There you go again repeating mistakes, House Republicans
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House Republicans are repeating the mistakes of the past at record speed. They've wasted no time in shutting down part of the federal government - in this case, their own chamber. Future, broader shutdowns are all but certain. The fight over speaker of the House has elevated the figures within the GOP conference, such as Matt Gaetz of Florida, Scott Perry of Pennsylvania and Lauren Boebert of Colorado, who alienate the independents and suburban voters that the party needs to grow its majority.
It's as if incoming members looked upon the spotty record of previous GOP Houses not as a warning sign to take a different path, but as a challenge to surmount.
The current dysfunction is not simply a product of the aftermath of Donald Trump's presidency, the post-2008 tea party or the eight-year-old Freedom Caucus. The first multiple-ballot speaker race in 100 years is only the latest episode in three decades of House Republican infighting.
Since 1994, when Republicans broke the 40-year Democratic hold on the House of Representatives, their majorities have stuck together only under the guidance of strong GOP presidents. Absent the gravitational pull of a Republican at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the House GOP loses its focus and turns against itself.
The 1994 revolution collapsed after similar infighting among quarrelsome Republican legislators, albeit not nearly as quickly. Leadership made the difference. When the party took power on Capitol Hill in 1995, House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia functioned as a quasi-presidential figure. His "Contract With America," a collection of 10 bills that Republicans promised to bring to the floor if they won the majority, functioned as a presidential-level agenda, nationalizing the battle for Congress with pledges to enact specific reforms. For a while, the dynamic, voluble and visionary Gingrich upstaged President Bill Clinton.
Then, as 1995 turned into 1996, Gingrich miscalculated, forcing government shutdowns that Clinton used to his advantage. Clinton adopted a politics of triangulation, embracing several conservative positions while casting Republicans as opponents of Medicare, Medicaid, education and the environment. Clinton declared the "era of big government is over," signed a landmark welfare reform law, cruised to reelection and worked with Congress to balance the budget. Gingrich had to deal with rising internal criticism and a coup attempt that almost cost him his job.
All of that came before Clinton's impeachment in 1998, which turned out to be a replay of the government shutdowns, with the president's job approval rising as controversy over his extramarital affair with an intern and subsequent lying about it dragged on. Gingrich resigned from the speakership after Republicans lost House seats in that year's elections. The GOP conference wanted to replace him with Bob Livingston of Louisiana, who turned down the job after news broke that he, like both Clinton and Gingrich, had an extramarital affair.
Eventually, Dennis Hastert of Illinois emerged as a consensus choice for speaker, with the real power residing in the office of Majority Whip Tom DeLay of Texas. Neither Hastert nor DeLay supplied the energy and ideas necessary to unite and motivate the House GOP. "As the 1999 congressional session progressed," wrote syndicated columnist Robert D. Novak, "it seemed that the agenda was being set more by the minority Democrats than by the majority Republicans."
The situation changed when George W. Bush was inaugurated as president in 2001. Bush spurred the Republican House to pass a tax cut, a ban on human cloning, the No Child Left Behind Act and a prescription drug benefit for Medicare. At the height of Bush's popularity after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, House Republicans (as well as many Democrats) supported the Patriot Act and the creation of the Department of Homeland Security and authorized the use of force against Afghanistan and Iraq.
Then, largely because of the Iraq War, Bush's job approval waned early in his second term. So did his ability to corral the House GOP. His proposals for adding personal accounts to Social Security and a comprehensive immigration reform that would have granted amnesty to immigrants in the country illegally never made it to a vote. An Indiana Republican congressman named Mike Pence led small-government conservatives in a revolt against Bush's spending request to rebuild New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.
Republican disillusionment, congressional corruption and the spiraling violence in Iraq contributed to a Democratic takeover of Congress in 2006. By the autumn of 2008, when an unpopular Bush asked Congress to authorize the bank bailout, House Republicans paid him no mind. The bailout failed on the first ballot, leading to a dramatic fall in the stock market and a frenzied scramble to persuade enough Democrats and Republicans to switch their votes to ensure the law's passage. Among those who supported the bailout was GOP leader John A. Boehner of Ohio. Many conservatives never forgave him for it.
After Republicans recaptured the House in 2010, Boehner was elevated to speaker. He was an accomplished legislator but no ideologue. He lacked Gingrich's forceful personality and suffered from the absence of a GOP president who could apply outside pressure on the conference. Republican congressmen reverted to their bad habits. In his memoir, Boehner wrote that as speaker he became "mayor" of "Crazytown," a place "populated by jackasses, and media hounds, and some normal citizens as baffled as I was about how we got trapped inside the city walls."
Just like Clinton, President Barack Obama exploited Republican divisions to situate himself in the center of the electorate and win reelection. Boehner watched as Republicans shut down the government again in 2013. By the fall of 2015, he'd had enough and resigned. Paul Ryan of Wisconsin became speaker.
President Donald Trump was unpopular with the public, but his extraordinary approval ratings among Republican partisans allowed him to keep House Republicans in line.
Too disorganized and easily distracted to deliver his own marching orders to the GOP Congress, Trump deferred to Ryan on legislative matters. The result was a tax reform, a boost in defense spending and rollback of several burdensome regulations enacted under Obama. Ryan, who never wanted the job of speaker, left Congress after Democrats won the House in 2018.
Four years later, Trump is gone, House Republicans are back in the majority, and GOP leader Kevin McCarthy of California is fighting for his career.
Some things never change. History suggests that whoever emerges with the speaker's gavel will be unable to lead for long a Republican conference given to sectarianism, conspiracy theory and dramatic gestures that inevitably backfire.
President Joe Biden is all smiles because he recognizes that Democratic presidents have done well when the GOP runs the House. For Republicans, the chance to elect a new president in 2024 can't come soon enough.
A strong leader with defined goals will heal the divisions that cripple their party and put them back on the path of conservative reform - unless, of course, the infighting and policy overreach of the next two years end up helping keep a Democrat in the White House.
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Continetti is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of "The Right: The Hundred Year War for American Conservatism."
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