2015 is just a few weeks old, but congressional Republicans have already discovered that governing is hard work.
Perhaps the biggest impediment is the outsized expectation of the party’s reinforced Tea Party caucus, which is hungry and eager to roll back the perceived excesses of the Obama administration. Egged on by Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and other prominent conservatives, they’ve convinced themselves that they have a national mandate and can do things like defund administrative actions with which they disagree.
{mosads}But the reality is that Barack Obama won the presidency twice, easily, in elections in which significant numbers of Americans turned out and voted. That’s a genuine national mandate. Republicans only win when Americans fail to perform their civic duty and vote. So Democrats dominated in 2012, when approximately 59 percent of voting-age Americans voted, and Republicans did well in 2010 and 2014, when just 42 percent and 36 percent did, respectively.
Furthermore, the 46 members of the Democratic Senate Caucus earned 20 million more votes than the 54 Republicans in last year’s races, and thanks to Republican gerrymandering, Democrats would have had to have won the House popular vote by more than 7 percentage points to take over the chamber.
In short, Republicans aren’t winning because of democracy.
But lack of national mandate has never bothered Republicans, who remain oblivious in a Fox News-informed bubble. “The American people want us to find a way to address their concerns,” said Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio). “That was the big message out of the election.” It’s hard to discern any “big message” endorsing Republican governance from an election that saw just 18 percent of Americans vote for GOP candidates, but they’ll probably continue to believe they have public support right up until November 2016.
What they can’t ignore will be the reality of governing with a fractured, radicalized nihilistic caucus, constrained by a Democratic (and suddenly activist) White House. Thus, you have the battles between fringe conservatives and more mainstream Republicans, like the ones that kept immigration reform from the House docket in 2014 despite having majority chamber support. And there’s no love lost between the GOP caucuses in the relatively pragmatic Senate and the loony bin we call the House of Representatives.
For example, House Republicans recently passed a funding bill for the Department of Homeland Security that Senate Republicans acknowledge has no chance of passing their chamber. But a more palatable bill would have trouble passing that radicalized House.
You see, Obama is no longer deporting the undocumented parents of American citizen children, and keeping families together is — to Republicans — apparently a bigger priority than funding the agency tasked with fighting terrorism. If Republicans can’t work out the differences among themselves over something so basic as funding anti-terrorism efforts because of a fringe ideological spat, how will they manage anything resembling real governance?
They’ll obviously try and mask their failures by blaming Obama, crying about an obstructionist White House after spending the last six years perfecting the craft. So they’re already complaining about Obama’s veto threats and whining about the president being “divisive.” “If we’re doing our work, that he’s not going to work with us on, then the country is going to stay polarized,” said Rep. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma. Hilarious.
But unpopular Republican legislation deserves nothing less than veto threats. The GOP can take the moral high ground when it gains a genuine national mandate. Right now, Republicans have their hands full simply managing their internal divisions. Good luck with that.
Moulitsas is the founder and publisher of Daily Kos.