Irresponsible government in America

It’s not quite twelve months since the mid-term congressional elections in the United States, when the Democrats won what was generally seen as a moral victory. Coming off low expectations, they held their majority in the Senate and, although they lost control of the House of Representatives, they confined the Republican majority there to just nine seats, 222 to 213.

Given the deep ideological divisions within the Republican Party, it took no great foresight to say, as I did, that this would result in “Trumpists and anti-Trumpists alternately being able to hold the leadership to ransom.” And sure enough that’s exactly what has happened.

It started early, with Republican leader Kevin McCarthy being forced to 15 ballots in January before convincing enough of the holdout Trumpists to vote for him for Speaker. Among the concessions he made to win them over was a change in the rules to make it easier to remove him; three weeks ago, after McCarthy had done a deal with the Democrats to avert a government shutdown, they took advantage of that and moved a vote of no confidence in him (called a “motion to vacate”).

The vast majority of Republicans still supported McCarthy, but that wasn’t enough: with the Democrats all voting against him, he lost by six votes, 216-210 (seven members were absent and two seats are currently vacant). Since then, despite war in the Middle East and all the other pressures on American government, the House has been unable to elect a replacement.

First the Republicans endorsed the next in line, majority leader Steve Scalise for the job, but he withdrew after failing to win the support of the ultra-Trumpists. Next they put forward Trumpist Jim Jordan, but a number of more moderate members refused to vote for him. On the first ballot he received only 200 votes, less than the 212 for Democrat leader Hakeem Jeffries. Jordan persevered, but went backwards on each of two subsequent ballots: by the third, last Friday, he had only 194 votes.

At that point the Republicans gave up and voted to disendorse him, with a vote on a new nominee scheduled for tomorrow (Tuesday in the US). But it’s hard to see how that’s going to help; the Trumpist wing won’t accept a nominee who isn’t as crazy as themselves, and such a nominee can’t win moderate votes.

In parliamentary systems like Australia’s – with what we call “responsible government” – we are used to periods of this sort of instability, where a handful of votes either in the party room or on the floor of parliament (or both) can be decisive. But they don’t get out of hand the way they have in the US, because the structural incentives are different. Governments have to be formed and have to govern, and if they can’t, parliament has to be dissolved so the voters can sort it out.

America instead has irresponsible government. Because the executive is not responsible to the legislature, legislative dysfunction does not prevent a government being formed or continuing. And without the pressure of that responsibility, members of the legislature are free to indulge themselves in a sort of performative politics, with inflated rhetoric, unrealistic demands and an inability to compromise.

Structural incentives matter, but so does culture. For most of its history, the US has operated with a political culture that stressed co-operation and collegiality; members of different parties respected each other’s positions and were able to work together, overcoming to some extent the structural defects of the system. When that collegiality broke down – as it did most obviously in the mid-nineteenth century – it heralded trouble.

The question now is whether enough members of both parties can find the resources to build co-operation and avert a similar disaster. In a parliamentary system, we know roughly what would happen: incompatible elements that found themselves in the same party would part ways (as Labor’s did in the 1950s) and one of them would reach, temporarily or permanently, an accommodation of some sort with the opposing party. Sooner or later an election would give the voters a chance to adjudicate.

But in the US party realignments are difficult and early elections are impossible. The two wings of the Republican Party are stuck with each other, and both are stuck with the Democrats. An alliance between Democrats and sane Republicans seems destined to happen eventually, but it will be difficult and precarious, and it will probably take quite some time yet.