Politics Counts: How Safety of GOP Seats Fuels Defections

Wall Street Journal

By Dante Chinni

March 11, 2015

Politics Counts: How Safety of GOP Seats Fuels Defections 

You’d think the 2015 congressional session would be a good one for House Republican leaders. The party picked up a net 13 seats in the House in the latest election and now holds 247, a number not seen since before the Great Depression.

But last week, after a hard struggle, the House eventually passed a bill funding the Department of Homeland Security, only after House Speaker John Boehner (R., Ohio) turned to Democratic House members, amid many Republican defections. So what’s going on?

The defections generally came from the most conservative members of the House, who wanted the spending bill to block President Barack Obama’s executive actions on immigration. Among them, 52 voted the week before against extending the funding for just three weeks because it didn’t include the immigration language. In the end. Mr. Boehner decided to pass the bill without their support, and ceded to Democrats’ demands that the House pass a “clean” bill, without the immigration provisions.

Why were those Republicans so willing to buck the leadership? For starters, all 52 Republicans who voted against the three-week extension won their 2014 races by 17 points or more – some by much more. That indicates they have less need for the party’s money and support to win re-election — and see less risk in abandoning party leaders.

Also working in the dissidents’ favor: These 52 members are all pretty conservative – all but one having a lifetime rating of at least 80 out of 100 from the American Conservative Union – and primary voters tend to be more conservative than voters as a whole. So, if the House Republican Leadership has issues with these members and would like to defeat them in a primary, or at least threaten them with a challenge, it would likely have a difficult road.

Moreover, it’s unlikely Republicans will be able to build an even bigger majority — and allow leadership to ignore the dissidents. The GOP’s current grip on the House – the 247 seats the party currently holds – is truly a high-water mark. The Republicans haven’t held this many seats in the House since Herbert Hoover was president.

The 2014 election results underscore this point. The Republicans added 13 seats to their majority in 2014, and none of the winners of formerly Democratic seats were among the 52 members that voted against DHS funding — and the bill still couldn’t pass.

Of course, the Homeland Security bill was just one piece of legislation, and Republican concerns about it were tied to one particular issue, President Obama’s executive order on immigration. But other potential divisive issues loom that have created similar tensions in the past, from the debt ceiling to legislation funding the government. Those issues are likely to have their own set of members with their own sets of concerns. It doesn’t have to be 52 Republicans fighting the leadership. It could be 50 or 40 or 55.

As a result, the House Republicans may be set for more internal battles like the one they had over DHS funding.

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