Split Develops Among House Republicans

Something unusual has begun to happen in Congress.

The House of Representatives has started to look like an American legislative institution instead like the British House of Commons, where strict party discipline is the norm.

After the 1994 elections, the Republican Party, riding to control of the House, imposed party discipline on its members to an almost unprecedented extent.

Historically both parties had hardly been highly disciplined.  Dissenters in each group would readily join with the majority in the other party to pass legislation.

In the 1930s and 40s, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had to try to peel off Southern Democrats from their informal alliance with Republicans to get them to support him and his Democratic policies.

And over the years moderate Republicans would occasionally line up with the Democrats.

That was the normal rule and how a lot of bipartisan bills were passed.

But House Speaker Newt Gingrich convinced all GOP members of the House to vote as a majority of the Republicans members directed.

In true parliamentary fashion, Gingrich even resigned office after his party lost a few seats in the 1998 elections.  Dennis Hastert, his successor as Speaker, said that it was his job to allow only bills favored by the GOP to pass.

This new discipline hit its peak when House Republicans voted to impeach Democratic President Bill Clinton.

Under the parliamentary system, the legislature can dump the government by subjecting it to defeat on a so-called “vote of confidence.”

While Congress has no such power, the Clinton impeachment could easily be seen as a vote of no confidence.   The Senate, lacking such total discipline, failed to go along with the House.

In 2010, the Republicans surged nationally, capitalizing on voter discontent with the slow pace of economy recovery.

The GOP gains were largely made by so-called “Tea Party” Republicans, who were committed to reducing the size of government and public spending.

The Tea Party wave was so strong that its adherents toppled some senior GOP officeholders in party primaries.

Following the 2010 elections, the Republican-controlled House passed Tea Party bills that had no hope of gaining Senate approval.  But they staked out a clear party position.

It seemed like Tea Party Republicans could take over the party in many states and in Congress after the 2012 elections. They believed that with economic recovery progressing slowly, Democrat Barack Obama and his supporters in Congress would suffer defeat.

Mitt Romney, the party’s presidential candidate, was forced to transform himself from a moderate into a conservative.

Instead of winning a sweeping victory, Republicans saw Obama re-elected and the Democrats stronger in both the House and Senate.

Although election post-mortems tend to be unduly alarmist about the future of the losers, Republicans were quick to draw lessons from the results.

They had lost the rapidly growing Latino vote and a majority of women voters.  If the trend continued, the party could spend a long time as a minority.

When Congress reconvened last month, parliamentary style discipline was clearly waning.   

Many Republicans, reading the party’s low poll standings, seemed to recognize that voters wanted results more than ideological purity.

The New York Times selected three recent votes to show the increased influence of House Democrats.  But they also showed a remarkable change: the split among House Republicans.

Speaker John Boehner has led his troops into compromises that the Tea Party would not make.

In the vote to avoid the fiscal cliff, about a third of the GOP went along the vast majority of Democrats.  (The Democrats are incapable of complete discipline, so they had some defectors.)

And the GOP itself proposed a three-month extension in the debt ceiling battle, though Republicans could not have passed it without some Democratic votes.

These votes represented the Republicans’ recognition that they would get the blame and possibly pay a price at election time, if they threw the country into a financial crisis undermining economic recovery.

On aid for Hurricane Sandy victims, a few Republicans supplied votes needed for a majority.

A relative but essential handful recognized that it was unfair to assist disaster victims in Republican areas but block it for the Northeast.

And in the wake of the strong Latino support of the Democrats, some Republicans were ready to join their opponents to pass new legislation to deal with illegal or undocumented immigrants.

Such unusual cooperation may mark the end of the GOP experiment with parliamentary style government.

This year should show if strict party discipline has finally given way to the demands of practical politics.