The Tea Party takes Washington

A reader has asked my opinion on the current standoff in Washington (click here), and with my editor’s indulgence I’ll try to respond to this once-in-a-lifetime request.

The Republican Party is a minority party in the U.S., and its Tea Party caucus is a minority within that. Republicans virtually conceded Congress to the Democrats after the New Deal as the country became more urban and ethnically diverse.

Richard Nixon figured out how to game these odds. It might be next to impossible to win a majority of 535 legislative elections, but if you won the single-contest election for the presidency you not only controlled an entire branch of government but also determined the makeup of the federal judiciary, especially the Supreme Court.

Nixon perceived that the Congress, although designed to be strongest branch of government, had steadily yielded power to the executive and the courts. The permanent crisis of the Cold War gave the president unprecedented authority over military and surveillance activities, whose full fruit we are only now beginning to realize.

Nixon’s success

The legislative function itself had been watered down, first by executive agencies that— by issuing rules to implement new laws— could hobble, distort, or even reverse their legislative intention; and second by a Supreme Court that, in the hands of activist conservatives, could gut or overturn acts of Congress. The court could even create new law itself by acting as a non-reviewable legislature that, by discovering broad “rights” in cherry-picked cases, could dramatically alter the social, economic, and political landscape of the country.

In short, Nixon perceived that, by controlling the executive and judicial branches of government, the Republican minority party could marginalize a Democratic Congress, control the country and ram through its agenda. Using the Southern backlash against the civil rights movement, he forged an electoral strategy for capturing the presidency.

And it worked: After being locked out of the White House between 1933 and 1969 but for Eisenhower’s eight-year tenure, Republicans occupied it for 20 of the next 24 years.

Gingrich attacks

But what if the Democrats should, by chance, recapture the presidency? This was what happened in 1992, when Ross Perot siphoned off enough votes to elect Bill Clinton in a three-cornered race.

By this time, the Democratic Party had retreated so far from liberal principles that no post-Nixon Democrat dared challenge the new conservative hegemony, just as Eisenhower had accepted the New Deal regime in the 1950s. But Republicans now looked upon the presidency as their franchise, and they turned in fury on the Arkansas upstart who had taken it from them.

Led by Newt Gingrich, they determined to attack the Democrats in their last stronghold— Congress— and they were successful enough to engineer both a government shutdown and to impeach the President over a soiled dress.

Obama neutered

From this point on, the Republicans’ strategy for dealing with a Democratic president was resolute opposition. When Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell declared the primary objective of the Republican caucus to be the failure of the Obama presidency, he only stated the obvious.

Parliamentary obstruction brought Obama’s agenda to a standstill after the Republicans successfully demonized the Affordable Health Care Act (in reality a largely Republican plan, but opposed because it bore the stamp of a Democratic president). Thus was perfected the art of gridlock that Gingrich pioneered in the ”˜90s.

By using the power of the purse negatively— refusing to pass annual budgets, and stringing along the government’s funding from one continuing resolution to the next, each at the expense of new executive concessions— and by holding the credit of the country to ransom each time the debt ceiling was reached, the Republicans forced Obama to govern, effectively, as a Republican tool.

Cruz, Bush and McCarthy

Wall Street Republicans, the party’s Old Guard, recognized that there were effective limits to how far such tactics could go without roiling markets and threatening a globally interdependent economy secured by American creditworthiness. But the deal they’d made with the Devil 40 years earlier caught up with them. In cynically electing to play the race card, they turned the Party of Lincoln into the Party of the unreconstructed George Wallace. Now, in the Tea Party, they have reaped the whirlwind.

Take away the libertarian bromides and you have a racist, anti-immigrant, Know-Nothing movement of the kind that habitually raises its head in times of crisis, led by Ted Cruz, a neo-McCarthyite demagogue who, like George W. Bush, is the worst kind of Texan: a converted one.

So what should Obama do? He should declare the government open for business because no legitimate Congressional authority exists to shut it, and order its bills paid as due under the obligation imposed on him by the Fourteenth Amendment to maintain the full faith and credit of the United States (a point made by Paul Krugman, Sean Wilentz and others).

Boehner’s bluff

A president who thinks he has the power to wage war without the consent of Congress (he doesn’t, of course) should not shirk from the task of paying the rent. Let the Grim Weeper who presides over the House of Representatives bring a bill of impeachment if Ted Cruz orders him to. He won’t get any further than Gingrich did.

I’m the last person who wants to see the power of the presidency augmented. But I think the minimum Constitutional responsibility of a chief executive is to keep the government open. Congress can create or eliminate programs or agencies, but it can’t simply defund activities it has authorized, either selectively or en masse.

This is nullification, a doctrine rejected with the Civil War. It’s a bluff, and Obama should call it.

But he probably won’t. One of the most bizarre aspects of Obama’s presidency is his strange search for agreement with an opposition party whose avowed purpose is to leave him in the dust. It would be better for him— and for the country— if he were to remember Franklin D. Roosevelt’s response to a Republican Party similarly determined to thwart him in the 1930s.

“I welcome their hatred,” FDR said. Those words, and the determination behind them, would be good to hear again.