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Get Jonathan Bernstein’s newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Republican dysfunction just keeps getting worse. The latest? A movement to strip the 13 House Republicans who voted for the infrastructure bill of their committee seats. Let’s go to Congress scholar Josh Huder: This is legitimately insane. These kinds of punishments are normally reserved for gross misconduct or extreme betrayals of party. Voting for an infrastructure bill is neither of those things. I'd be very surprised if this develops further. But the fact it is being discussed at all is bananas. Try to overthrow your speaker? Assignments might be in jeopardy. Blatant corruption? Assignments might be in jeopardy. Drunk drive your car into the Potomac with an adult entertainer? Assignments might be in jeopardy. Vote for an infrastructure bill? That's a Tuesday.
As everyone noted after the news broke, 19 Senate Republicans, including Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, voted for the bill in August; support for it wasn’t some fringe position within the party when it cleared Congress last week. And indeed, as Jonathan Chait points out, the perceived problem with the bill wasn’t the substance. It’s that it was a Democratic bill. This wasn’t the first move by Republicans to punish one of their colleagues for cooperation with Democrats, as former conference chair Liz Cheney could remind us. The dynamic that tends to govern these tantrums is simple. Republican radicals are constantly looking for ways to differentiate themselves from the party’s mainstream. They can’t do it on policy because the party is already extremely conservative, so they wind up looking for procedural maneuvers — shutting down the government, for example — even if there’s no point to it. At the same time, the mainstream of the party is desperate to avoid getting tagged as “Republicans in Name Only,” or otherwise accused of being insufficiently loyal to the party, and so they often go along with whatever nonsense is being proposed. That’s all been true for years. It’s worse now that nobody in the party wants to be seen as disloyal to former President Donald Trump, regardless of what chaos he is supporting at the moment. Thus: Dysfunction. All of this has minimal or even zero direct effects at election time. Voters mostly don’t care about this stuff, and indeed it’s unlikely they ever hear about most of it. That doesn’t mean it isn’t important. It significantly limits what Republicans can get done when they have majorities. After all, Trump wanted and couldn’t get an infrastructure deal, while almost everyone in the party wanted to repeal and replace Obamacare but couldn’t get that done. Governing failures stemming from all this may even wind up producing indirect electoral effects. We don’t really know why five of the last five recessions have started with Republicans in the White House, but internal party difficulties surely can’t help. How bad is it? There’s a good chance that Republicans will have a majority in the House of Representatives after the 2022 elections, and there’s already been some speculation about how large a majority they would need to select a speaker and organize the chamber. Yes, there was similar chatter about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats back in 2018, but in fact Pelosi was never in any serious danger. Perhaps it will turn out that current Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy will have similar strength. Perhaps he’ll be replaced by someone else all House Republicans will be happy with. And perhaps Republicans will have such a large majority that they can afford plenty of defections. But if they do wind up with a slim majority, there’s a possibility that we’ll see plenty of chaos. 1. Miranda Yaver at the Monkey Cage on the court cases over Biden’s vaccine mandate. 2. Lew Blank argues for visible policy results as a way to make Democrats popular. I’m skeptical, but perhaps it could work. 3. Jamelle Bouie on structural racism. 4. Rachel Cohrs reports on Pelosi and drug pricing. 5. Linda So and Jason Szep on the Trumpy war on election officials. 6. And my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Faye Flam on masking. Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You’ll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close.
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