Christine Todd Whitman and Andrew Yang announced that they’re forming a new party called “Forward” on Thursday. Here on my thoughts on that.
Evan McMullin is running as an independent in the 2022 midterms against Republican Sen. Mike Lee of Utah. He says that, if elected, he won’t caucus with either party. If this were true, it would be truly stupid, leading to the same kind of ineffectualness Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene suffers after having been stripped of her committee assignments. After all, caucusing with a party is about choosing a Speaker of the House or Senate Majority Leader, but that’s done after the first day. Thereafter, it’s about serving on committees where most legislation is marked up and where the administration’s nominees are vetted. There are no seats on congressional committees reserved for independents or uncommitteds. If McMullin doesn’t commit to a party, he’ll have little to do and very little direct influence on the work of the Senate.
It’s possible that McMullin will actually win because the Democrats have endorsed him. That’s not actually helpful in conservative Utah, except that the Dems aren’t running their own candidate. Republicans are mindful that a vote for McMullin is more than a vote against Sen. Lee. It’s also a vote against Mitch McConnell becoming Majority Leader again, and that’s true even if McMullin abstains and refuses to endorse Schumer or another Democrat.
But what if the midterms produce another divided Senate where McMullin is the deciding vote that determines whether the Republicans or Democrats will be in control? In that case, he could give the Democrats the choice of making him the Leader or having him hand control to McConnell.
This is not a low odds scenario. The midterms could well produce another 50-50 split. The Republicans need 51 for a majority while Democrats only need 50 thanks to the tie-breaking role of Vice-President Kamala Harris. But if McMullin is the Democrat’s fiftieth vote, his abstention would give McConnell a 50-49 majority. With that amount leverage, McMullin could force himself to the top position, but he could also choose any other Democrat for the position. Maybe he prefers Kyrsten Sinema to Chuck Schumer?
The point is, this is how a true independent party would have to operate in Congress. For the foreseeable future, it would never have an outright majority, but its members could be majority-makers and insist that they serve in positions of authority as leaders and committee chairs. This is how coalitions are built in parliamentary systems and its awkward in our American system, but it can still be effective.
The best place to begin is in California where candidates can identify with any party they want and the top two finishers in the primaries face off against each other in the general election. A third party whose candidates pledge to vote only for one of their own on the first ballot for Speaker of the House or Senate Majority Leader could build up a small but sufficient bloc of elected officials to effectively control the leadership of Congress. They could demand leadership for themselves or insist on moderate Dem or GOP leaders. This would be much easier in the House, but the presently close split in the Senate makes it possible there, too.
For third party advocates who want centrist representation, this is the ideal way to strip the partisan venom out of Congress. If the goal is to have a center-left alternative to the Democrats, they’d find it much easier to compel the Democrats to govern from the middle than to supplant them as one of the two major parties. In other words, they would caucus with the Dems, but with conditions.
I believe progressives could pull the same trick by running candidates in California pledged to vote for one of their own on the first ballot for Speaker. If their bloc ever becomes decisive, they could determine who holds the gavel in the House.
Politics is organized around ideology but it’s really about power. And if you don’t like how power is split up in our system and want a third party alternative, you have to find a way that might give you power. Running as an independent or small-party candidate against entrenched Democrats and Republicans almost never works, and it leaves the rare winners with no way to have influence except to caucus with one of the major parties. It’s unrealistic to think that a third party will soon win a majority on its own, but if it figures out how to become a majority-maker, it can reach its objectives.
Until proven otherwise I’m going to assume that, like every other third-party push in my lifetime, their intention is not to gain power but to ratfuck Democrats.
The “Forward” press release offered predictable comments about “extremists on both sides”, as though progressives wanting universal health care was as extreme as MAGAs wanting theocracy.
True. If it was set up to be the Republican party without the crazies, then it would be useful. But the Republican party can not exist without the crazy and the business interests fear they’ll lose their power if they don’t stay with the crazy. Maybe if the Dems win in a landslide this time, then the Republican party may implode…
Maybe! A more likely way forward is for there to be increasingly severe consequences for bad behavior by anti-democracy Republicans—losing their seats on congressional committees, censures, evictions from office, prosecutions and sentencing for illegal behavior, shunning, ridicule, etc.
Exactly right. And it gives me an opportunity to vent (once again) about the single largest and most damaging bit of political and journalistic malpractice of the past 13 years: the failure of centrist Republicans to form a Blue Dog-like caucus with which to wield power, and of Washington journalists to tell the story of that failure.
At almost any point since 2009, senators like Collins, Corker, Flake, Murkowski, Portman, Romney, Snowe, et al, could have gone to McConnell with an agreed set of centrist and/or pro-democracy demands and told him his support was the price of their allegiance to the party. If he didn’t go along with them, they could then have gone to Schumer with the same (or related) demands as their price for voting with the Democrats.
Instead, they’ve remained isolated and divided, and have been picked off one by one over the years—either losing their seats or their power within the party.
All of those “centrists” would have made those demands and then been kicked right the fuck out of the Fascist Party at the next primary. This issue has already been covered.
The Republican Base Voter is a right-wing authoritarian and they want fascism. Full stop.
Thanks for your response. First, they’re senators so they have six year terms. Second, it’s by no means clear that in 2010, 2012, 2014 that Republicans like those I named would have lost to a primary challenger. Third, a key element to keeping right-wing authoritarians out of power is for pro-democracy conservatives to find and create ways to ally themselves with pro-democracy centrists and liberals. It’s easier to accomplish that goal if you’ve got a united faction.
Take Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court, for example. What if some combination of Capito, Collins, Flake, McCain, Murkowski, Portman, Sasse, and Toomey went together to McConnell and demanded a vote for Garland or they’d caucus with the Democrats, thereby flipping control of the Senate. (That would obviously be a huge benefit to the Dems so they’d be fools not to get something in return from Schumer—committee chairmanships, votes on their preferred legislation, whatever.)
The most likely outcome is McConnell backs down rather than lose control of the Senate. The second most likely outcome is Schumer gets to be Majority Leader for a de facto coalition government for 11 months, with significant limitations on how much of a Democratic agenda he can advance.
If you (or anyone!) knows a way out of our current political situation that doesn’t involve a critical mass of conservatives doing what Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger have done for the past year, I’m all ears.
One bad outcome of 9/11 you can add to the traditional list is that it wiped out the impact of Sen. Jim Jeffords of Vermont defecting to the Dems. We were about to see how the Republicans would respond to being punished for their radicalism, but instead they got a pass and a full tank of gas to launch a war on terror.
Manchin/Sinema is/are a “third party”. What he/they wants… maybe we gets.
And a microcosm of what centrist Republican senators could have done at any time in recent years.It’s a basic tenet of negotiating that whoever’s willing to walk away from the table has more power. If even five GOP senators had formed a Blue Dog-like caucus they could have pulled their entire party to the center and away from its authoritarian direction.
The history of third parties is not great, certainly not since the founding of the Republican Party in the 1850s. Issue parties like Labor-Greenback or the Populists jumped up for an election cycle or two, but they never really penetrated the Congress.
The only really interesting time for third parties was the period during the Democratic-Whig party system, at least in part because no one had really figured out how this new “democracy” thing was supposed to work. Still, the Anti-Masonic and Liberty Parties usually only accomplished Nader-like feats by electing their ideological opposites.