Our Constitutional Crisis
- fmcinerney
- Feb 25, 2016
- 10 min read
Updated: Apr 11, 2021
Publius doesn’t get why Americans insist on talking about their two-party political system when we have long had three parties and soon maybe four.
We constantly reiterate the number two with words like “bipartisan” and phrases like “both sides of the aisle.” Pollsters insist on polling only two parties. Pundits of all types compare these poll results and speak of just two parties and their two sets of internal dynamics.
Yet the numbers say that we have had three parties since 2002 when the Tea Party was founded.
How is it that nearly a decade and a half after the emergence of a third party Americans still cannot say “three parties,” “tripartisan” or “across the aisles"?
A little history. Americans are terrified of third parties. The last time one was successful, Lincoln won the Presidency and the country exploded in a civil war. Because of this, Americans will do anything to prevent the rise of another party.
In New York, Publius notes, to put a third party on the ballot state-wide you must get signatures in each Congressional District from at least 5% of the number who last voted for governor. To get around this insanity quickly and efficiently, the Tea Party simply hijacked GOP ballot lines.
This was a brilliant move. In the 2010 election, the Democrats secured 193 seats, the GOP 181, and the Tea Party 61, gaining the Tea Party the swing vote. Voila, three parties. And a massive constitutional crisis.
Here’s why.
To students of constitutional development like Publius, 2010 spelled a Democratic minority or a GOP-Tea Party coalition. In most countries, the largest party, the Democrats, would get the first chance to form a government, either by forming a coalition with one of the other parties or by getting some agreement on a governing agenda as a minority. Failing that, the second party, the GOP, would get its chance.
As a rule, whichever party won the confidence of the House would stay in power until it failed on a money bill or fell on a vote of non-confidence. This would usually result in a snap election that might, or might not, unlock the House.
We have no such fluidity in our 1787 Constitution. Elections for the House are fixed at every two years and for the Senate at one third of Senators every two years. If things get stuck, they stay stuck until the next cycle.
In the House, everything depends on the Speaker’s ability to manage this muddle. If the Speaker cannot meet the challenge—and there is no Constitutional system for forcing the Speaker’s resignation and/or dissolving the House—we enter a prolonged period of stagnation. Where we are now.
This was so obvious to anyone who could count that Publius warned his GOP friends well before the 2010 election that their priority was not Obama—they could forget him for the moment—but getting the Tea Party off GOP ballot lines. If the GOP did not act fast, Publius warned, its outlook was just like that of the badly split U.K. Liberals following the First World War: a miserable slide into irrelevance as the Labour Party rose and rose. And huge opportunities for the unexpected. An opportunity Don Trump grabbed with gusto a half-decade later.
Oblivious, Speaker Boehner did not unlock this mess and the House became gridlocked. Boehner got a reprieve in the 2012 cycle, following which the Democrats climbed to 200 seats, the GOP stayed at 181 and the Tea Party dropped ten to 51.
Several things were immediately obvious in 2012.
First, the Tea Party’s loss of ten seats, 100% of which benefitted the Democrats, should have forced it to recognize its diminished position and what would happen if it tried to wag the GOP dog.
Second, Boehner should have reached the same conclusion and disciplined the Tea Party, telling its leadership that its control over the coalition agenda would be sharply curtailed to a short list of items that would not endanger the GOP.
Third, GOP leadership should have taken advantage of the Tea Party’s weakness to purge it from GOP ballot lines.
But, likely because he did not understand what he was looking at—nor, it seems does anyone in the GOP to this day—Boehner did not take control when he had the opportunity. Because of this, he did not see, let alone seize, the chance to create a centrist government with centrist-leaning Democrats and gain for himself the Greatest Speaker in American History Award.
Instead Boehner’s coalition collapsed on an agriculture—money—bill, on a second money bill, the budget, and a third, the debt limit.
Elsewhere, failure on even one money bill would mean his immediate resignation a snap election. But, in the U.S. system Boehner could not go to the country. He just sat there month after month, year after year. Our constitutional crisis deepened by the day.
Eventually, John Boehner recognized the impossibility of his position under the 1787 Constitution and resigned. Can his successor Paul Ryan expect to do any better given the constitutional limitations on his role? No. As he is fast discovering.
The problem is that the 1787 Constitution collapsed in 1861 and we did not fix it after Appomattox. Whatever Lincoln was thinking doesn’t matter; he was killed before he said a word. The result? We have been limping along on a broken document for 150 years. Can we really be surprised now that the 1787 version has finally stopped working entirely?
Then there is the lesson of the last time a crisis like ours was met and overcome successfully: Lloyd George's budget of 1909. Asquith had the advantage of a majority and promised to pack the Lords, rendering it powerless, something Boehner cannot do. Asquith could, and did, go to the country. The Lords caved , something that the elected and powerful U.S. Senate would never do. Indeed, the Senate turned against Newt Gingrich when he tried to pull a Lloyd George and make himself the PM in all but name nearly 20 years ago.
For failing to adjust our constitution to the reality of a multi-party system, we now have a full-blown constitutional crisis. The Democrats will remain the largest party in the House, the GOP will not purge the Tea Party, and the inability of Congress to do anything will stifle the nation.
April 16, 2016 Follow Up
Just to show how even trained observers haven't been able to figure this out, check out Michael Barone's article in the April 16th Wall Street Journal. Many years after the Republican Party split into two and was forced into a coalition with the Tea Party--and nearly two months after Publius' piece--Barone asserts that Trump can't break the already broken Republican Party. Huh?
Almost as confused is Yuval Levin's article in the Wall Street Journal Review section of the same day saying that the cure for the GOP--he also does not acknowledge its long ago split--is a reformulated policy for the American right. Levin also says something really weird: "Many liberals still cling complacently to the anachronism of social democracy ..." Since liberals detest social democrats, it is not entirely clear how this works. Get's weirder still when he sketches out a liberal path for his remodeled American Right.
More problematic for Levin is George Monbiot's piece in the Guardian on April 15th showing in detail how Levin's liberal prescription is in a state of global collapse!
Neither Barone nor Levin notes the irony that the GOP convention this summer is likely to choose either the man who exploited the GOP-Tea Party split, Donald Trump, or one of the Tea Party leaders who engineered it, The Canadian Candidate, Ted Cruz.
May 6 Follow Up
It doesn't get any better than this for Publius. Don Trump walks right into the middle of the GOP-Tea Party split Publius warned of years ago, grabs the so-called GOP (so-called because it ceased to exist long ago) nomination for the Presidency, and further splits the "GOP" into at least three and, possibly, four parties.
Then, The Wall Street Journal, in a bizarre May 3rd editorial titled The Third-Party Temptation, happily announced that the long-split GOP might split now because of Trump's arrival in the top spot. Even though the split happened over a decade previously.
You have to wonder what these people are thinking. And, indeed, this is the WSJ's weakness. Its editorials meander all over the place, hop, skip and jump between things that have no connection and then wind up with some kind of odd assertion that makes no sense. The WSJ calls this leadership when it is no such thing.
The Journal's problem is a lack of basic education. Its editorial team was not taught elementary writing and paragraph construction skills. When it gets to conclusions that might be right, you have no way of reasoning back to how the WSJ got there to see if its conclusion indeed works. And reasoning forward from the team's premises to its conclusions is a fool's game.
GOP stalwart Mary Matalin, who is the farthest thing from WSJ dumb, has figured all this out and jumped ship to the Libertarian Party.
October 9, 2016
You gotta love Don Trump. He has made Publius the top political analyst in America today. By nominating Don, the badly split GOP-Tea Party coalition stepped right into the three party trap Publius said seven months ago was waiting for them.
Don's Billy Bush rant on how to sexually assault women shows definitively that Publius' eigth grade test of Don's ability to read and write extends to Don's emotional maturity. Thirty days before the US presidential election, Don insists that we understand that he is a 12-year-old boy stuck in the body of a 70-year old male. And that he really, really wants to be President when he grows up.
Had the GOP not allowed the Tea Party long ago to rip it from its hinges and had Speakers Boehner and Ryan been leaders rather than cyphers, Don's candidacy would have been still born.
The GOP must now pay the price Publius has set. Good luck with that.
October 26, 2016
Today, Jeremy Peters and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times tried to make sense of Don Trump's fight with the GOP elite without showing that the US has been a three party system for some years. The result made no sense.
To preserve its brand, The NYT has to ensure that its journalists are schooled in the history of the political crises on which they are reporting. These splits occur all the time in less stable countries like Italy and Israel but far less frequently in stable countries like ours. But they do occur and we have to know how and why in order to make sense of our own.
Between Gladstone--the longest serving British Prime Minister ever--and Lloyd-George, the U.K Liberals went from powerhouse to afterthought. In Canada, the once mighty Conservatives vanished overnight in 1993, going from a majority to two seats as the Reform Party emerged Tea Party-like from its belly, consuming its remnants a decade later.
This process is well advanced here. That is how Trump got where he did. He is not initiating a process, he is finishing it. For the sake of its readers, the NYT must school its reporters and have them show what has happened so that they understand what is going on now,
No one in the US media gets this and the electorate has been badly mislead for over a decade as a result. The arithmetic is not complex: just count the number of seats in both houses of Congress held by the three parties and then explain the gridlock. This is an opportunity for NYT leadership. If Publius can do this in a second or two, so can the NYT!!
April 1, 2017
The GOP is the gift that keeps on giving. Its implosion on Obamacare repeal (see Publius on Our Four Party System March 30, 2017), predicted by Publius over a year before the event, makes Publius the must-read in American politics today.
Nothing in Publius' analysis is remotely complex. It is based on his high school history courses and public information accessible for well over a decade to anyone who can read. So, how did all the media, all members of the GOP and the august Don Trump not figure this out?
You must conclude either that they are all intolerably uneducated or intolerably stupid.
Because Publius has determined from an Eigth Grade level examination Don's policy pronouncements during his campaign that he cannot read, write, or speak English (See Publius on Dumb Don, September 18, 2016 and Illiterate Don and You, September 19, 2016), Don gets a pass. He's just intolerably stupid.
But the others? This is pretty elementary stuff. None of them could figure it out? Not one? Can the American education system be that bad?
April 13, 2018
Paul Ryan. who replaced John Boehner as Speaker of the House, announced that he will not run again in the 2018 midterm elections. He was unable to pull an Angela Merkel and get his three-party coalition to agree to a common platform.
Between 2014 and 2016, the Democrats gained six House seats to 194. The GOP lost 14 seats and now has only 168. Between them, the Tea Party and the Freedom Caucus control the swing vote of 73 seats.
Ryan's resignation in effect dissolves the failing GOP Establishment rump and surrenders what is left to the Tea Party, the Freedom Caucus and anyone else who can grab a piece. As Publius wrote here over two years ago, the beneficiaries will be some combination of Trumpistas and business-illiterate populists.
For students of U.S. history, this is one of the biggest moments since Lincoln brought the GOP to power in the 1860 election. The GOP is going and we have no idea what will replace it or in what combination.
May 18, 2018
This is getting easy!! In a perfect display of the four party dynamics Publius explained here more than two years ago, Paul Ryan lead a Farm Bill to defeat at the hands of the balance-of-power holders, the Freedom Caucus.
The problem for the GOP is lack of basic education. If you asked the GOP to explain the lesson's of Asquith's administration on the working dynamics of parliamentary democracy you would get back something like, "What's an Asquith?"
The fact that there is no return to Asquith's glory days is beyond them. Political illiteracy is very expensive!!
And, as explained here, the Farm Bill is a money bill. Anywhere else, failure on a money bill means the GOP Coalition would have been out on its butt the same day and we would have a new government, likely a Democrat-GOP rump alliance.
Here, however, it just means more of the same for whatever is left of the congressional term.
And, because the GOP doesn't have the brains to get the Tea Party and Freedom Caucus off its ballot lines, we are likely to get more of the same for the next congressional term and the one after that. Saving, of course, disgust with Dumb Don's mental insufficiencies widespread enough to kiss off the GOP Coalition.
A warning to Democrats: don't think you can avoid the same fate. Take the GOP Coalition lesson to heart. Keep other parties off your ballot lines at all costs. If you don't, you too will come apart at the seams.
January 6, 2021
The social media-fired coup attempt in Washington today show how on the money Publius was five years ago. The GOP has collapsed into utter chaos. What is left of it? How will it reshape itself? Can it reshape itself? Is there any self left to reshape? Who knows?