Mark Franke
Well, another Republican speaker of the House of Representatives is in trouble with the most extreme of his own party.
The bipartisan budget deal reached by Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader Charles Schumer, presumably with White House blessing, is too repugnant for these true believers to swallow.
In the interest of fair disclosure, I admit to agreeing with the Freedom Caucus’ principles. Something has to be done about the annual multi-trillion-dollar federal deficits and the ever-increasing national debt load. It is simply unsustainable, the voodoo economics of the new monetary theory notwithstanding.
It is the Freedom Caucus’ tactics I disagree with and the political strategy informing these tactics. Their calculus must be based on the razor-slim majority the Republicans hold in the House and the need for their acquiescence on any deals. Fine, except that the Democrat-controlled Senate and the Democrat White House also must be parties to any agreement.
Speaker Johnson finds himself on the horns of the same dilemma as his predecessor: Satisfy the Freedom Caucus and lose any hope of Senate passage or negotiate something passable within the Senate and be stymied by parliamentary maneuvers on the House floor. You need to be half-crazy to want that job.
Not that the Democrats aren’t equally responsible for Congress’ systemic inability to pass a budget. Since their party colleagues on the Senate side appear willing to pass the compromise, they could vote for it in the House and put the Freedom Caucus on the irrelevancy shelf.
One must assume they would rather score potential political points by letting the Republicans dangle from a very breakable limb. They know their history. If it comes to another government shutdown due to a failed budget, the Republicans will get all of the blame. A national media hostile to the Republicans will see to it.
So what can we do? My answer to that is to look backward in order to see the way forward, and there is no better time in the past than the Founding Fathers era to be instructed on how to make democracy work.
The Constitutional Convention should be studied by all elected officials as a prerequisite for taking office. It will be informative and humbling, even given our 21st century egoism. The convention can be summed up with this verdict: We have a constitution because 39 men saw compromise as a reachable path to a higher good.
Nearly every issue contained a fault line that threatened to open an unbridgeable chasm. Yet somehow, these determined and opinionated men found enough common ground to reach agreement. A lot of horse trading went on, both openly and privately. What I wouldn’t give to have been there as a fly on the wall while these debates occurred.
Sometimes, the compromise reached seemed to antagonize everyone. Consider the Great Compromise, the one which still arouses righteous anger among our current day presentists who judge all past actions by present standards and biases. It involved slavery, of course.
New England, the commercial center of the nation, wanted federal sovereignty on trade issues, both internal and external. Trade wars between the states were just one of the failures of the Articles of Confederation. These states were also home to some of the most anti-slavery sentiments in the land.
Southern states, all based on agricultural economies dependent on slave labor, didn’t want federal interference with their agricultural exports and their importation of foreign goods. But they wanted federal hands-off slavery even more.
Why would these incompatible viewpoints find reconciliation in any kind of agreement? The New Englanders agreed to a 20-year period of no federal regulation of the slave trade, something that had to be obnoxious to many of them. In return, they gained assurance of uniform trade legislation and tariffs across and among all of the states.
Should New England have refused such a compromise as abhorrent to their moral philosophy? If they had, would the southern states have left the convention and formed their own confederacy 70 years earlier than what actually happened? Is tolerating a current wrong to mitigate its future evil impact a moral thing to do or is it just a deal with the devil? The question of moral agency has occupied philosophers for centuries, and I don’t presume to have anything original to add.
The ongoing budget contretemps in Congress is an important issue, but it hardly rises to the level faced by our founders in 1787. We can only speculate what would have happened in Philadelphia back then absent the Great Compromise, but it is not unreasonable to posit a breakup of the constitutional convention and no United States of united states. They saw it through to the end, and we all benefit from their perseverance.
We Lilliputians might learn much at the feet of those Brobdingnagians.
Mark Franke, an adjunct scholar of the Indiana Policy Review and its book reviewer, is formerly an associate vice chancellor at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne. Send comments to [email protected].