanded that the 19 members of the South Carolina Freedom Caucus abide by a set of rules prohibiting them from campaigning against fellow Republican incumbents or violating the confidentiality of discussions among closed meetings of Republicans.
Refusal to sign on to the rules, which Freedom Caucus members have attacked as a loyalty oath, would prohibit Republicans in the state House from membership in the South Carolina Republican Caucus, effectively relegating them to legislative marginalization. So far, 71 Republicans have signed the rules, and 17 have not, according to sources who attended a closed state Republican Caucus session on Tuesday.
The intraparty conflict has remained largely out of public view in South Carolina except for coverage in a conservative web-based publication, FITSNews, run by Will Folks. “Make no mistake,” Folks wrote in a story published on Monday, “Supermajority Blues: SCGOP ‘Oath’ Standoff Is at Hand”: “This ‘loyalty oath’ is about nothing more than silencing those members of the legislature who want things to change.” The loyalty oath, Folks went on,
would prohibit members from endorsing or campaigning on behalf of anyone challenging a G.O.P. incumbent in next spring’s primary elections. It would also prohibit lawmakers from posting images of the House’s electronic voting board on their social media pages — and from discussing the “internal processes” behind House votes during public appearances. Basically it’s an incumbent protection ultimatum — accompanied by a muzzle.
Ohio provides a second example of an intraparty battle, with a different but parallel resolution.
At the start of this year, Derek Merrin — a hard-edged anti-abortion conservative supportive of so-called right-to-work laws — was assured victory in his bid to become speaker of the Ohio House of Representatives.
Merrin had won majority support from the 67-member Republican caucus in the 99-member Ohio House. His ascent would have marked a significant shift to the right in a state Republican Party known traditionally for its centrism.
On Jan. 3, however, when the full Ohio House met to pick a speaker, Merrin was defeated by a bipartisan coalition of 32 Democrats and 22 Republicans, a rarity in this polarized era. The coalition supported a less conservative, less confrontational Republican, Jason Stevens, who told the House after his victory, “I pledge to respect and to work with each and every one of us to address the many concerns of our state.”
Let’s look at a third state, Pennsylvania — where the determination of control in the state House of Representatives awaits the results of special elections for three vacancies. Here, enough Republicans joined with Democrats in a bipartisan vote on Jan. 3 to make Mark Rozzi, a centrist Democrat, speaker of the House.
“The commonwealth that is home to Independence Hall will now be home to this commonwealth’s first independent speaker of the House,” Rozzi told his colleagues after the vote. “I pledge my allegiance and my loyalty to no interest in this building, to no interest in our politics. I pledge my loyalty to the people of the commonwealth.”
In Ohio and Pennsylvania, the House speaker can, with some restrictions, set the legislative agenda.
In Alaska, which provides a fourth case study, bipartisan control of the legislature has a longer history. Without fanfare, 17 of the 20 members of the Alaska State Senate announced the formation of a bipartisan majority coalition in November that was empowered to run the upper chamber. The 2023-24 Alaska House has not yet chosen its leaders, but in the 2021-22 session, Louise Stutes, a Republican, was speaker, and Chris Tuck, a Democrat, was majority leader.
State legislatures are gold mines of ground-level material revealing how polarization and partisanship influence both policymaking and politics.
Vladimir Kogan, a political scientist at Ohio State University, replied by email to my inquiry about developments at the state level, suggesting that evidence of Donald Trump’s weakness in the 2022 elections has elevated Republican unease concerning ties to the former president: “I suspect some of what you’re seeing is party leaders updating their beliefs about electoral strategy and also trying to do damage control and protect the party brand going forward.”
In Ohio, Kogan noted, “there is a really important interest group story as well. Given the impotence of the small Democratic minority here, organized labor has been contributing significantly to Republican legislative candidates.” In other words, some Republican members of the Ohio House have ties to unions that made them wary of supporting Merrin because of his advocacy of right-to-work legislation.
At the same time, Kogan pointed out, Merrin’s support of highly contentious issues like seemingly limitless gun rights and anti-abortion legislation worried “some historically Republican-aligned interest groups in Ohio — particularly those in the business community and folks who care about economic development — which seem also concerned about some proposed and recently enacted legislation, especially legislation on social issues. I would not be surprised if they were involved behind the scenes as well.”
Michael Hartney, a political scientist at Boston College who focuses on state and local politics, emailed me his views on why some Republicans are moving toward the center: “Although the causes behind these instances of moderation appear to me to be somewhat idiosyncratic to each state and chamber, I do believe that many Republicans are feeling more liberated to focus on pursuing their governing agenda than on appeasing Donald Trump. Clearly Trump is still an important figure in the party, but Trump’s influence has surely waned.”
A number of Republicans, Hartney continued,
are showing they are ready to move on to pragmatic legislative dealing. In South Carolina, the speaker wants to do bipartisan work on economic development. In New Hampshire, Governor Sununu is calling the chance to cooperate and compromise “an awesome opportunity.” It’s quite plausible that the shifting political winds have led the most zealous “never McCarthy” representatives to play as much hardball as possible now and get what they can while they can.
Norman Ornstein, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who has been sharply critical of the changing character of the Republican Party over the past three decades, wrote in an email:
The state legislative maneuvers are truly encouraging. In a state like Ohio, the traditional conservatives have been appalled by the radicals, but it still took courage to do what they did. The noncrazy Republicans in Congress are all cowards. I hope I can revise that assessment if a sufficient number vote against the horrible rules package, but the odds are slim. I think the difference may be the lower visibility of state legislatures.
In fact, on Monday in Washington the House approved McCarthy’s rules package by a 220 to 213 vote, with only one Republican “no” vote.
In terms of recent developments at the state level, two Republican pollsters, Ed Goeas, who recently retired as president of the Tarrance Group, and Neil Newhouse, a founding partner of Public Opinion Strategies, have substantially different interpretations.
In a phone interview, Goeas argued that both parties have allowed their respective primaries to be dominated by the most ideologically extreme voters, with the result that “the two parties are failing us because they have allowed general elections to become contests between candidates who represent the far right and far left.”
Because of this, Goeas contended, “my sense is that people are ready and willing to return to more normal politics. People are tired of all this bickering and fighting.”
Newhouse wrote in an email, “This trend has less to do with G.O.P. legislators reading the tea leaves — signals — from voters calling for more moderation and bipartisanship and more to do with legislators’ own self-preservation.”
In general, Newhouse continued:
it is probably safe to say that state legislatures are less polarized by partisanship than the U.S. Congress. It’s probably not by much, as our data indicates that polarization reaches down to the very grass-roots elements of both political parties. Voters tend to give lip service when they talk about the need for partisan legislators to compromise — but what they are really saying is that Republicans want Democrats to compromise and Democrats want Republicans to do the same.
Newhouse concluded, “There seems to be little to indicate that this extreme polarization is likely to improve in the near future; rather, we may not have reached bottom.”
Ray Zaborney, a founding partner of Maverick Strategies, a Republican consulting firm based in Harrisburg, Pa., wrote by email that the vote for the Pennsylvania speaker, Rozzi, was “a function of the closeness of the House,” but, he continued, “I do think that it’s the intention — the desire — to get things done and not be hamstrung by a chamber that is 101 to 100. It was going to be almost impossible to pass an agenda that is partisan in that situation, and that move was some recognition of that.”
In other states and even in Washington, Zaborney continued, “I think there is a recognition that the most extreme elements of both sides can’t be in control.”
Stan Greenberg, a Democratic pollster, suggested in an email that the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturning Roe v. Wade was a crucial factor in the escalation of conflict within Republican ranks. This split became evident within weeks of the decision in the abortion rights vote cast by a majority of the electorate in Kansas, a red state, in an August referendum. In the Kansas governor’s contest, “moderate Republicans rebelled against an extreme pro-life, anti-tax, antigovernment conservative, allowing Democrats to win the governorship,” Greenberg wrote.
Polling conducted by Democracy Corps, Greenberg said, shows that “moderates are Republicans because of race and immigration, but they are more pro-choice and pro-A.C.A. (the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare), and they are providing a base of voters and support for Republican leaders who are starting to shake up the party.”
During the current session of Congress, Greenberg wrote, “I bet that there will be 10 to 20 Republicans who will work with Democrats to pass important legislation. And they will be empowered by the state examples and the perception that McCarthy is just in the pocket of the Tea Party and Trump Republicans.”
Perhaps the most important question regarding the contemporary struggles of the Republican Party is how much the factionalization of the party is driven by Trump and whether it will recede if he is pushed farther to the sidelines.
On Jan. 9, CBS News/YouGov released a survey of 2,144 U.S. adult residents interviewed from Jan. 4 to Jan. 6 that showed substantial internal divisions within the Republican Party, between a dominant Trump wing and a smaller but substantial non-Trump faction.
Nearly three-quarters of voters CBS called “MAGA Republicans” said “investigating Joe Biden” should be a high priority for the new Congress, and 47 percent of “non-MAGA Republicans” agreed. Sixty-five percent of Republicans said “being loyal to Donald Trump” is very or somewhat important, while just over a third said such loyalty is not important at all or not very important.
A decisive majority of all voters polled by CBS, 70 percent, said they would prefer the new Republican House to work with “Biden and the Democrats to enact policies all can agree on,” compared with 30 percent who said the Republican House should “oppose Biden and the Democrats to try to stop their policies.” A majority of Republicans, 52 percent, said the House should oppose Biden and the Democrats, but a not insignificant 48 percent favored working with Biden and the Democrats.
In practice, Republican leaders of the House have already adopted an agenda of opposing, investigating and defunding everything related to the Democratic Party.
On Monday the House voted along partisan lines, 220 to 213, to cut $71 billion from the I.R.S. budget in an attempt to eliminate funds earmarked to finance closer examination of the returns of corporations and high-income taxpayers.
“We will hold the swamp accountable, from the withdrawal of Afghanistan to the origins of Covid and to the weaponization of the F.B.I.,” McCarthy told his colleagues after winning his battle to become speaker. “Let me be very clear: We will use the power of the purse and the power of the subpoena to get the job done.”
On Tuesday, McCarthy won House approval, in a party-line, 221 to 211, vote, to create a Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, with Jim Jordan, one of the most outspoken supporters of Trump and the MAGA movement in Congress, as its chairman.
It’s possible, although not very likely, that the MAGA electorate will rise up en masse in 2024 to reward House Republicans with another two years in the majority while pushing state-level Republicans who have moved from the right to the center, joined bipartisan alliances or challenged the party’s extreme wing into political exile.
But the problem for House Republicans under the nominal leadership of Kevin McCarthy is that they have left themselves no choice. They are locked into a high-risk, take-no-prisoners, governing-be-damned strategy by the totality of McCarthy’s concessions to the Freedom Caucus, by his promised appointments to key committees and by the adoption of rules that turn any move toward moderation or bipartisan cooperation into political suicide.
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January 11, 2023 at 05:00PM
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