How factionalism made the debt ceiling deal possible

This week House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and Joe Biden achieved what was supposed to be impossible. They reached a deal to avoid having the United States default on its debt, and pushed it through a historically unruly and divided Congress. All of this when solving problems through legislation was said to be dead, futile, a thing of the past. 

How did they do it?

Factionalism — the interplay between competing, sometimes overlapping sub-groups within the two major parties — played a major role in getting the bill through. Feared by the Founders and long decried by pundits of all stripes, factions have actually become essential. Harnessing their power to build governing coalitions, which can and do shift from issue to issue, is the surest way for legislators to get anything done in today’s Washington. 

This isn’t to say that factionalism is an absolute good. Especially when one faction is left unchecked by another, it can lead to small but rigidly ideological groups hijacking the process and making regular order unworkable. We’ve seen this in many iterations over recent years. But the debt ceiling episode demonstrates the flip side of factionalism: its promise as a bulwark against the antidemocratic tendencies that increasingly threaten our republic.

The Framers of the Constitution were famously skeptical of factions. Alexander Hamilton called them “the most fatal disease” and James Madison wrote in Federalist 10 about the need to “break and control the violence of faction.” But they also saw them as a necessary evil in a free society, and they made allowances for the emergence of factions in the new system they set up. Pretty soon, they and others who were factionalism’s original opponents had themselves joined factions, which in turn quickly morphed into parties containing multiple factions.

Today, we see them everywhere: the Freedom Caucus, the Republican Study Committee, the Congressional Black Caucus, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the Problem Solvers Caucus, the New Democrats, the Blue Dogs. The power of faction was on vivid display earlier this year, when McCarthy cobbled together an unwieldy coalition of allies across multiple GOP factions to win the gavel. 

And without factionalism, the U.S. would likely be on the precipice of defaulting on its debt today. The Washington Post described House Republicans’ “five families” as existing on a spectrum from left to right. To the left: the pragmatic Problem Solvers Caucus and Republican Governance Group. To the right: the hardline Freedom Caucus and Republican Study Committee. Square in the middle: old-fashioned Main Street Republicans.

By giving just enough to keep most members of most of these families happy, McCarthy was able to unite his party in aggregate. And by declining to take a victory lap on the deal he struck with House Republicans, President Biden illustrated the precarity with which such agreements can hang together. Factional politics are essential, but the coalitions they give rise to can be fleeting and dissolve when pressed too hard.

We narrowly averted disaster more than once during negotiations. As several prominent progressives and Freedom Caucus members rejected the deal, for example, the leaders of the New Democrats and Main Street Republicans swooped in and endorsed it. In this climate, with so many factions wrangling for leverage, it’s not just the most vocal who can make themselves heard. But by balancing competing interests, factionalism ultimately delivered a deal. 

Sometimes, factions are a clear impediment to the common good. Southern Dixiecrats who defended Jim Crow and opposed federal anti-lynching laws are an example. So are Redemption-era politicians who prevailed in abandoning the project of Reconstruction after the Civil War. But more often than not, factions are a feature rather than a bug in our system. 

But they must be wielded responsibly, not just for their own sake. A better factionalism in our time would mean continuing to seed and cultivate the landscape with pragmatic, solutions-oriented groups. Ideally they should be capable of crossing the aisle to unite with factions in both parties on areas of common concern. Rather than performative partisanship, they should serve as a means through which like-minded members can find workable avenues for compromise with others.

For example, The Welcome Party and Welcome PAC — organizations committed to creating a “big tent” Democratic Party — are modeling a new centrist factionalism. They conduct outreach to disaffected and politically homeless voters and support candidates in competitive districts that are neglected by the major parties’ funding apparatuses.

Earlier generations of Americans knew a politics where there was room for liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats, plus everything in between. This served both as a check on polarization and an essential means for getting things done. Restoring trust in our system should start with rediscovering the power of factions as essential elements in the business of governing. Pluralism, not polarization, should be the order of the day.

Daniel Stid is the executive director of Lyceum Labs, a new charitable venture dedicated to improving the quality of political leadership and party politics in the United States.