This column acknowledged two weeks ago that the populist revolt in America is real. Well, it continues. That 50% of Republican primary voters prefer someone – either Trump, Carson, or Fiorina – who has never held office before suggests that the Republican Party of Speaker John Boehner has radically changed. Incidentally, if you have not yet learned that his name is pronounced “Bayner”, you needn’t bother. He is resigning next month.
Boehner has spent his entire speakership seeking to make compromises that are not available. For example, he agreed a compromise that would have instituted minimal cuts in government spending and preserved current tax levels for 99% of people while pushing up taxes for the richest. A minority in his caucus was unwilling to accept even those tax increases and the president was insistent that they must happen. The practical difference between including these tax increases and not including them was tiny. It is not even clear that raising the rates would have raised any money. But both the president and House conservatives retained a theological attachment that was focused on the tax rate rather than the tax revenue.
Boehner, despite a rigid personal integrity – under which he has forgone any “earmarks” for his district – seems to be from a different era to House conservatives. They favor confrontation rather than compromise, and the president is perfectly willing to oblige. Given intransigence on both sides and the powers which the Constitution grants to the president, Boehner’s search for compromise has been – and would certainly have remained – fruitless.
One of the leadership’s most vocal critics has been Senator Ted Cruz – a candidate for president, and perhaps the one most likely to gain support when (or if) the Trump and Carson bandwagons are derailed.
Because Congressional leaders have ruled out closing down the government – in reality, closing “unnecessary” government activities during a budget crisis – he argues they have effectively given away everything to the president. He is not completely wrong. If one side unilaterally declares the point at which it will give way it has effectively conceded the whole of the negotiation. If Congress votes not to fund Planned Parenthood then the president merely needs to say he will veto any budget that does not include funds for Planned Parenthood and Congress needs to back down, or face the shutdown it has pledged to avoid. He could even demand doubling of funds for Planned Parenthood, and Congress would have to oblige. The only point at which Republicans could force any concessions at all would be when enough Democrats agreed to back them to override a veto.
But the Cruz argument falls down at the next stage. Just because anything short of shutting down the government will fail to gain concessions from the president does not mean that a more confrontational strategy would succeed. Given the arithmetic of Congress, the powers of the presidency, and the proven intransigence of the incumbent, it would not.
The progress that could be achieved by compromise would be limited, but it seems unlikely that the Cruz strategy would produce any progress at all. Cruz has a self-interested belief that nothing can be done until there is a conservative Republican president. Perhaps, but there is governance to be undertaken in the meantime, and Congress should not be neglecting it.
Quentin Langley is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing at the University of Bedfordshire Business School as well as a freelance columnist published in the UK and all parts of the US. He blogs on social media and crisis communications at brandjacknews.com
Filed under: U.S. Politics
