It seems that almost everyone is disappointed with October’s government shutdown. Tea Party sympathizers are unhappy that their strategy didn’t work, establishment Republicans are upset they tried that strategy at all, and Democrats and moderates are dismayed there was a shutdown in the first place. But despite the large segment of politicians who did not want a shutdown, this doesn’t mean that they could have kept the government open. The event was not just another budget dispute or political fight, but a fundamentally ideological battle between two parties. One party believes that government is fundamentally evil; this understanding complicated any compromise that might have arisen, because party members lacked the ideological drive to keep the government functioning. The other party believes that government is fundamentally good, so they refused to sacrifice parts of the government to keep the rest alive; they simply placed too much value on most government functions — especially policies as politically sensitive and ideologically significant as Obamacare.
The argument between government as good and government as bad is much deeper and more fundamental than the divides other country’s political systems suffer. But there was also a motive for the parties beyond ideology: political maneuvering. Republicans wanted to slander Obama, while Democrats wanted both to protect the president and to avoid setting the precedent of negotiating over funding the government; they view this as an obligation of the oath of office. It seems that the only way for the shutdown to end was for it to get painful — so much so that parties would be forced to break ideology and partisanship and make concessions. There were protests at the closed World War II memorial in Washington just a few days into the shutdown; these might have become widespread if the crisis was prolonged.
The debt ceiling was the looming pain that ended the shutdown and forced the rocky consensus. The last comparable crisis was in 2011, when President Barack Obama and House Speaker John Boehner, both moderates, tried and failed to use the situation to strike a grand bargain that would reduce the deficit. Since then, any hope of a big deal has died and been exchanged for hopes that the government will just stay open and keep funding its programs. This meant that moderates had nothing to lobby for this time. They couldn’t hope for debt reduction or even any real progress. Having come near the brink of shutdown once, some lawmakers had become desensitized to the idea. This crisis sprang from the combination of this decreased fear of jumping over the cliff and the deep political differences between the parties.
Both debacles – 2011 and 2013 – focused on the debt ceiling and on operating budgets. Between two parties that fundamentally disagree over the role of government, the debt ceiling and government funding are natural objects of contention. It is not subject but impact that distinguishes these two crises. The shutdown was partial — everything related to national security stayed open — but a government default would have caused more immediate and much larger financial chaos. A partial shutdown is not scary enough to force political surrender; a debt default is.
Saying that Congress is partisan only scratches the surface of the problem; there is a long history that builds up to the dysfunctional nature of Congress today. By examining the main political events of the Obama administration — the passage of the Affordable Care Act, the 2010 Republican mid-term election victory and the 2011 debt ceiling crisis — a picture of bitter disagreement, resolved only at the last minute, portends the story of the 2013 shutdown. The most dynamic Congressional politics have come from the House Tea Party Caucus, a group of approximately 50 Republicans who can only be unseated by a challenger from the right due to their radicalized constituencies. Not only did Republicans retake the House in 2010; they also swept local races, giving GOP-dominated state legislatures the power to gerrymander Congressional districts and creating some markedly conservative seats. This gerrymandering works best in big states that are majority Republican, but also contain substantial Democratic populations, such as Texas, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. Of course, Democrats did the same thing in Illinois and a few other states, but they controlled fewer state legislatures and so had less of a chance to gerrymander their way into stealing seats. In 2012, Democratic Congressional candidates received more than 1 million more votes than GOP candidates, but Republicans won 35 more seats.
Partisan districts do not lead to extremism on their own. Democrats have safe districts throughout the country, but only 16 House Democrats voted against the legislation meant to avert the fiscal cliff in 2011, compared to 151 Republicans who did so. This may be because the Occupy movement — in some ways the Tea Party’s equivalent on the left — never became involved in electoral politics in any comparable, concrete way. Safe left districts are still filled with moderately left voters, not far left ones. The far left is simply not as involved in the Democratic Party as the Tea Party is in the Republican Party. An active right flank has therefore pulled the House Republican Caucus to the right. Some current members, having either obtained their nomination through the Tea Party insurgency or having watched the process unseat their colleagues, feel pressure to vote on the conservative line even if they aren’t ideologically as conservative as their Tea Party counterparts. In one-party districts, the primary, not the general election, is the deciding factor. These primaries often do not receive much attention, but this doesn’t mean they don’t matter. It means that the people who can drum up the most passion and excitement — the people most upset with the status quo and invested in changing it — win nominations.The situation has undermined Boehner’s power over his caucus. Republican aversion to legislation, especially the earmarks that have traditionally been used by political power elites to win individual legislators’ support, has given Boehner fewer tools than past Speakers have had. He has nothing that his members need for re-election; sometimes, they are even safer defying him. With so many members either fearing or caucusing actively with the Tea Party, Boehner cannot compel his party the way some past Speakers could. Because many Tea Party representatives do not have ambitions outside of their Congressional seats, being too far to the right to aim for executive positions or a Senate seat isn’t a problem. For ambitious Tea Partiers, the path to power is through increasing their seniority in the House, which means winning primaries for re-election and always keeping one foot on the party line. That makes the House a poor bet for compromise. The solutions to both recent fiscal crises have come from the Senate, where statewide elections result in more moderate members, and longer terms of office give Senators more freedom of action. All this is to say that budget negotiations between President Obama and the House failed not because politicians in Washington cannot get along, but because real differences exist between the two factions, or least between the politicians in these factions. It takes a fear of real-world consequences — stock market dips, credit rating downgrades, debt default, job losses — for the two sides to suppress their genuine disagreement over how to run the country. After the 2011 crisis, the so-called “supercommittee” could not agree on a plan to avoid sequestration cuts because the sequester, intended to force compromise, was not painful enough.
The Tea Party wing holds as much power as it does because of the Hastert Rule — named for former Republican Speaker Dennis Hastert — which states that the Speaker should only allow votes on bills supported by the majority of the majority. Under this principle, and under normal political circumstances, Boehner should only call bills to the floor supported by most Republicans. These crises end, however, when Boehner, facing impending fiscal doom, allows bills to come to the House floor that will pass with almost all of the Democratic and a minority of Republican votes. While this course of action is often the only way to get legislation passed, the practice breeds resentment among those legislators who question why their party controls a chamber if bills can pass over their opposition. As a result, Boehner must wait until the last minute to avoid being branded a sellout by his caucus.
Theoretically, there is political room for a grand bargain, but reaching such a compromise would require a new kind of bipartisan cooperation. In the past, parties have passed combined spending bills so that each side gets something; for example, farm subsidies and food stamps were often funded in the same bill in order to garner both rural and urban support. Tellingly, House Republicans separated those two packages this summer. In the new political world, a grand bargain would be just the opposite: each party would walk away with something they forced down the opposition’s throat. Democrats would point to tax increases they made the Republicans accept. Republicans would hold up entitlement changes they imposed on Democrats. But for Republicans who wanted one prize, finding a compromise was difficult.
No single law has demonstrated the partisanship of the Obama years quite like Obamacare. To liberals, it is the biggest prize they have to show from the Obama administration, marking the conclusion of a decades-long fight for a health care overhaul. To conservatives, it is an enormous, expensive, ill-constructed law. Many Tea Partiers see their elections as mandates to repeal it. But while many districts support repeal, the 2012 election results suggest that the nation as a whole does not. After the Supreme Court declared Obamacare constitutional, the Republicans looked to 2012 as their chance to repeal it, but that never occurred. In the 2011 crisis, the dispute centered on government spending levels and the Bush tax cuts. This time, with Obamacare about to go into effect, Tea Partiers wanted to try everything in their power to achieve what they believe they were elected for: an Obamacare repeal. Beyond the polarizing effects of Obamacare, such long-term deals have many structural difficulties. The same time pressure that brings the two sides together makes crafting sophisticated legislation extremely difficult. Additionally, sacrificing their party’s most cherished goals, even if they get something from the other side, leaves representatives vulnerable in the next primary. It’s easier to just defend what the party already has until the nation’s back is up against a wall.
While the ideological chasm between the parties is large and damaging, it is reflective of a much larger shift in the U.S. party structure. Before the civil rights era, the parties were much more sectional and much less ideologically pure, though just as partisan. In 1949, southern Senators held up rent control legislation to force northern liberals to withdraw a civil rights bill they were filibustering. In 1963, the Southerners refused to pass appropriations bills in order to pressure the northern politicians into ending consideration of civil rights legislation. The idea of hijacking the government to impose a partisan agenda is nothing new. At the time, such legislation seemed as elusive as a fiscal grand bargain seems now. The system appeared broken and the opposition intractable. southern Senators, like Tea Party Congressmen, enjoyed easy re-election so long as they watched their right flank. But ultimately, the combined power of growing popular support for civil rights and remarkable individual leadership made civil rights legislation possible.
Now, instead of sections disagreeing over civil rights, we have parties disagreeing over the role of government, a divide shaped by the political history of the twentieth century. On the Democratic side, the New Deal’s counter-cyclical liberalism became the Great Society’s permanent social safety net. For the GOP, Eisenhower’s conservatism of economy became Goldwater’s conservatism of reaction. Parties can, and do, evolve ideologically in response to electoral pressure. The fact that budget negotiations have been yet again pushed back to early next year will let us see how these narratives and ideologies play out. Another 11th hour debate might harden the parties’ extremes even further, but it also might spur the popular anger and legislative courage necessary to rule more effectively. At some point, voters will force their representatives to make compromise — before the nation has a gun to its head. Until then, we can count on the debt ceiling to do that job.