Say Hello to the Multi-Party US House of Representatives

The far-right Freedom Caucus has demonstrated that the tail can wag the dog, but this may only be the beginning of the fracturing of our two-party system.

We are fated to live in interesting times. In the future, historians may mark the rebirth of multi-party politics in America to last week’s elongated process of electing Rep. Kevin McCarthy the new Republican Speaker of the House. What we witnessed wasn’t just the dysfunction that can be generated by a group of far-right renegades who have learned over the last few years that pushing conspiracy theories, trying to block anything Democrats do and grandstanding on social media generates piles of campaign money and invitations to appear on Fox News. It was also the fledgling test of a new model for building and deploying political power that is designed to maximize the advantages of being a small, disciplined faction inside a larger but still slim majority. And while the Freedom Caucus, a splinter of a few dozen Republican House members who want to radically shrink the federal government, was the main beneficiary of the tactic this time, they’re not the only ones who can play this game. In the future, a group of more traditionally-inclined Republicans, perhaps with some Democrats, may make a similar move. Who knows, we may learn enough from the craziness to come over the next two years to make some fundamental changes in how we run elections to Congress, to make it much harder for a small band of extremists to take over a major party, and instead make it easier for more parties to compete for and share in power.

I’m not the only one who has noticed this shift. Here’s Daniel Schuman of Demand Progress, writing in his excellent “First Branch Forecast” newsletter:

What we really witnessed last week was the coming of age of a proto-coalition system in the House. A group of members in the majority party acted like members of a small third party that refused to form a government until they were given a share of political power. That’s hardly anarchy: it was leveraging the one opportunity afforded factions in the House to maximize institutional power at the start of a new Congress. This has happened often in the House’s history. McCarthy’s personal desperation and a lack of alternatives, along with Democrats turning the screws to keep his agony visible, heightened that leverage considerably.

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, as some Freedom Caucus-types have been talking in this way for months and working towards increasing procedural power for years. Conservative Partnership Institute president Ed Corrigan described this tripartite coalition directly in November at an event organized by Rep. Andy Biggs and attended by [Rep. Matt] Gaetz and Rep. Victoria Spartz. (The Grid did a writeup of it last week as Biggs, et al. followed Corrigan’s tactical advice.) …Biggs distinguishes between the “Uniparty,” i.e., Republicans and Democrats who make up the status quo in his view, and conservative purists. He and his compatriots were thinking in European multi-party coalition terms.

….How the Freedom Caucus operates as a quasi-party faction in a coalition government and how the rest of the institution responds to a Speaker that is not all powerful will be fascinating to watch in the 118th Congress. FC members have much, much more in common ideologically with the rest of the party than did the progressive Republicans who last leveraged the Speaker election for process reform in 1923. Despite the bad blood, the conference mostly will come back together. But aggressive use of the new tools at their disposal, particularly through hijacking 12 appropriations bills, hitting the doomsday button on the debt limit, adding members to the Rules Committee and the steering committee, and the omnipresent threat of the motion to vacate, could generate intra party political costs that causes the Republican party to fracture. If the Democrats were smart, they’d have been working this angle at least since the first insurrection. Fracturing the parties would not be bad necessarily, but it would require rethinking how we understand power and coalition politics.

As I told Slate last week, it’s a shame that what happened last week is being framed as “chaos.” In fact, it was the kind of struggle factions of members across the board should be having with their party leadership for political power within the institution. Power is defined through the rules, procedures, personnel, and resources that structure the institution. The model of the Speakership that existed until Saturday morning ensured that only a limited set of policy options ever were considered and a select diet of issues ever saw a floor vote. Through force of will, the Freedom Caucus created a new model where everything won’t be pre-baked by party leadership, at least for Republicans. The Democrats mantra “our unity is our strength” suggests that their factions have a lot to learn about the dangers of a party leadership structure that doesn’t share power with committees and the rank-and-file.

Here's Jonathan V. Last, editor of the never-Trump flagship The Bulwark, in his Triad newsletter:

“The Freedom Caucus wants to be a third party without being a third party. They want to be treated like a junior an equal partner in a parliamentary system. You can read the details here.” [He links to the same Grid article as Schuman above]

“It’s an interesting idea, for a few reasons:

• I am not sure Republicans want anything like a third party floating around while Donald Trump is a declared candidate for president in 2024.

• If you had imagined a Republican splinter, would you have guessed it would be from the side that was more anti-establishmentarian than Trump?

• A third party would be a fairly accurate depiction of reality. The Republican party’s voter coalition has imploded. A lot of college-educated professionals who used to vote Republican now vote Democrat. The two blocs left—the corporate-class Republicans and the populists—have almost no policy goals (or cultural affinities) in common.”

“The problem for Republicans is that they need the Freedom Caucus more than the Freedom Caucus needs them. That’s because Republicans want power while the Freedom Caucus and their voters merely want performance. And you can perform just as effectively—maybe even more so—from the minority. A lot of people seem critical of McCarthy for giving away the store to the Freedom Caucusers. But honestly, I’m not sure what choice he had. They have 100 percent of the leverage.”

Here's progressive Robert Kuttner in The American Prospect, writing before the final deal that broke the impasse with the Freedom Caucus:

The best scenario, politically and for constitutional government, is one that has been floated by one of the few moderates to suggest it publicly, Rep. Don Bacon (R) of Nebraska: Democrats make a deal with the Republican moderates to vote for one of their number as Speaker. This seemed vanishingly unlikely earlier in the week, but it now seems plausible. While Nancy Pelosi explicitly ruled out a deal to give McCarthy the necessary votes, she did not rule out a deal with the Republican moderates. It’s hard to believe that there haven’t already been back-channel conversations.

There are 19 Republican members of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus that worked to pass the bipartisan infrastructure law and other cross-party achievements. That’s probably the outside number of moderates who might vote for such a deal. How would this work? All 212 Democrats would need to vote for a Republican moderate, for example, Don Bacon. This would create a fusion leadership of the House—Democrats plus Republicans interested in governing.

As part of the deal, the Republican moderates would have to give the Democrats something, for example, half of the committee assignments and chairs, and an agreement not to support some of the things that the Republican crazies have been pushing, such as shutting down the government by refusing to increase the debt ceiling, defunding the IRS, pursuing impeachments, and using committee investigations for various fishing expeditions.

This would result in a constitutional coalition of serious legislators becoming the de facto majority party in the House. It would humiliate both the Republican far right and the McCarthy Republican "mainstream" that has shown no interest in governing. Democrats would still lose some important legislative goals, but this arrangement would be vastly preferable to a House led by McCarthy or by another Republican in thrall to a far right that would be obstructionist and nihilist across the board.

Of course, no such deal happened. But that doesn’t mean that people more in the middle of the political aisle won’t go looking for such a deal in the future. After all, if they don’t, the House of Representatives is going to be effectively run by its most far-right members.

In most of the world’s functioning democracies, the Freedom Caucus would be a minor party, going to the voters under their own banner and then negotiating for a share of power with larger parties seeking to form a governing coalition. Only the United States has a rigid two-party duopoly that allows extreme factions to win so much power if they manage to dominate one of the major parties. This is not a recipe for stability; I suspect it cannot last.

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that lots of historians are pointing to the 1840s and 1850s as a precedent for the kind of fracturing of party politics that led to McCarthy needing 15 House votes before he could be confirmed as Speaker. Writing in the New York Times, Joanne Freeman noted that every time it’s taken Congress so long to choose a leader, “the struggle was a litmus test of the state of party politics and the state of the nation.” In 1855-56, the speakership contest took two months and 133 ballots. That happened, she notes, while the Whig Party was dying, the Democratic Party was splintering over slavery, and newer third parties, the nativist Know Nothing Party and a still amorphous antislavery Republican Party, were in the process of gaining support. In 1849 and 1859 the Speaker vote also took dozens of tries.

Now today it’s a lot harder for a new political party to succeed than in the 1800s because of laws passed a century or so ago that block smaller parties from cross-endorsing, or fusing, with the candidates of larger parties, as well as the abolition of proportional representation systems prevalent in a number of American cities. That currently forces smaller parties into the “spoiler” problem, outside of states like New York and Connecticut that do allow fusion. But MAGA madness is causing some unusual, strange-bedfellow alliances to form. It’s not just Democrats—like the Utah Democrats who held off nominating a Senate candidate in 2022 in the hopes of helping independent Evan McMullin take on Senator Mike Lee--making these moves, either. A few days ago in Ohio, Jason Stephens, a moderate Republican lawmaker from the rural southern part of the state, plucked the Speakership of the state House away from far-right GOPer Derek Merrin by getting the backing of all 32 of the chamber’s Democrats along with 22 out of 67 Republicans.

Interesting times, indeed.

Odds and Ends

—Instead of virtual reality being the Next Big Thing, could we instead be headed for Artificial Reality instead? That’s what I gleaned from reading designer/anthropologist Maggie Appleton’s essay on “The Expanding Dark Forest and Generative AI.” On the Internet, no one will know if you are a ChatGPT.

—Speaking of artificial reality, there’s been a lot of talk of late in the digital political world about tapping online influencers to swing voters, but here’s a cautionary note: Crypto-ponzi firm FTX was paying YouTube stars and influencers huge sums to tout its products; one star with a financial tip page with 1.85 million followers says he got $2500 for every time he mentioned FTX in a video. Caveat emptor.

—If you are looking to enter the progressive data career track, Brittany Bennett, the data director for the Working Families Party, has put together everything you need to know about making your way in the field.

—Art of the Steal: Lest we forget, Tim Noah runs down all the ways the Orange Cheeto stuffed his pockets after the 2020 election, when he raised a quarter billion dollars claiming it was to contest the results.