The Republican struggle to choose a speaker for the House has looked a lot like an ideological battle, pitting archconservatives against relative moderates in the GOP caucus. But in fact, it’s also a fight about governance, and especially the return to intransigence.
“What’s also going on is a split over whether Republicans should try to govern by way of compromise,” observed CNN’s Harry Enten in a recent analysis. Are members willing to support the deals that GOP leaders have made with Democrats to keep the government functioning? Or would they rather dig in their heels and break things?
The breakage caucus seems to have momentum. And that’s bad news for anyone who values an operational federal government.
The newly installed speaker, Rep. Mike Johnson, R-La., has deep ties to the shake-it-and-break-it wing of the party. But he has also said he would consider a stopgap funding measure to prevent a government shutdown. It was exactly that sort of pragmatic compromise that ended the tenure of Rep. Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., as speaker. Maybe Johnson has the street cred to make it fly, especially given his colleagues’ fatigue with speaker elections. But a shutdown still seems possible — after all, time grows short. If it doesn’t happen next month, it might still occur when the stopgap runs out.
General government shutdowns are one thing. But the rise of the intransigents, including Johnson, bodes poorly for the IRS in particular. For more than a year, Republicans have been trying to slash the agency’s funding — with some notable success, thanks to the debt limit deal hammered out last spring.
And the intransigents are promising more of the same. They have plenty of support from the rest of the caucus, too, where hostility to the IRS has become a touchstone of modern GOP politics.
Not the Personality but the Process
The importance of the speaker fight has never really been about the personalities involved. “It doesn’t even matter who wins the speakership because the caucus is just ungovernable right now,” Douglas Holtz-Eakin, president of the American Action Forum, told The Washington Post.
Indeed, the choice of a speaker probably won’t change the likelihood of a government shutdown because a shutdown seems probable under almost every scenario. “Even if an agreement can be reached,” wrote American Enterprise Institute senior fellow Desmond Lachman in the New York Post, “it is far from clear a new speaker could get a spending bill through Congress without suffering the same fate as McCarthy when he compromised with the Democrats.”
McCarthy has made a similar point, although he has also urged his replacement not to run from a challenge. “I think it’s important whoever takes that job is willing to risk the job for doing what’s right for the American public,” McCarthy said during one of the early rounds of voting.
Still, McCarthy’s fate has loomed over the debate about choosing his successor. His contentious tenure — beginning with a protracted election fight in January 2023 and ending with his ouster less than nine months later — serves as an object lesson for anyone hoping to claim, and keep, the gavel.
The story of Rep. Tom Emmer, R-Minn., is a good case in point. After winning the GOP nomination for speaker on the morning of October 24, the relatively moderate Emmer withdrew just a few hours later. Intransigents in the caucus, egged on by former President Donald Trump, decried Emmer’s past support for the debt limit compromise (as well as his vote to certify the 2020 presidential election results).
Emmer’s breakneck rise and fall virtually guaranteed that any successful candidate for speaker would have to disavow the debt limit compromise — and others like it.
Shutdown Looming
All this opposition to compromise makes a shutdown seem almost inevitable. With a November 18 deadline for passing appropriations bills — and a determination among many of the intransigents to avoid a continuing resolution — it’s hard to imagine a smooth path forward.
Which probably doesn’t worry a lot of people. Washington has gotten used to shutdowns over the past 50 years or so. There have been 21 in total, and 14 since Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti served notice in 1980 that government agencies would have to cease nearly all operations whenever funding lapsed. (Previously, agencies had largely ignored the lapses, confident that Congress would quickly make up the shortfalls.)
But shutdowns are always disruptive. And the one looming next month might be especially bad. In his New York Post op-ed, Lachman predicted that it might even tip the country into a recession. “By raising questions about the political will to address our budget-deficit problem, it would also invite the bond vigilantes to send long-term interest rates even higher than they already are,” he wrote.
Running large deficits in a good economy tends to worry markets. So do near-defaults in the midst of unnecessary debt limit debates. Increasingly, American politicians have signaled a willingness to flirt with disaster and a determination to avoid the sort of compromise that keeps disaster at bay.
Principles Over Practicality
The world is awash in commentary about political polarization, an undeniable phenomenon of the last half-century. But a more important development is probably the decline of compromise as a recognized virtue.
“Some 25 years ago, NBC polling found that Republicans were far more open to compromise than they were to standing on principle,” noted Enten. “When it came to negotiations with Democratic President Bill Clinton, 63 percent of Republicans wanted compromise and only 28 percent wanted to stand on principles when forced to pick between the two choices.”
Things are different now. A recent CNN poll on the SSRS Opinion Panel found GOP voters much less interested in compromise. The division, however, is not uniform; it tends to mirror support for Trump.
“A majority of voters who are behind Trump in the 2024 GOP primary contest (52 percent) wanted Republicans in Congress to stand firm,” Enten pointed out. “Among Republicans not behind Trump, just 23 percent preferred lawmakers who didn’t compromise.” Indeed, 77 percent of non-Trump Republicans want their elected representatives to work across the aisle.
But it’s Trump’s party, at least for the time being. The opinion of his voters is pretty much the only opinion that counts, at least among Republican elected officials.
Effects on the IRS
What does declining interest in compromise mean for the IRS? Nothing good.
A shutdown would be bad for the IRS, which would suffer just like other unfunded agencies. But the ascendance of the intransigents is likely to be especially hard on the IRS because the agency plays a pivotal role in modern GOP politics.
Beating up on the IRS is nothing new. The agency has never been popular – not with lawmakers and not with the voters who elect them. Ambitious politicians have been exploiting that fact for generations, mixing oversight with opportunism. Berating the agency for its myriad failures (both real and imagined) can pay handsome political dividends.
But since the 1990s, the IRS has been a focal point for GOP attacks on big government. Indeed, attacks on the agency have become a pillar of modern Republican politics. As Patrick T. Brown of the Ethics and Public Policy Center observed earlier this year: “Most GOP members know standing against taxes (and the federal tax agency) plays well with the Republican base.”
During the debt limit fight, Republicans managed to make good on their promise to claw back the special IRS funding included in the Inflation Reduction Act. A “gentleman’s agreement” between President Biden and then-House Speaker McCarthy took back roughly $20 billion of the nearly $80 billion that the agency was slated to receive.
Ostensibly, that agreement remains binding on both parties, but the GOP reneged on the deal even before McCarthy’s ouster. Ignoring the agreement’s $1.59 trillion limit on discretionary spending, House appropriators set a new target of $1.47 trillion and have proposed focusing the additional cuts on the IRS.
In fact, Republicans were clear from the start that the $20 billion spending cut for the IRS was only a starting point. Immediately after reaching his agreement with Biden, McCarthy announced his intention to go after the rest of the IRS funding from the IRA.
“We’re not going to stop until we get the rest of the IRS agents repealed,” McCarthy told reporters, referring to the enforcement personnel funded by the IRA. “I promise you, I’ll be back next year and next year and next year. Because I believe government should be here to help you — not go after you.”
For their part, Democrats understood that attacks on the IRS would be a fixture of future budget debates. “We’re going to have that fight I’m sure on a continuing basis,” predicted Rep. Steny H. Hoyer, D-Md., in June.
The fight will continue because it’s important to Republican politics. And as the speaker battle has demonstrated, there isn’t much room for compromise in Republican circles, at least not right now.
It’s possible, of course, that even intransigents will get more pliable once they occupy positions of responsibility. But McCarthy’s fate serves as a constant reminder that pliability can doom a party leader these days.
A Grim Outlook
The IRS is likely to suffer in a House where pragmatism has been redefined as a cardinal sin. Adequate funding is never an easy sell. It doesn’t win votes for lawmakers, and it might even lose them — especially in GOP primaries.
But hating on the IRS and starving it of needed funds will be expensive in the long run. As Brown reminded his fellow conservatives, “A tax system in which no one but an unlucky few face the risk of sanction runs the risk of breeding a culture of non-compliance and a sense that the rules are only there for suckers to follow.”
Republicans as well as Democrats will pay the price for a culture of noncompliance. Not simply in the form of lost revenue, but also lost faith in government. That’s an expensive loss, but it’s also a long-term one. And we live in a short-term political world, especially when it comes to budgets. Politicians in both parties have chosen grievance and complaint over candor and hard work.
That sort of world is likely to be a bad one for the IRS.
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