A Party of Symbolic Action

After two years of the Tea Party issuing unrealistic demands and the Republican Party responding with unrealistic promises, an obvious question is how the latter can possibly keep the former happy. No Congress can provide both deficit reduction and tax cuts; both smaller government and a sounder financial system; both strict adherence to the originalist enumerative Constitution and modern governance. So, if the GOP wants to deliver, it will need to make moves that suggest not only that these things are all possible, but that they are underway. Suffice it to say, this is no small feat.

Certainly, there will be some broken promises and some backpedaling. Only two days in, Majority Leader Eric Cantor has walked back promises of cutting $100 billion as "number parsing" and Speaker John Boehner has defended the fast-tracking of Affordable Care Act (ACA) repeal by saying that he didn't promise "every single bill" would have a transparent, committee-driven amendable process. More of this can be expected as the session wears on, but the party will eventually need to deliver red meat to its base. For that, they will engage heavily in symbolic action.

The modern Republican Party is prone to symbolism, so the GOP caucus in the 112th Congress has cooked up a long docket of actions rich in symbols, but light on results. Of course, the religious role the Constitution plays in party mythology makes it no surprise that the theatrics start there.

• For the first time ever, the Constitution was read on the floor as Congress' first act. The #tcot Twitterverse was no doubt moved to tears, but no one expects this move to effect the "constitutionality" of legislation one way or the other. Along the same lines, the House will require a citation of the Constitutional authority for all legislation. While this is another purely symbolic (and redundant) move, it is interesting to note that ACA repeal does not bear such a citation.
• Despite a widespread bi-partisan acknowledgment that an increase on the debt limit is unavoidable, Republicans plan to make the increase contingent upon spending cuts. While most Republicans are merely engaged in a game of chicken here -- attempting to pack any bill with their own desired cuts -- the stance itself betrays a symbolic bias in some. If only some enlightened Congress would just legislate an upper bound, then surely someone else will make the difficult choices about what to actually cut. It's more of the same "starve the beast" philosophy.

More than just theatrics, Republicans are intent on fighting some hopeless legislative battles thick with symbolism:

• Aside from ensuring the renewal of the Bush tax cuts, the biggest GOP victory in the lame duck was blocking the passage of the budget, due to earmarks. The size of these expenditures is a tiny  fraction of the federal budget. Worse, ending earmarking doesn't even cut the money from the budget, it just changes who is responsible for allocating it. Symbolic of corruption and lavish spending, earmarks provided a convenient target for a trapped party on an anti-climactic victory lap. Ironically, the symbol ensnared them further -- making the promise of $100 billion in cuts virtually impossible. 
• Most notably, the 112th Congress intends to pass a repeal of ACA that has no chance of becoming law. This was a major promise during the election and Boehner intends to deliver this purely symbolic victory. One need merely look at the name of the bill to see what Republicans are really up to: "The Repealing the Job-Killing Health Care Law Act."
• Thursday, legislation was introduced to eliminate "czars" in the White House. While it's doubtful that this bill will ever become law, it clearly lacks any substantive policy impact. Although "czars" have become a potent symbol of Obama statism in conservative mythology, this legislation would do little more than hamper the efficiency of the White House and create an additional avenue for GOP obstruction in the Senate.
• To date, the only concrete spending proposal from Boehner is to cut staff budgets. While starting close to home is a potent symbol, this move will cut 0.001% from the federal deficit.

We should have seen it coming. After two years of waving the Gadsen Flag, donning tri-cornered hats and stitching together Luntz-tested platitudes into an election-gimmicky Pledge to America -- which contains more preamble and photography than policy proposals -- the Republican party's penchant for meaningless theatrics should be as predictable as their use of the words "job-killing" to mean "Democratic" and "common-sense" to mean "Republican."

Their determined focus on reducing taxes for the wealthy and eliminating government regulation gives the Republican party two enormous advantages: their ideology is so simple it can be expressed with just two words ("small government"); and most of the time their only responsibility is to obstruct, which is far easier than to legislate. But the party's dependence on symbolic action involves much more than the simplicity of their message and the advantages inherent playing the opposition.

On a much deeper level, all Republican victories are ideological. The modern party's only end is the advancement of the "principles" that underlie its philosophy -- an end that justifies itself in modern conservative orthodoxy and cannot be measured from the perspective of such real-world metrics as the impact on American workers. In the end, the measure of a conservative is their adherence to principle, not their ability to solve problems. Only a RINO -- or worse, a liberal -- would leave that work to anything other than the invisible hand that seems intent on moving greater and greater concentrations of wealth into the hands of fewer and fewer people. Today, a conservative's only concern should be to unshackle that hand so it can act more efficiently.

To misunderstand the problem as one of cynicism is to see only part of the picture. Sure, many Washington GOP insiders may be guilty of viewing the process as little more than a game; and their involvement as little more than a business. But often they are more guilty of pursuing their ideological ends -- that of "starving the beast" -- than they are of manipulating public opinion for cynical personal interest.  On Thursday, Red State telegraphed the symbolic path out of the deficit trap, arguing:

Yesterday’s swearing in of the new House and Senate, including the transition of power to Speaker Boehner and the new Republican majority in the House, inaugurates a new political season, in which “the deficit” promises to be front and center. President Obama is already sending up trial balloons about various proposals made by the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission. But Republicans should resist efforts to frame the debate as being about “the deficit,” because that term itself focuses on the wrong measurement.

 Democrats like to talk about the federal government’s operating budget deficit as if it is a matter of balancing income against spending. It’s not.

 ... the problem isn’t that the government is spending more than the government takes in, but that the government is spending too much of what we create.

"Corrupt" may be too strong a word, but certainly this is not a party of "grown-ups." The 112th Congress really wants to deliver for its base. But it can't. No one can. So we can expect two years of investigations, gridlock and most of all ... theatrics.