Republicans can’t stop fighting — even when they aren’t fighting Barack Obama
Since they won control of both houses in last November’s election, everyone has said that Republicans now have to “show they can govern.” But more than that, they have to actually govern, whether they’re showing it or not. And the current intra-Republican conflict over the budget shows that they may have gotten so used to shaking their fists and drawing lines in the sand that many of them can’t imagine any other way to go about negotiating — even when Barack Obama and the Democrats aren’t involved.
Republicans have been arguing bitterly among themselves for days now over a budget resolution — whether it will increase military spending, and if so, whether some of the money will be offset by other budget cuts or not. At various moments the conflict has pitted fiscal hawks against military hawks, the House leadership against uppity backbenchers, and the House against the Senate. The drama, which included a failed late-night vote Wednesday in the House Budget Committee, has largely been around a mere $20 billion of the $600 billion Republicans want to spend next year on the military. It sometimes seems like an endless episode of “Real Housewives,” where even the tiniest disagreement quickly turns to shouted insults and overturned chairs.
Speaker John Boehner is now crafting some parliamentary maneuvers that will get the GOP budget to a successful floor vote in a way that lets everyone tell themselves they won. I’m sure that eventually he’ll get there, though there may be more Keystone Cops pratfalls between now and then. But all this sturm und drang comes before Republicans can even start negotiating with their real enemy in the White House.
It suggests that at least some Republicans — enough to gum up the system — have so assimilated confrontation as a political strategy that they don’t know any other way to operate, even when they’re dealing with their allies (and they’re spurred on by conservative groups like Heritage Action that encourage intra-Republican conflict). The refusal to compromise is a political strategy, one whose efficacy people disagree about (some say the GOP made themselves look terrible with all the crises they created in the last few years; others respond that it didn’t seem to hurt them at the polls). But it was never much of a legislative strategy, if your goal is to actually craft a bill.
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