The GOP attempt to replace Obamacare collapsed on September 2, 2004, over four years before Obama was elected. That was the day the Tea Party domain name was registered and the GOP split into two parties. The GOP never recovered. It has been in a legislative tailspin ever since.
On July 19, 2010, the Tea Party was approved by the House Administration Committee. That fall, it took 61 House seats by hijacking the GOP’s ballot line. The Democrats retained their position as the largest party in the House (193) and the GOP fell to second place (181). The Democrats have been the largest party in the House ever since. This, as Publius showed on February 25, 2016, lead to our greatest constitutional crisis since the civil War.
Because the House elects its Speaker by majority, so long as the GOP could get the Tea Party to go along in a coalition government, it could keep the Speakership even though it was not the number one party.
The Tea Party proved troublesome, however, demanding that the GOP do its bidding to get anything done in the House. Every time the Tea Party demanded something, the GOP simply collapsed. The Tea Party’s 61 members took control of the GOP’s 181 members and dictated terms.
Why did then House Speaker John Boehner not sit his coalition partners down and force them to do a deal that the rest of the GOP could live with or be cast aside for centrist Democrats? Any other parliamentarian in the world looking at Boehner’s numbers would have done this. It’s just arithmetic. And pretty simple arithmetic at that.
The only reason Publius can think of is Obama hate. The GOP hated Obama so much that the thought of cutting any kind of deal with him made them sick. Better to let the Tea Party determine outcomes, even at the expense of the future of the GOP.
If it sounds suicidal, that’s because it is.
The great German politician, Free Democratic Party leader Hans-Dietrich Genscher used his minority position to serve in every German government, left or right, from 1969 to 1992. He must have thought Boehner a fool. Genscher retired as Germany’s most popular politician. Boehner was kicked out of the Speakership by the fast-emerging Freedom Causus and retired in disgrace.
But, this only made the GOP’s position worse.
In 2016, the Freedom Caucus entered the lists, also by hijacking GOP ballot lines, winning 33 seats. The Tea Party won 40, a sharp decline. The GOP, or whatever remains of it, has only 168 seats in the House. The Democrats have 194, six more than in 2014.
The GOP has, therefore, lost seats to the Democrats on one side and to a three party-split on the other. It is on life support. Boehner’s replacement, Paul Ryan, has proven himself spectacularly inept.
Dumb Don Trump hasn’t proven himself to be any better at managing his three-party mashup.
Added to the fact the Don owes his 74 vote Electoral College victory by a vanishingly small 75,000 popular votes spread over three states, and the GOP’s weakness going into Obamacare repeal was so easy to calculate that only an utter idiot would have considered the idea.
A smarter politician than Paul Ryan would have taken one look at the numbers and the ideological differences between the GOP rump and its Tea Party and Freedom Caucus coalition partners, dumped them and formed a centrist coalition with the Democrats. But, like Boehner before him, he appears to have been too afraid to do this. Making Ryan’s life impossible, as Publius has shown, Don Trump can’t count either. His inability to understand simple arithmetic is beyond dispute.
What humiliated Don Trump, though, was not just his innumeracy but his ignorance. He apparently didn’t notice that the Freedom Caucus is a seasoned combatant with a lot of experience as the coalition tail that wags the GOP dog. It wins every time because the GOP has been powerless for years. Having brought down Boehner, it has nothing to fear from a President who, as Publius has shown, cannot read, write, or speak English.
In a case of evolution running backward, the GOP allowed itself to be consumed with Obama hate rather than attending to its own aggrandizement.
Publius warned his GOP friends in 2010 that they must forget Obama. Their future depended entirely on purging the Tea Party from their ballot lines. The smartest thing to do, Publius told them, was to cut deals with the Democrats that make them look like smart, shrewd parliamentarians capable of running the country. And win.
Most refused to listen.
Publius also warned Republicans, as he reiterated here in Our Constitutional Crisis, that their failure to take their own party seriously would allow someone like Don Trump to walk right into the GOP split and take over. This would ruin the GOP for good. Oh well…
The idea of hijacking the ballot lines of an established party is a direct outcome of the Civil War, the last time a third party—the GOP—emerged successfully. After the War, the established parties made it extremely hard to create a third party ballot line. Financing a third party is still harder. Hijacking ballot lines, by contrast, is cheap and easy to do.
But there are consequences. The GOP ceded Publius’ district to the Tea Party, giving voters a choice between the Tea Party and the Democrats. This had the effect of turning the district, not to the Tea Party as intended but, to the Democrats. Crazy.
Today, Don Trump finally got to where Publius was in 2010, tweeting furiously, “The Freedom Caucus will hurt the entire Republican agenda if they don’t get on the team, & fast. We must fight them, & Dems, in 2018!” Amazing. It took the Dumb Dude seven long years to count to 218.
If Don had been able to count to 218 in 2010 he likely would not have run for President. For either of the largest parties because neither could reach that number.
The innumeracy of the GOP-Tea Party-Freedom Caucus coalition in the House has led to some weird outcomes—as with the Obamacare repeal fiasco—and will lead to many more.
Take Don Trump’s budget, which adds up about as well as his mass deportation plans (see Publius’ Learning to Count With Don Trump). If Dumb Don could count, he would have had to ask himself how he could get his three-party coalition to pass his jumbled fiscal math. Then again, he wouldn’t have jumbled the math in the first place. He might have been forced to propose common sense.
Now, that would have been a wonder.
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 part 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 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.