Why the GOP agenda will grow even more extreme in the coming years

Why the GOP agenda will grow even more extreme in the coming years

Paul Waldman — Read time: 4 minutes

Some Republicans in the Senate have been arguing lately about how explicit they should be about the agenda they’ll pursue should they win control of Congress. While some suggest promoting “Contract With America”-style bullet points, Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) says this is unnecessary and risky, potentially opening the party up to attacks.

But the GOP has an agenda, one that’s quite clear if you’re paying close enough attention — which most Americans aren’t. It matters greatly, not only for what they would do between 2022 and 2024, but more importantly, what will happen should they take both chambers of Congress and the presidency afterward.

Consider, for instance, McConnell’s latest obsession: too many kids who have enough to eat during the school day.

As part of pandemic relief passed by Congress in 2020, the Agriculture Department funded universal free lunch in schools. Rather than having a complex system in which some kids paid for lunch, some got reduced price meals, and some ate for free, schools could just feed everyone. It made for less bureaucracy and better-fed kids, at a time when the country was economically stressed.

The waivers that made this possible were later extended, but they’re set to expire at the end of June — and now McConnell and other Republicans are resisting extending them further. “McConnell is not budging,” said one person close to the negotiations.

While you can argue that the Trump era saw a partial retreat in the GOP from Paul Ryan-style attacks on the safety net, the impulse to literally take food from the mouths of children is still there — and will surface whenever Republicans have the chance.

Why go there? Their most common argument they make is that it’s just too expensive, and they’re seeking budget cuts. I’d remind you that Congress recently passed a $768 billion bill to fund the military for a single year, which Republicans enthusiastically supported. So they have zero credibility to complain about high spending; they support spending on some things and not others.

If Republicans do win control of one or both houses in the midterms, we’re likely to see a lot of this type of effort to chip away at social spending wherever possible. Sometimes, it will be for political reasons, but often, such as in this case, it will be a reflection of their sincere beliefs about what government should and shouldn’t do.

We’re also likely to see a repeat of a pattern that was evident when the Republicans took over first the House and then the Senate when Barack Obama was president. To satisfy the voters who elected them, they have to hold show votes on issues that matter to their base, even though those bills will be filibustered or vetoed. But in the process, they frustrate those same voters, who want results.

So, if and when they finally take the presidency as well — as in 2016 — they will really have to deliver. We saw that with the Affordable Care Act: After holding more than 60 failed votes to repeal the law while Obama was in office, they had to follow through once they had all the power. Fortunately for the country, their last attempt in 2017 was a disaster, and collapsed when Sen. John McCain refused to vote for repeal.

How much the appetite remains in the party for that particular act of destruction is unclear, but Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wis.) recently said during a radio show that he still hopes to repeal the ACA. Whatever they do, they’ll have to show the base that they’re sticking it to the libs and moving ahead with a conservative agenda.

There’s another key part of this dynamic that wasn’t present before: State-level Republicans have gotten so extreme and aggressive that they may have created a new set of expectations that congressional Republicans will have to satisfy.

When your state representatives are essentially outlawing abortion, banning books and passing “Don’t Say Gay” bills, you may not be satisfied unless your member of Congress is willing to go just as far. Which will put pressure on congressional Republicans — but unlike those at the state level, they won’t be able to put their agenda into law.

That is, unless and until they take over in 2024, at which point they’ll have to follow through on all the radical policy changes they said they wanted but were stymied by President Biden from enacting.

Which means that should we find ourselves there three years from now, the Republican agenda will be a secret to no one — and its audacity will make your head spin.