The leadership shrug is a remarkable new political gesture.
Members of Congress who declared their opposition to Lyndon Johnson’s most important legislative priorities tended to be woken by phone calls in the middle of the night from an angry president. Johnson was fond of physiological imagery, so members of his party who declared their independence would hear that he planned to cut their throats or alter their sexual anatomy. In profane rants, holdouts learned that federal spending for things like highways was about to become quite scarce in their district or their state, and everyone back home was going to know who had caused the sudden money drought with his stupidity.
In person, the “Johnson Treatment” – “an incredible, potent mixture of persuasion, badgering, flattery, threats, reminders of past favors and future advantages” – was known for its physical aggression, as the 6’4″ president leaned forward and shoved his face into deeply uncomfortable proximity with men who weren’t getting with the program. When he met with members of Congress, Johnson wasn’t asking.
Last week, Senate Republicans announced that they just don’t have the votes to pass the SAVE America Act, an election security bill with measures that Republican voters have strongly supported for years. “That’s just a function of math, and there isn’t anything I can do about that,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said. This is how Republicans are pretending that Congress works: Leaders ask every member what they feel like doing, and then the members all say how they want to vote, and then leadership accepts their decision and the conversation ends. A caucus is a counting mechanism, and can’t be anything else. Thune’s “there isn’t anything I can do about that” is a gesture of make-believe helplessness that defies 250 years of legislative history.
So Republican voters want it, the Republican president wants it, and Senate Republicans just don’t feel passing it. Sorry! We tried. You know without looking that Lisa Murkowski is refusing to vote with her party. It never costs her anything to break with her party, so it’s an easy choice for her.
But the enforcement of party discipline is historically normal behavior for American presidents. Democrats who tried to limit the New Deal found the Roosevelt administration campaigning against them in primary elections that historians describe as the “Purge of 1938.” Several years into the endless government overreach of the Great Depression, exhausted voters mostly rejected Roosevelt’s intervention. But a president met resistance with a fight, telling voters that his agenda was opposed by elected officials that he asked them to replace.
Presidents have also historically used the other kind of persuasion to get their legislation passed. The 13th Amendment, banning slavery, failed in the House of Representatives in 1864. President Abraham Lincoln got the votes he needed in the House by handing out promises of comfortable government jobs as post-congressional employment. As one historical website puts it, “the president and Secretary of State William Seward were willing to strong-arm border Unionists and horse-trade with reluctant Democrats to secure their votes or at least their abstentions in order to lower the threshold for a two-thirds majority. The administration took advantage of the timing of the lame-duck Congress by offering patronage jobs — and in one case an ambassadorship to Denmark — to defeated Democrats.”
At least to some degree, Lincoln bought the 13th Amendment. “The greatest measure of the nineteenth century was passed by corruption, aided and abetted by the purest man in America,” the Rep. Thaddeus Stevens is often (probably incorrectly) quoted as saying. Lincoln didn’t merely ask Congress if they felt like sending the 13th Amendment to the states for ratification. You don’t have to admire the sleaziness of political horsetrading to see that legislation doesn’t just happen.
If the SAVE America Act is worth passing, it’s worth fighting for. It can’t just be lobbed at the Senate by passive measures. It’s time for the Johnson Treatment to get an update, and it’s time for Republican quislings to pay a price for their uselessness. An administration gets the legislation it pushes Congress to pass.
