AP Photo Politics The Republican Plague on Government The House GOP just doesn’t understand the U.S. Constitution.

Barney Frank is a POLITICO columnist and a former Democratic representative from Massachusetts.

The morally and intellectually lazy explanation for the deterioration in congressional performance over the past five years is the “plague on both their houses” approach—a theory that blames each party more or less equally for the wildly excessive partisanship in the service of increasingly rigid ideology. But the blame shouldn’t be evenly spread on Capitol Hill. To understand the unique strand of the Republican Party that should be blamed for the dysfunction in Congress, look no further than the ouster of Speaker John Boehner by extreme conservatives—a group whose members found him guilty only of conspiracy to commit government.

Understanding the dynamic that led to Boehner’s ouster is key to seeing the broader problem that led to it—a problem that will continue to be the major obstacle to a return to legislative functionality. The growing influence of the far right of the Republican Party is not solely the problem. What has made effective governing so difficult in recent years is that that wing of the GOP is determined to ignore the normal constraints on achieving its policy goals—constraints that are imposed both by the Constitution and the traditions of a democratic system in which power alternates among advocates of conflicting policy outlooks.


Don’t worry, I’m not myself just being hyperpartisan in blaming the Republicans for the current unhappy situation on Capitol Hill. In fact, the crux of my argument is that until 2009, neither party engaged in the pattern of irresponsible behavior that currently troubles us.

To cite only recent history, for 14 of the 24 years preceding the 2010 election, Presidents Reagan, Clinton and Bush 1 and Bush 2 worked with a Congress controlled by the opposing party. In only one case did vigorous partisanship and strong liberal-conservative differences override the bipartisan, multi-branch commitment to governance. The public reaction to that sole exception—the shutdown that resulted from Newt Gingrich’s 1995 temper tantrum—demonstrated that voters had little sympathy for ideologically driven intransigence. Not only did the next election—1996—see a stronger-than-expected Clinton reelection but Democrats also actually gained House seats.

The tradition of strong party differences on some issues, matched bipartisan cooperation on others, even survived the Republican impeachment effort—as John Kasich has repeatedly reminded debate audiences by noting his success as Republican House Budget Committee chairman in achieving balanced federal budgets. Those budget deals, of course, were made possible only by John Kasich’s close collaboration with his understandably unnamed Democratic presidential partner.

It was only after the sharp rightward swing of the Republican Party begat by the rise of the Tea Party that partisanship began to prevent interparty cooperation on the basic needs of governance. The impact of the Tea Party is irrefutably demonstrated by the events of 2008, a time when the world faced economic catastrophe. Throughout that year, the Democrats who controlled Congress repeatedly responded favorably to pleas for help from the Bush administration in coping with serious—and eventually grave—economic problems.

The year began with President George W. Bush asking Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for a stimulus—obviously not yet a Republican swear word—to bolster a flagging economy. They enacted one.

That spring, Sen. Chris Dodd and I worked with Bush’s Treasury secretary, Hank Paulson, to give Paulson the authority he wanted over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac—we had adopted a version of the bill in the House in 2007. And as chair of the Financial Services Committee I angered some of my very conservative Republican committee colleagues (not something, to be honest, that it was hard to do) by refusing to hold hearings during which they could attack Bush appointees Paulson and Ben Bernanke for their actions regarding Bear Stearns.

The year ended with the Democrats working in harmony with the Bush administration to adopt the Troubled Asset Relief Program—a bill that passed over the loud objections of a majority of House Republicans. The relevant point here is not the merits of any of these cooperative efforts between Democratic majorities and the Republican president, but rather to draw direct contrast to the response of the Republicans to President Obama. It’s a contrast sharpened by the additional fact that the cooperation continued without hesitation right through the 2008 election—not usually the best time for working across party lines.

The historical record proves my point. The breakdown in responsible government we have suffered over the past five years is not caused by some inherent flaw in our system, nor is it caused by mutual hyperpartisanship. Instead, the breakdown is the sole responsibility of the increasing influence in the Republican Party of people who are not only on the far right of the American political spectrum on the substance of public policy, but who, more importantly, believe they are morally obligated to engage in rule-or-ruin politics.

This crucial last point has been too little discussed. Governance is not obstructed simply because an important political faction advocates radical changes in policy. The problem comes—today and for the past five years—when these advocates try to take the country hostage in response to their inability to effect change through the normal legislative process. Why this is the case? In a system governed by free elections, there is, after all, no necessary linkage between believing strongly in a set of issues and insisting on the right to shut down the government if you fail to advance them. Nor has this been the historical pattern in the U.S., with the exception of the bitter moral struggles that led to the Civil War (and even Ben Carson has backed away from equating Obamacare with slavery).

The crux of the Tea Partyers’ justification of their right to extort their way to policy success brings me back to my opening assertion: Paradoxically, their extortion is rooted in their failure to understand something for which they claim great reverence—the U.S. Constitution.

Their complaint is that they have been denied the fruits of their electoral victories. After both midterms, and especially after their great success in 2014, the right has defended its demand that the rest of us agree to its agenda or suffer severe disruption by claiming that we are illegitimately refusing to honor their electoral mandate. Leaving aside the fact that they showed no such deference after the Democrats won one of the biggest victories in recent history in 2008, they blatantly ignore the essence of the governing system established in 1787. They ignore a principle that in other contexts they celebrate as a bulwark of liberty—the separation of powers.

Mainly, the GOP’s right wing ignores that we have distinct executive and legislative branches—and the latter is itself divided in two—and that the people who serve in these institutions are elected at different times, for terms of different lengths.

The GOP’s right wing seems to have us confused with England. There, all members of the House of Commons—effectively the unilateral decision-maker—are elected on the same day. A leader wins a majority on one day and a few days later is made prime minister with full governmental authority. In the U.S. in sharp contrast—again, one in which conservatives usually express patriotic pride—we are at any given time governed by the results of the past three elections. The House of Representatives in Washington today contains only people elected in 2014, but they share power with a president elected in 2012, and senators chosen one-third in 2010, one-third in 2012 and one-third in 2014.

Winning big in any one election does bring significant policy influence—although less influence comes in the off years (which is where the right has recently won) than in the quadrennials (where they’ve lost). When won, that influence does carry with it a veto over new policies going forward, and it gives a winning party significant ability to enact new programs. But given the nature of our constitutional system, getting the power to make significant changes in already enacted policies cannot be accomplished without at least two election victories in a row—if not more.

That brake on change applies particularly in cases in which the winning party’s goal is to uproot long-standing legislation that’s become part of America’s personal or economic patterns of behavior. To take one very current example, had there never been an Export-Import Bank, the Republican majority in the House that’s existed since 2011 could have kept it from being established. But demanding that a sitting president and a majority of the U.S. Senate join in taking that resource away from businesses that have come to rely on it is a very different thing.

Winners of a single election have the right to try to do this, but in our constitutional, separated powers, democratic system, they are not justified in holding their breath and kicking their feet until they succeed.

