Oy, [Headline Writer]

The GOP Can't Win With Eric Cantor as Its Ambassador

OK, here's the deal. Conor Friedersdorf had a perfectly fine column over at The Atlantic today giving Eric Cantor the business for being a wet sack of mush, at least in his rhetoric. Friedersdorf listens carefully to Cantor and hears nothing but the stalest of cliches; no policy, no stirring language, nothing.

And it's a modest column; Friedersdorf ends with a "to be sure" paragraph noting that the job of a House Majority Leader can be more inside than outside, more nuts and bolts than rhetoric, and about the biggest claim he makes beyond his immediate analysis of Cantor is that he doesn't sound much like a future president. Well, sure.

And yet, of nowhere, we get "The GOP Can't Win With Eric Cantor as Its Ambassador." Which is an utterly ridiculous thing to say, and one that Friedersdorf neither said nor hinted at in the piece.

I don't know for a fact, but I assume that Friedersdorf didn't write the headline -- when Salon and TAP write headlines for me, I don't see them until I read the piece.

This isn't the first time I've written a post ragging on a headline when the article was fine, but as usual I don't really know whether it's worth it. On the one hand: what are you going to do? On the other: it's certainly true that far more people see the headline than see the article.

At any rate: no, the rhetorical skills of the House Majority Leader are not going to matter electorally, pretty much no matter what. Indeed, none of the skills of the House Majority Leader are likely to matter in future elections. I doubt that one in a hundred Americans has any idea who Eric Cantor is (or who Steny Hoyer was before that, or any of the rest of them). For that matter, I very much doubt that a Speaker's rhetorical skills matter at all. Elections just don't work that way.

Eric Cantor's Dilemma?

Ross Douthat is a fan of the ill-fated House health care initiative last week, which was torpedoed by a faction who decided that voting for a program to carry out a GOP talking point would, in this instance, count as supporting Obamacare. Douthat had previously bashed Republican politicians for not fighting for the policy ideas that some conservative wonks support, but now decides that Cantor deserves credit for trying -- because, Douthat believes, in his position he couldn't do more:

Because the Republicans are a minority in the Senate, because senators represent broader constituencies than congressmen, and because the structure of the upper chamber is designed to make compromise a necessity in any case, there’s a lot more room for Paul to be entrepreneurial on foreign policy (or for David Vitter to be entrepreneurial on banking reform, or for Marco Rubio to entrepreneurial — even if I think it’s in a mistaken cause — on immigration) than there is for a House leader charged with managing a fractious caucus to do the same.

Yes, but. The problem here isn't so much House vs. Senate, or even leadership vs. rank-and-file (although that is a real consideration), but an absolute, self-imposed bright line against working with Democrats. Douthat says, correctly, that "the House runs on partisanship." And yet: it doesn't have to, at least not always. The mechanisms that allow the majority party to get its way whenever it is united are very real and important, but they do not, in fact, preclude cross-party majorities from potentially succeeding.

In fact, Douthat gives away the game: "obviously House Democrats aren’t about to go along with a measure designed as part of a larger strategy to pick apart Obamacare." Well, yes. If, however, Republicans were trying to improve health care...that's something that House Democrats, Senate Democrats, and Barack Obama might well go along with. So it's not being in the House that's the problem, and that's forcing Cantor to win almost every single Republican vote; it's that we're talking here about an explicitly partisan strategy, with the only question about whether Cantor's tactics are better than those of other House Republicans.

That's not what Paul is up to on foreign policy, or Vitter on banking, or Rubio on immigration. They're trying to get something substantive done (or, at least, get a reputation for trying to get something substantive done), and none of them are, apparently, terrified of being pictured with a Democrat. And, presto, they can find Democrats willing to work with them.

It's probably true that Eric Cantor can't follow that course if he also wants to be Speaker some day. But that's not inherent in the House, and it's even possible that Cantor (and Boehner, and other House leaders) might try to persuade the rank-and-file that there are real policy gains available through some sort of bipartisanship. Unfortunately, there's little sign that either Cantor or the House Republican conference in general are very interested in real policy gains. And that, and not anything else about the House, is why Cantor doesn't actually deserve much "credit for the effort."

Planbee

Obviously, I'm assuming that after Speaker Boehner introduced Plan B to the GOP conference yesterday, the Republican Members of the House have been spending the day running around covering up for Matthew so he doesn't get fired. Right?

(Yes, I know, no one knows or cares. Sorry; I'm going to treat it as if it's a well-recognized classic that's part of our assumed common culture, so that I can make references to it without explanation.)

Hmmm...where was I....oh, yeah, Boehner and Planbee. Does she (she being Andrea Planbee -- didn't you click on the link and re?-watch the entire four-episode sequence before continuing?) have the power to unseat Dave Boehner, and put her best friend Eric Cantor into the Speaker's chair?

Well, no, not really. John Boehner has one major safety net which should keep him safe as Speaker for a while: Eric Cantor shouldn't want the job, just yet. The situation is basically the same as the one in Summer 2011. Sooner or later, there's an excellent chance that the Republican Speaker -- whoever it is -- is going to have to sign on to something. At the very least, the Republican Speaker will eventually have to support an increase in the debt limit or a mechanism for avoiding it, but before that the odds are good that the Republican Speaker will wind up supporting something to modify the sequester and to keep tax rates at their present levels for some, but not all, filers.

That is, something will eventually pass on those topics that can be signed into law, and the only way it will pass is if both the Republican Speaker and the President of the United States agree to it.

And so it's very much not in Eric Cantor's interest to be Speaker when it happens. Or, to put it another way: if it's a deal that the rank-and-file Members of the conference support, then Boehner is safe. But if it's a deal that they don't support, and in fact if any deal at all will cause a large chunk of the conference to blame the Speaker for selling out, then Cantor would very much like John Boehner to be the Speaker who does it.

Now, I have no idea what Cantor really wants at all. But if he simply wants to be Speaker and doesn't care about substance at all (again, not saying that's true, just thinking about incentives) then what he should really want is a long-term deal that removes the debt limit entirely for good, and that then barely passes the House. That should leave Boehner reasonably unpopular, but would also make the Speaker's chair far more attractive going forward, since it would reduce the opportunities for any further brinkmanship for at least some time, and therefore turn the job into a much easier one.

The general point: it's a mistake to think of John Boehner as a moderate and Eric Cantor as a hard-line conservative. The main thing going on is that a large part of the Republican conference is either crazy or catering to the crazies, while whoever is Speaker actually has to strike deals sometimes.

So no matter how much of an amateur arsonist Planbee turns out to be

The House Leadership

I thought Pema Levy's post about blame for the debt limit mess was excellent -- with the important caveat that we're still waiting on a lot of the behind-the-scenes information that could help confirm what most of us suspect.

Levy's point is that the GOP leadership should have been preparing rank-and-file Members from the start for an eventual compromise, no matter what they were saying in public. After all, they knew that eventually the House was going to have to vote for a debt limit increase, one way or another (at least barring unilateral action by the president, which presumably wasn't the goal). So if things go wrong, John Boehner, and especially Eric Cantor, deserve the blame.

I think that the key evidence for this is in Mitch McConnell's plan to dump responsibility on the president, but to surrender on GOP-backed spending cuts. At the time, I interpreted McConnell's plan as primarily a warning to Republicans: if you don't cut your best deal with the Democrats, you'll wind up getting nothing, and still the debt limit will go up, because it eventually must. The question is: did Boehner (or Cantor) ever make that case in private to GOP Members of the House? Did they do anything to educate their conference on either the substantive or political realities of the situation? Perhaps we'll find out that they did, and that what we've been seeing in public is nothing more than really good play-acting. If not, however -- if House Republicans really don't understand the policy they're dealing with, or the political context -- then I agree that Republican leaders are very much to blame.

In Which I Have Unkind Words About Eric Cantor

I was busy with answering questions and trying to figure out the McConnell plan yesterday, and I completely missed a very smart post from Matt Yglesias about Eric Cantor. It seems that Cantor has been going around with a slide show claiming that Barack Obama had agreed to spending cuts negotiated during the Biden sessions, although in fact those cuts were predicated (for Obama) on tax increases that Cantor, famously, rejected so strongly that he ended the sessions over them. Yglesias makes an excellent point:

[T]his kind of partial leaking of the contents of negotiations has the tendency to poison the atmosphere. The whole reason that “nothing is agreed to until everything is agreed to” is that to reach a bargain you need to have a pretty open and flexible discussion. If everyone in the room knows that Cantor has no compunction about misrepresenting every discussion as an agreement, it merely makes it that much harder for people to negotiate in a serious way.

Certainly correct. But it's worse than that! Basing public talking points on a misrepresentation of private bargaining certainly does make it a lot harder to negotiate properly. But what's even worse is that these slides were apparently used to brief Republican Members of the House on the status of the budget talks.

If that's the case...

I'm struggling to find strong enough words for just how irresponsibly Cantor is acting. Massively irresponsible? Unthinkably irresponsible? Newt-level irresponsible?

I mean, first of all, he's their representative at these budget talks. He's supposed to accurately report to the rank-and-file Members what's really going on. Not a talking points version of it.

But on top of that...look, one of the great things about the US -- and I mean this quite sincerely -- is that any yutz can wind up a Member of Congress, and that, at the same time, individual Members of Congress are actually fairly influential. On the first half of that...there are general career paths, but lots of Members come from other places; there's certainly no School for Politicians and the Governing Class that large chunks of Congress come from. And on the second half of it, as I never tire of saying, the US has a transformative Congress in which individual legislators really do have influence. Granted, less in the House than in the Senate, but still -- this isn't a Parliament where a Government is chosen and the rest of the MPs do little of importance other than retain the right to defect and topple their party leaders. But what all that means is that regardless of ideology, many Members of Congress show up without knowing really basic stuff. That's okay -- but if their party leaders insist on (falsely) confirming that whatever yahoo junk they were electing "knowing" is actually true, then they are going to still believe those things. And as I think Bill James said once, the Good Lord may fail at many things, but He's very good about punishing those who believe and act on the basis of things that Are Not So.*

It wouldn't be surprising if many Members of the large Class of '11 just didn't know very much about the debt limit -- in particular, didn't realize that not raising it really would risk, and eventually surely cause, an economic cataclysm; and, politically, that eventually, one way or another, it was going to go up. To be charitable to them...that's not a consequence of ideology or anything; it's just that there's no particular reason for House candidates to know obscure budget stuff. It's a disgrace, however, if House leaders played to that ignorance, instead of replacing it with knowledge. You know, factual knowledge. The kind that's actually true.

And that goes, as well, to giving them an honest view of what's happening in top-level negotiations.



*Reminding me of two things -- I really wish the Abstracts were indexed, although it wouldn't help in this instance. And, my memory is subject to my very favorite of Polsby's Laws: Famous Words Migrate into Famous Mouths.

Where Cantor Sits

There's been a lot of stuff today and over the weekend about how little sway John Boehner has within the Republican conference. I do think that there's one thing Boehner has going for him, though, that I haven't seen mentioned: the last thing that Eric Cantor should want would be an insurrection right now that would leave him Speaker.

As I've said, one way or another, eventually, the debt limit is going to be raised (I suppose the exception is if Barack Obama invokes the 14th amendment, but I think that's relatively unlikely). Could be after a technical default, or a market cataclysm, but it's eventually going up, and with the support of whoever is Speaker at that point.  I'll add: one way or another, there will be spending bills passed to allow the government to stay open in the next fiscal year. Just as with the debt limit, it's going to take cutting a deal of some sort with the Democrats, and the Speaker is going to have to endorse the deal. Could come after a government shutdown, but eventually it will happen.

And yet important segments of the GOP, at the elite and the mass level, just reject the entire notion of compromise. In general, and with our Kenyan anti-colonialist socialist president in particular. Whoever is Speaker will have to compromise (and given the situation, it's going to be the Speaker who is the most visible GOP compromiser).

The odds are very good that the differences between John Boehner and Eric Cantor have nothing to do with policy positions or ideology; the differences have to do with where they sit. Indeed, I think Cantor is going to have to wind up supporting the debt limit deal and the FY 2012 spending deal, but at least he'll be able to blame Boehner for it, and allow the crazier GOP Members of the House (and the rank-and-file) to maintain an illusion that they would get whatever they wanted if only their leaders didn't sell them out.

If, that is, Boehner is still around.

And so it's very much in Cantor's interest for now to keep Boehner right where he is.

Good Step For Cantor

I'm generally impressed by incoming Majority House Majority Leader Eric Cantor's reported plans for House scheduling for 2011.  It's been a longtime suggestion of many that Congress work longer, but fuller, weeks, and Cantor is planning exactly that.  It's also smart to plan in advance for the session to end in December, instead of setting a phony early target for adjourning only to have it slip several times.  Now, I expect some slippage, and particularly in claims about open rules and full debate.  But for the most part, I don't blame House majorities for using procedural advantages to achieve majority party rule, and it's nice that at least coming in, Cantor is willing to make gestures in the direction of procedural fairness.  While the main people affected by scheduling policies are Members, staff, and others who work on or around Capitol Hill and their families, it's still good to see positive, appropriate change. 

In particular, it's nice to see that unlike in 1995, Republicans appear at least in this instance to be putting an emphasis on making the House work well rather than indulging petty grudges or scoring ephemeral debate points.  Now, that's not true on everything; for example, the business of citing specific Constitutional authorization for bills is just silly, if they decide to follow through with it, although it's also harmless.  It also remains to be seen what they'll do on ethics -- and, more importantly, whether they'll need the ethics process as much as they did the last time the GOP ran the House.  (And I haven't seen whether they're going to change the committee names again, which I really hope they don't, for the selfish reason that I'm terrible at remembering the changes).  But Cantor deserves credit for a solid step in the direction of helping the House function better. 

The Maddow Sting

In my view....

There's nothing hypocritical or wrong in any way with a Member of Congress saying that government should not spend money, but trying to get as much of it for his or her district after its been approved. 

On the other hand, it is massively hypocritical for a Member of Congress to say that a bill would not create a single job while, at the same time, lobbying for projects from that bill to be placed in his or her district on the basis of all the jobs it will bring. 

I'm not a big one for objecting to hypocrisy in politicians, but that's a pretty extreme version of it.  It's pretty clear that such Members are deliberately lying to someone.

Oh, and I just saw Eric Cantor's spokesperson quoted on CNN (sorry, no link, will update if I see one) saying something to the effect of that a Member can't be expected to vote for a bill if he supports 1% and opposes 99% of the bill.  I think that means that while Cantor admits to supporting high speed rail, he opposes tax cuts (and unemployment benefits extensions, and expanded COBRA, and did I mention tax cuts?)  Good to know!  Perhaps he's almost telling the truth again.

(Gotta be fair...the quote was phrased a general proposition, not a claim that Cantor actually opposed 99% of the stimulus.  Nice spinning!  Doesn't get him off the hook on the jobs created thing, though).