Recall that our Founders abhorred factions in our national politics, even considering it, in those first few elections, to be inappropriate for a candidate for office to personally campaign, the candidate relying instead on supporters to talk them up before the elections occurred. The Founders’ idea was that the subjects coming before Congress should be debated and then voted up or down by those initial 65 Congressmen and 26 Senators and signed into law by the President, or vetoed (and subsequently overridden by Congress, or not), on their individual view of the bill’s merits.
Of course, that goal quickly went into the trash heap, and immediately we got the straightforwardly named Pro- and Anti-Administration Parties, followed quickly by the Federalist Party and the Democratic Republican Party, and on through to the Progressive-Democratic Party, the Republican Party, and the Democratic Socialists of America Party of today.
Today we have factionalism laid bare and operating especially nakedly. Grace Mauser, Co-Chair of the New York City chapter of the DSA:
If someone needs your votes to make something happen, they should give you something in return[.]
The incoming DSA Caucus of the Progressive-Democratic Party is not alone in this naked trading of support for support. The Chaos Caucus of the Republican Party paralyzed the House and prevented the Republican Party from getting much of anything done beyond one tax-cutting bill, most infamously failing to pass the SAVE Act, which would have made our elections more secure if only by limiting the franchise explicitly and nation-wide to American citizens.
There’s not even any pretense of acting on the merits of a proposal anymore. A bill passes or fails (and the President signs or vetoes) based on the pecuniary or political value of what’s offered in trade for a politician’s—or today, a claque small caucus’—support. All along, too, we’ve objected as a people to the buying and selling of votes in our elections, yet our politicians actively buy and sell their own votes in the halls of our Congress–and we accept that as the nature of political sausage.
Given that factionalism has been and is here to stay, the longer-term danger of today’s factionalism is that the Progressive-Democratic Party and its DSA Caucus in the House will avoid paralysis and get much of the latter’s socialist goals passed and sent up to a Senate controlled by a Progressive-Democratic Party with its own DSA Caucus of Senators. After all, during Nancy Pelosi’s reign as Party Leader, we had Party acting on everything in the Party, nothing outside the Party, nothing against the Party. That’s how we got Obamacare inflicted on us that last time we had the Progressive-Democratic Party unilaterally reigning.
We’ll see whether Party and its Caucus can maintain that discipline.