New York Republicans Have Found Something to Fight For Jonathan Bernstein | Bloomberg — Read time: 4 minutes

 

Democracy Dies in Darkness

New York Republicans Have Found Something to Fight For

Analysis by Jonathan Bernstein | Bloomberg

July 26, 2023 at 8:49 a.m. EDT

They didn’t do anything when Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy made all sorts of unwise promises to his party’s radical wing in order to get his job in January. They went along with the radicals’ demand for a vote to slash spending on popular programs in April during the debate over raising the debt limit. And they failed to stand up to their radical colleagues this month on a slew of disruptive amendments to the defense-authorization bill.

Now, however, House Republicans in swing New York districts appear to have found something to fight for: state and local tax deductions.

The catch is that the bulk of the Republican conference is from states that do not benefit from the deduction and strongly oppose expanding it. Whether this is an ideological position (against the inconsistent treatment of income) or a political one (to punish states where Republicans do not do well) isn’t important. What matters is that, so far, these New York Republicans have been unwilling or unable to cut a deal, leaving the tax bill stalled. With no support from Democrats, the bill needs virtually unanimous backing from the tiny Republican majority.

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There’s nothing unusual about members of the House fighting for their districts’ interests, even if those interests do not align with those of the nation.(1) Indeed, one of the strengths of Congress is that so many different interests are represented, and neither chamber blindly follows ideological or partisan preferences. US democracy works in part by ensuring that even electoral losers — that is, members of the minority party  — still have meaningful representation.

No, the problem here isn’t that New Yorkers and Californians are fighting for their constituents. It’s that they’ve surrendered on everything else.(2)

Throughout this Congress, the most radical group within the Republican Party has operated on the assumption that it does not have to negotiate within the party. Why cut deals when they can simply bully mainstream conservatives into giving them what they want? Granted, this approach doesn’t actually affect policy, since the Republican House cannot bully the Democratic Senate or president. Instead, the pattern — at least for must-pass legislation — is that the House first passes extremist bills, then eventually goes along with a compromise, with radicals opposing the final bill and blaming the rest of the party for selling them out.

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That puts Republicans in swing districts in the miserable position of having voted for extreme initial versions of bills that will offend moderates, and for more watered-down final bills that will offend conservatives. It’s true that they don’t have a lot of good choices. But they certainly could have told leadership that they simply would not go along with extreme legislation, or worked to make initial bills more reasonable — either within the party or through deals with Democrats. Of course, that would break the party’s unity, but any bill that passes the Senate and gets signed by President Joe Biden, such as the debt limit deal, is going to do that anyway.

Meanwhile, these swing-district members appear to be sitting back and letting the radicals foment a government shutdown this fall, which is quite likely to be a popular disaster for the party in general and its most vulnerable members in particular. But at least they’re willing to take a stand against their party’s tax-cut bill. That gives them something to brag about — unless (or until) they wind up caving on that, too.

(1) In this case, “fight for” might actually be too strong a phrase. What House Republicans from New York are doing is insisting on restoring the deduction as part of the House’s tax-cut bill, which has no chance of going anywhere in the Democratic-majority Senate.

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(2) To be sure, some of the radicals’ least popular ideas, such as pulling out of NATO, have been defeated on the House floor, giving members in swing districts an opportunity to build (relatively) moderate conservative records by opposing those amendments. But plenty of unpopular provisions have either passed with their votes or were tucked into bills they voted for.