Rand Paul has opened deep divisions in the GOP. (photo: Getty Images)
03 August 13
ongress
has closed for a five-week vacation, leaving the rest of us to figure
out what happened in the several days of yelling about bills that no one
was willing to pass, and to ask whether there is anything left of the
Republican Party. The best approach might be to put together a diagram
of who hates whom in the G.O.P., except that the drawing would get too
messy; you'd need an Etch A Sketch and, like Mitt Romney, after a while
you'd just want to shake it.
To start simply: John McCain hates Rand Paul, so much that he suggested, to The New Republic's Isaac Chotiner,
that he might prefer Hillary Clinton for President. Chris Christie
hates Rand Paul, so much so that he said he was not interested in having
a beer with him. Rand Paul seems to hate Chris Christie, since he
called him the King of Bacon and mocked him to an audience in Tennessee
by saying,
"Gimme, gimme, gimme-give me all my Sandy money now." But then Christie
had compared Paul to Charles Lindbergh-for his isolationism, not the
aviation. What was strange about the Paul-Christie spat was that Charles Krauthammer
and other observers spoke of it solemnly, as though it was the
intellectual engagement on the future of foreign policy that the G.O.P.
had been longing for. Really what we were talking about was Christie saying
that libertarians like Paul ought to come to Jersey and sit across from
a 9/11 widow before saying that the N.S.A. shouldn't collect all the
information it wants to.
The other event of the week that was spoken of in
similar terms was the Senate's collective primal scream at Rand Paul
when he introduced a bill to take away Egypt's foreign aid and to use
the money on infrastructure at home. He lost, by a count of eighty-six
to thirteen, after the debate was extended so that everyone had a chance
to tell him that he was awful and would destroy America's power. The
tally would have been more "lopsided," Dana Milbank wrote,
except that "in the final seconds of the roll call and after the
outcome was obvious, a bloc of six GOP lawmakers led by Minority Leader
Mitch McConnell (Ky.) quietly cast their votes with Paul-not in
agreement with him but in fear of the tea party voters who adore him."
So there are also the people who hate Paul because they have to pretend
to like him.
Republicans don't just hate Rand Paul for being
something of a libertarian. There are also those who would object to how
Paul would use that foreign-aid money-for building bridges. The Tea
Party has become a confused (and less and less useful) shorthand both
for libertarians of the Justin Amash, anti-domestic-spying variety, and
for those who just want to wildly cut taxes. On Thursday, the Senate and
House gave up trying to pass a transportation bill. Instead, the
Minority Whip, Eric Cantor, spent the day
getting a bill through the House that would have prevented the I.R.S.
from dealing with any part of Obamacare, including provisions that
involve tax credits, because he and his colleagues hate the I.R.S.,
taxes, and government agencies doing their jobs. They do, however, love
legislative action that gets them closer to their apparent goal of
arranging a vote to repeal Obamacare for every member of the Republican
caucus. (They are at forty.)
The I.R.S. bill will fail in the Senate, where Ted
Cruz is busy adding on to the list of reasons that other Republicans
hate him by zipping around saying that they are cowards if they don't
join him in threatening to stage a debt-ceiling-shutdown crisis unless
Obamacare is defunded. "Let me be clear: I don't trust the Republicans,"
Cruz said. Democrats were at least candid about being "dangerous,"
while too many members of the G.O.P. were joining a "surrender caucus."
He often smiles when he says things like that, so it's hard to tell whom
exactly he hates-maybe everybody. McCain hates it when anyone says that
he's too scared to vote for things that will cause the world economy to
implode-"It's been a long time since I've been scared," he told ABC.
Other members of the Party might mind that Cruz forgot
the part about pretending that the shutdowns were about unsustainable
spending rather than weapons of fiscal terrorism, or about the Senate
supposedly being less crazy and reckless than the House. But Cruz might
be lost in a wave of general ineffectiveness: so many spending bills
haven't passed that the government might shut down on October 1st
without anyone really being clear about why.
In fairness, it seems that a good number of
Republicans don't actually hate Senator Marco Rubio; they are just
getting really annoyed at him, maybe for overthinking how to position
himself on an immigration bill on which they would rather take no
position at all. That is another set of divides: Republicans who hate
immigration, those who hate that the Party is ending up in a place where
it will lose the Hispanic vote, and those who hate that they have to
think about this at all.
McCain told Chotiner that he wouldn't put Rubio in the same category as Paul, Cruz, or Mike Lee, the Utah senator who this week told Rush Limbaugh
that Republicans needed to cut off all funds associated with "this
wasteland that is the world of Obamacare" before "it starts, you know,
buying some loyalty" by benefiting people.
John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, hates that it
has become obvious that members of his caucus don't listen to him: some
of them hate spending so much that they won't vote for any bill with a
dollar figure above sequestration levels, or below it either. There are
some who hate doing nothing, and others who are trying to chase away
primary opponents, and maybe work out some of the stress, by pushing a bill limiting abortion rights-one that whatever semi-moderates are left in Congress will hate voting for or against.
Gail Collins, in the Times,
imposed some intellectual order on all this by pointing out that the
key line is between the Senators who want to run for President in
2016-Paul, Rubio, Cruz-and everyone else. That makes a little more sense
than pretending that the G.O.P. is having a serious internal debate
about foreign policy or the budget, let alone about a vision of
government or citizenship. It just doesn't fully encompass the chaos.
The Republican Party has not embarked on a grand civil war, with battle
lines drawn and generals appointed. It's more like one of those fights
in a cartoon, with characters jumping into a swirl of limbs and dust and
cowboy hats. It is a rolling ball of cheerful hate, careening downhill,
uprooting trees and legislative priorities, heedless of where it, or
the country, is going.
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