Blundering Boehner

Back in graduate school, when I was first learning about schools of historical interpretation, I read about the so-called "Blundering Generation" theory of the Civil War. The idea was something like this: the Civil War was no inevitable conflict, but rather the result of a poor generation of political leaders. Whereas the first generation of the Founders and the second generation of the Jacksonian era found ways to compromise and preserve the Union, the third generation, coming into its own in the 1850s, had failed. Political ineptitude, not irreconcilable differences, produced the war.

The word "blundering" leapt to mind Thursday night when I heard that Speaker John Boehner was withdrawing his own proposal to avoid the ill-named "fiscal cliff" because he could not get his own party to vote for it.

What has happened to the GOP?

Nearly three years ago, I wrote a piece bemoaning the lack of party discipline among Congressional Democrats when compared to the lockstep nature of Congressional Republicans. The relative lack of success in passing Obama's agenda was due at least in part to the extraordinary unity showed by the GOP.

That was then, this is now. Of course much has changed. Republicans have controlled the House for two years now. But Democrats still control the Senate as they did then, and the president has been re-elected. And yet, the GOP is a mess. Even when the Republican Speaker of the House said he needed support for a bill in order to get leverage in negotiations with the president, he failed because enough of his own party members told him to take a hike rather than vote for even the most minimal tax hike (only on income over $1 million a year).

So who, or what, is to blame? Is Boehner a blunderer, someone who is (as Rachel Maddow has been saying almost since he became Speaker) simply bad at his job?  Or is there something deeper going on here?

I confess that I've always thought the "Blundering Generation" thesis of the Civil War was something of a cop out, a way of avoiding analysis of the complex political, economic, and social forces that produced the political failures of the 1850s and early 1860s.

In this instance, however, there is something to be said for the idea that Boehner is simply blundering. Friday morning on NPR's Morning Edition, correspondent Scott Horsely noted that while Boehner's "Plan B" could not pass without near unanimity among House Republicans, that did not mean that no plan could pass the House. A compromise proposal that garnered votes from both Democrats and at least some Republicans could certainly pass:

It could win a majority with Democratic support if Speaker Boehner were willing to bring it to the floor. That would take a level of statesmanship we have not seen so far and it could be the end of Speaker Boehner - his speakership.

And there it is: if there is no agreement, it will be because the Speaker is more concerned with keeping his title than in solving the problem, because he failed the test of leadership and did not rise to be a statesman. This is the "Blundering Generation" critique.

In a sense, Boehner is the victim of his own previous success. When he was faced with doing little more than saying "hell, no!' to whatever the president proposed, Republican unity served him reasonably well.

But now he is in the position of having to be for something, of needing to do something that will also be acceptable to the president and enough Democrats in the Senate to pass and become law. He cannot do that and maintain complete GOP unity, because at least some of the Tea Party members will never go along.

The question now is which he will choose.

I have observed many times (here and here, e.g.) that the Tea Party mindset shares much in common with the uncompromising southern position before the Civil War. As Rep. Steve LaTourette (R), from Ohio said last night, there was no use appealing to them: "we have been doing that for two years with these people and all they -- they become martyrs. They become martyrs in the eyes of these extreme groups."

Historians of the "Blundering Generation" school blame the extreme, uncompromising "fire-eaters"(and the other "leaders" who enabled them) for failing to find political solutions in the secession crisis. I suspect there were no plausible political solutions left to be found in 1860-1861.

There are solutions today, however. Our disagreements are not as fundamental as theirs were. Does anyone really think that Boehner and Obama cannot find a budget agreement that includes both tax hikes and spending cuts and that can win majority support in both Houses of Congress? Of course they can. As Horsely put it, however, it will "take a level of statesmanship we have not seen so far" from Boehner.

If he cannot find the courage to be a leader and statesman, if he continues to submit to the political blackmail of the Tea Party martyrs, John Boehner will truly have earned the title "blunderer."

The Impending Crisis

Washington, D.C. is full these days of talk of impending crisis and "grand bargains." For an American historian, those terms inevitably are reminiscent of the great compromises of the pre-Civil War era, all of which had something to do with the great divisive issue of the day, slavery. Can those crises tell us anything about today's events?

At first glance, the answer would seem to be "no." Slavery divided the country along sectional, not party, lines. But there are aspects of those crises that do provide some insight into the Republican, or more accurately, Tea Party approach to the debt limit.

And that pattern involves raising issues of policy to matters of dogmatic principle.

Earlier this week, New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote that if the Republicans do not take the deal that the Democrats are currently offering, it will mean that they are no longer a "normal" party. Yesterday, David Frum argued that the

coming vote [on the debt ceiling] is one where almost every House Republican will want to be on the losing side. But if they all get their wish – then they win. And of course … the country and the world loses, and loses horribly.

This idea of a compromise where everyone wants to be on the “losing side” is reminiscent of the Compromise of 1850, which preceded the Civil War by little more than 10 years. The difficulty of resolving the issues in 1850 were a harbinger of the utter inability to find a compromise a decade later.

The mindset today is similar to the one that prevailed in 1850.  This morning on NPR's "On Point," Major Garrett of the National Journal said that the idea now is for a "too big to fail" or "big bang" deal; i.e., if everything is included, if all outstanding issues are addressed, then members of Congress will have to vote for it.

That was how Congress initially approached the problems of 1850.  The "Great Compromiser" Henry Clay, leader of a special Senate committee, proposed what was called an "Omnibus" bill.  According to James McPherson, in his Pulitzer Prize-winning Battle Cry of Freedom, "this package was designed to attract a majority from both sections by inducing each to accept the parts it did not like in order to get the parts it wanted."

It sounded like a good idea. The problem was, "as the legislators labored through the heat of a Washington summer" (sound familiar?), most congressmen "signified their intention to vote against the package in order to defeat the parts they opposed."  Clay's Omnibus bill was defeated.

It is not a stretch to see the same thing happening to any "too big to fail" deal today. Republican leaders like Speaker John Boehner have been saying that a deal that includes any increase in tax revenue cannot pass the House. Minority leader Nancy Pelosi yesterday reacted strongly against any agreement that cut Social Security or Medicare.

So the prospects are not bright.

But there was a Compromise of 1850. Perhaps that holds out some path forward? Sadly, probably not. 

After his bill was voted down on July 31, Clay left Washington in despair, fearing that the failure of his bill would mean disunion. Stephen Douglas, as McPherson puts it, decided to "pick up the pieces" and pass the bill--"in pieces." He divided the Omnibus into five parts, and then assembled ad hoc majorities for each of the five parts. This allowed most members of Congress to vote against the parts they did not like, while voting for those they did like.

In 1850, there were enough legislators willing to oppose the pull of sectional loyalty to make compromise possible. It is questionable whether such a strategy could prevail today. As stunning as it may be to say, today's uncompromising attitude, particularly coming from Tea Party types, seems even greater than the sectional stubbornness of 1850.

The next few weeks should tell us whether we are in worse shape than we were in 1850. Most Republicans in Congress (41 in the Senate and 236 in the House) have signed Grover Norquist's pledge not to raise any tax ever. Perhaps they will revolt, as some did in the recent vote on ethanol subsidies, and show themselves to be a "normal" party. But if not, there will be no "grand bargain."

[In my next post, I will examine the similarities between the Tea Party's demonization of compromise and the mindset of the leading opponent of compromise in 1850, John C. Calhoun.]