Let's Work That System.
If the GOP retains a majority the House next year, but Hillary wins the Presidency, we will likely find that the congress is essentially living under a three-party system. The Democrats and two wings of the GOP that despise each other, but together make up a majority. Congress will work no better than it has in the recent past, if it doesn't do even worse. And our country needs a congress that works.
Three-party systems (and systems with even more than three parties) work in most other democracies. Even if two groups in congress call themselves Republicans, the Republicans who feel some responsibility to actually govern would do far better to make a coalition with the Democrats than to just endure a cage match with the zoo monkeys.
The GOPs for actual governance would be the smallest of the three parties, but in fact, it occasionally happens that some multi-party governments are glued together by one of the smaller parties in a coalition, one that holds its power by being willing to walk away.
I feel silly proposing an idea. I'm just a minor poster in somebody else's blog. So I'm not bringing up this idea because I believe it could actually be implemented. Mostly, I'm posting this to see if I don't get laughed out of the joint entirely.
Here goes.
If the republicans retain control of the House, they might go to war with each other for months simply to elect a Speaker. If Paul Ryan still wants the job, he will have a fight on his hands. And even if he can win, we're promised chaos by the people who can cause it. Ryan will likely find himself in the very place that John Boehner happily walked away from.
So if Ryan is in the fight of his life when the next congress shows up in January, it might make sense for the Democrats, with the aid of the new Democratic President, to go to Ryan and say “We can have a real, functioning House Of Representatives that works somewhat in the way they used to work.
“If you can start putting together an actual Republican majority, go for it. But if you can't, we'll vote you in as Speaker (any member can vote for anyone for Speaker), and then we'll work with you, as we did when we had a functioning two-party system.
On two conditions:
The first condition is that you dump the Hastert Rule. It's been one of the great blocks of our ability to do the job we were sent here to do. From now on you bring bills to the floor whether or not a majority of republicans will vote for them. If a bill has the support of most Democrats and some Republican – as has been the case with many bills that have died here in recent years – you bring it to the floor of the house. That's the way it used to work when things worked well.
The second condition is that we'll negotiate and compromise, like in the old pre-Gingrich & Hastert days. No more of this all or nothing poison.
He has some incentive to change the way things work, because if he runs the House under a system that works he will look like a better presidential candidate in 2020 than if he just directs gators through the swamp. This would not be very beneficial to us except that we all need a system that works, and the Democrats will get a lot more of what we need than if they don't find some way to work with Ryan, if they don't win the House next month.
The old way - where the party in power gets most of what it wants, and the other party gets less, but doesn't get nothing - that system no longer works, and won't again until we face reality.
Wishing it did, complaining that it doesn't, won't change things. We're told that it is most unlikely that we'll take back the House, even now. Things that really need to get done will not get done under the present system.
But a structure where the Democrats, and the minority of GOPs who are not infantile screamers, can work together.
It becomes in effect a three-party system, but my question to the group is, would something like this work?