Why did John Boehner announce that he will resign? The Friday announcement has sparked a flurry of debate among people who were largely caught by surprise. Jonathan Bernstein points out that many Congress scholars now speculating about why it happened had earlier thought Boehner’s job was secure. Bernstein notes that Boehner has faced unrealistic expectations from the conservative House Freedom Caucus, as do others such as Jonathan Chait.
This problem of expectations is supposedly a manifestation of the ideological tension between the old institutionalists like Boehner and the newer members who are either tea party true believers or simply afraid of losing a primary if they don’t appear as conservative as possible. Perhaps these divisions are substantive, and perhaps they are merely tactical, as Matthew Green has suggested here.
However, not everyone was surprised by Boehner’s downfall. As someone who questioned the stability of Boehner’s speakership in a 2014 paper, I have an explanation for the speaker’s downfall: how the combination of divided government and party polarization bought about an important change in the legislative agenda.
When the House of Representatives under Republican control works on “normal” legislation, the goal is to move policy from a liberal status quo to a more conservative alternative. Since the party as a whole prefers to move policy to the right, bringing this kind of legislation to the floor would unify the Republican Party against the minority Democrats. Whatever divisions exist among the Republicans, then, are hidden by an agenda that unifies the party, even if those divisions are wide and substantive underneath the surface.
But when divided government is combined with extreme polarization, the story is much different. There is no incentive to take up such legislation — except as bait for a veto by President Obama — and until the Republican takeover of the Senate in the 2014 midterms, even that wasn’t possible.
Stripped of any such normal legislative processes, the House since 2010 has focused on must-pass legislation to avoid government shutdowns and debt-ceiling breaches. These pieces of legislation do not pit left-leaning status quo points against more conservative alternatives. Instead, they pit continuing resolutions or debt-ceiling increases against a shutdown or a breach of the debt ceiling.
These outcomes, while terrifying to Democrats and many Republicans, don’t seem so bad to the most conservative wing of the Republican Party. Rep. Ted Yoho of Florida, for example, claimed that a debt-ceiling breach would bring stability to world markets, and many tea party activists cheer the concept of a shutdown. Instead of dividing Democrats from Republicans, then, these agenda items divide Republicans from each other.
The challenge for Boehner in these circumstances was that to avoid a debt-ceiling breach or shutdown, he needed to persuade a bloc of Republicans to break off from their own party, side with Democrats and open themselves up to the possibility of a primary challenge, while alienating the caucus members who sincerely prefer shutdowns to any deal anyway.
Moreover, that required solving what we might call the “collective-action problem of sincere voting.” While many Republicans have sincerely wanted to avoid debt-ceiling breaches and shutdowns, they have faced electoral pressure to vote against any bipartisan deal out of a fear of primary challenges (overstated though those fears are, as Bernstein correctly noted). Any one of these cross-pressured legislators could not sway the outcome, so each had an incentive to vote insincerely against any deal in order to stave off the threat of a primary challenge. To do otherwise would be to run an electoral risk with no policy payoff.
The task for Boehner, then, has been to solve the collective-action problem of sincere voting — which is to say, not to unify the party, but to splinter it. This task has been forced on him not by primary threats alone but by the legislative agenda.
A party leader whose central task is to fracture the party is not a secure leader. How divided was the Republican caucus before 2010? We don’t know. The legislative agenda wouldn’t bring those divisions to the forefront. However, the agenda since 2010 has not only revealed those divisions, it has forced the speaker into the unusual position of repeatedly fragmenting the party rather than unifying it. In my 2014 paper, I wondered “how stable that leadership model can be.” Now we know.
Justin Buchler is associate professor of political science at Case Western University. He is the author of “Hiring and Firing Public Officials: Rethinking the Purpose of Elections.”