The War Inside the Republican Party

[eridani]

http://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/33901-the-war-inside-the-republican-party

On July 28th, Mark Meadows, a Republican representative from North Carolina, walked to the well of the House and filed a motion to vacate the chair. It’s an obscure parliamentary tool that allows any member of the House to trigger a vote to oust the Speaker. The only other time it had been used was in 1910, during a rebellion by forty-two Progressive Republicans, the Party radicals of the day, against their Speaker, Joseph Gurney Cannon, who was accused of running the House like a tyrant.

Meadows is one of the more active members of the House Freedom Caucus, an invitation-only group of about forty right-wing conservatives that formed at the beginning of this year. Since 2010, when the Party won back the chamber, the House has been engaged in a series of clashes over taxes and spending.

Two years ago, House Republicans brought about a government shutdown over the Affordable Care Act and nearly caused the United States to default on its debt. This week, as Congress raced to meet a December 11th deadline to pass the annual legislation that funds the government, the members of the

Freedom Caucus had new demands: they wanted to cut funding for Planned Parenthood and restrict Syrian refugees from entering the United States, policies that, if attached to the spending bills, could face a veto from Obama and, potentially, lead to another government shutdown.

To the general public, these fights have played out as a battle between President Obama and Republicans in Congress. But the more critical divide is within the Republican Party, as House Speaker John Boehner discovered. Boehner, who is from Ohio, was elected to Congress in 1990 and rose to the Speakership in 2010. His tenure was marked by an increasingly futile effort to control a group of conservatives that Devin Nunes, a Republican from California and an ally of Boehner’s, once described as “lemmings with suicide vests.” In 2013, to the bafflement of some colleagues, Boehner supported the shutdown, in the hope that the public backlash would expose the group as hopelessly radical. It didn’t work. The group continued to defy Boehner. He tried to regain control as Speaker by marginalizing its members, and they decided that he must be forced out.

[pampango]

1. "Boehner’s troubles and the rise of the Freedom Caucus are the product of resentments and

expectations that the G.O.P. leadership has struggled for years to either address or dismiss. In 2009 and 2010, Democrats, who then controlled both the House and the Senate, pushed through the most aggressive domestic agenda since the Great Society. In response, during the 2010 midterm elections Republicans promised to overturn Obama’s entire agenda—the Affordable Care Act, financial regulation, stimulus spending, climate-change regulations—and dramatically cut government. Just before the election, the three House Republican leaders, Boehner, Eric Cantor, and Kevin McCarthy, promoted a manifesto, called “A Pledge to America,” that, among other things, promised to cut a hundred billion dollars from the budget and return spending to pre-Obama levels. The Republicans won sixty-three seats, taking control of the House, and expanded their ranks in the Senate. In November, 2010, House Republicans unanimously elected Boehner Speaker.

... the biggest change he’s seen since he arrived in Congress, in 2002, is the rise of online media outlets and for-profit groups that spread what he views as bad, sometimes false information, which House members then feel obliged to address. The change has transformed Nunes from one of the most conservative members of Congress to one of the biggest critics of the Freedom Caucus and its tactics.

“I used to spend ninety per cent of my constituent response time on people who call, e-mail, or send a letter, such as, ‘I really like this bill, H.R. 123,’ and they really believe in it because they heard about it through one of the groups that they belong to, but their view was based on actual legislation,” Nunes said. “Ten per cent were about ‘Chemtrails from airplanes are poisoning me’ to every other conspiracy theory that’s out there. And that has essentially flipped on its head.” The overwhelming majority of his constituent mail is now about the far-out ideas, and only a small portion is “based on something that is mostly true.” He added, “It’s dramatically changed politics and politicians, and what they’re doing.”

The public face and strategist for the Freedom Caucus is Raúl Labrador, from Idaho, who was elected in the wave of 2010 and revels in the mischief-making that has characterized the House since then. ... The innovation that Labrador and his colleagues brought to the Republican conference was a willingness to use tactics that Boehner and his allies saw as beyond the pale. “We don’t want a shutdown, we don’t want a default on the debt, but when the other side knows that you’re unwilling to do it you will always lose,” Labrador said. In his view, Boehner dangerously misunderstood Obama and had an outdated view of political combat in Washington. “You have somebody in the White House who plays hardball,” Labrador said. “He wants to fundamentally change America. And when you have a guy whose only job is to ‘govern,’ and doesn’t realize that the other guy is trying to fundamentally change America, you just don’t have an even match.”

Nice article, eridani. Thanks for posting it.