FIVE POINTS: Those Midwinter Divided-Caucus Blues
1. Party caucus rules in Congress are important and unappreciated. I'm going to write this up in more detail next week, but I thought I'd start with a teaser here: party rules play an important role in shaping power, procedure, and outcomes in the House and Senate. Most people are aware that the legislative process is structured by a variety of rules, most notably those in the Constitution, statutory law, and the chamber rules/precedents of the House and Senate. But the legislative process is also governed by private rules developed by the political parties. For example, here are the rules of the House Republican Conference for the 115th Congress (and here are the floor protocols of the majority leader).
As a private party matter, these rules are not enforceable by points of order on the House or Senate floor. Instead, they are enforced (or not) by the party. Most of the rules govern matters that are squarely in the purview of the party: how it will select its leaders, how decisions will be made about committee assignments for members of the party, and so-forth. These are things the party, rather than the chamber, should do. But some of the rules govern the actual legislative process on the floor, such as conditions on what types of bills the party may bring up on the suspension calendar or the ban on earmarks.Which raises a question: why would the majority party in a majoritarian legislature like the House put such a rule in their party rules rather than in the chamber rules?
One reason is because they allow the majority party to make binding rules that govern the legislative process without the participation of the minority party. Consequently, the median voter in the decision process becomes the median voter in the party, not the median voter in the House. This drastically reduces the power of small opposing factions within the majority party. Consider the House Freedom Caucus. When a decision needs to made in the House proper---such as the election of the Speaker or the passage of a bill---they have tremendous potential leverage, because they hold the balance of power. The 239 Republicans cannot get a majority without either the 35 HFC members or some Democratic votes.
But for decisions made in the party conference---such as the selection of the majority leader or the decision to ban earmark requests---they hold much less power, because with only 239 voters, 35 votes does not confer upon the HRC the balance of power. Thus, the leadership can more easily defeat the HFC in conference votes than on the floor. It also means that policies that might not have a floor majority if put up in front of the whole House can be passed by making them party policy. The earmark ban might fall into this category: if an attempt was made to place it in House rules, it may have failed on the floor if a faction of Republicans aligned with the Democrats to block it. By doing it in party rules, so long as the median party member supports the policy, it can be adopted.Similarly, party rules provide flexibility; to break them requires only the acquiescence of the median party member, rather than the median chamber member.
Party rules votes also have the value of secrecy. There may be things that a party would like to do to structure floor action, but members would prefer not to have to vote publicly to put them in the House rules, or may prefer not to even have their party colleagues know how they voted. By putting these votes through in the caucus rather than the House, they can avoid such public votes. Finally, party rules allow the minority party to structure policies regarding party matters that intersect with the chamber. Since the chamber rules are controlled by the House majority, the minority has no access to alter them in most situations.
2. Floor majorities don't always get their way in the House. Party rules aside, the immigration debates in the past few weeks seem to be awakening a lot of people to the idea that party control of Congress can prevent policies that have a floor majority from passing. At a basic level, this is more or less obvious: so long as the majority party holds together as a procedural coalition, they can prevent bills from reaching the floor that would pass if they could get there. We see this time and again in the House. When the Democrats have control of the chamber, there has often been a pro-gun majority on the floor that can never get its priorities up for a vote. When the GOP controls the floor, there is often a floor majority for certain domestic spending priorities (such as compromise health care bills).
This is formally known as agenda control. And it routinely shifts policy outcomes (in the House) toward the median position of the majority party (left or right) and away from the median position of the chamber. The median member of the House on any issue---the 218th most conservative member---is someone on the far left of the Republican party. But the median member of the Republican party---the 120th most conservative Republican---is quite a bit to the right of the median member of the hamber. So long as the GOP can prevent their left flank from defecting on the floor, they can effectively shift policy rightward.
There are a few under-appreciated aspects of this, both illustrated by the current immigration debate. The first is that agenda control also matters greatly in the Senate. While the GOP majority cannot simply pass anything they want through the Senate because of the minority filibuster, they *can* effectively use negative agenda control to prevent things from reaching the floor that would pass, even pass with a filibuster-proof majority. On an issue like immigration, which cuts across party lines more than many issues, there is almost certainly a DACA compromise that can get 60+ votes in the Senate and a floor majority in the House. But that same compromise may very well be not favored by the median GOP member in each chamber. Which means getting it on the floor would require leaders to buck a majority of their caucus, or roll them as it is known.
The second point is rolling the GOP House majority has been both common in the last 7 years, and quite dangerous for the leadership. A large number of the important must-pass appropriations and debt limit bills since 2011 have passed with Boehner/Ryan getting many Democratic votes in the House to make up for the large number of defections from the GOP side. In fact, the main strategy of the GOP at many points has been to pass a conservative bill in the House on party line votes, let it get changed in the Senate to a compromise deal , and then put it on the floor and make the House eat it, even if it requires rolling the majority party. In some cases, there were many "vote no, hope yes" GOP members who were fine with getting rolled. But continually doing things this way certainly puts the party leadership in a precarious position with the caucus.
And the upshot is that many of the plausible DACA deals will require rolling the GOP majority, perhaps in both chambers.
3. Some important thinking is going on about Congress these days. There are far more people in DC writing at a practical level about Congress as an institution these days than there were a dozen years ago when I moved here. It's really astonishing. It seems every day there is something interesting. This week, I'd point you to Yuval Levin's piece in the NYT and Elaine Kamarck's piece at Brookings (and this Jonathan Bernstein rejoinder) as two places to start. More generally, the Governance Project at the R Street Institute is producing and aggregating institutional work on Congress at an alarming clip, and I highly recommend checking out their blog and subscribing to their updates.
4. State of the Union Addresses are unimportant, but important. On Tuesday, President Trump will deliver his State of the Union address. In recent years, it has become fashionable to play down the importance of the SOTU: the instant polling is worthless, the president doesn't actually get an approval bounce from it, and the policy effects are small. On the other hand, Jonathan Bernstein made the important case this week that, while the public effects of the SOTU are small, there are party and administration agenda coordination opportunities for the president, ones that Trump appears to be wasting this time around.
And, of course, tradition and symbolism are important in a republic. Here's my sappy old valentine to the pageantry of the SOTU, which is still the most popular blog post I ever wrote on my old blog. Here's a taste:
It doesn't much matter what the president says at the SOTU. You don't even have to listen. But you should watch, because, well, it's important.
5. Reminder: We have a podcast! This week we had Molly Reynolds from the Brookings Institution as a guest, and it was awesome. You can listen to the episode here. You can subscribe on iTunes here. And our RSS feed is here.
See you next time (probably end of next week). Thanks for reading!