The NPR Politics Podcast - Extreme Wing Of House Republican Party Worries Rest Of Caucus Before Midterms

Episode Date: December 15, 2021

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy is feeling hopeful about the midterms: President Biden's approval numbers are low and inflation is at least temporarily high. But some Republican representatives are worried their peers are too focused on Trump-style bomb-throwing and jeers to stick to a uniform, policy-focused campaign message. This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, congressional correspondent Kelsey Snell, and acting congressional correspondent Deirdre Walsh.Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Find and support your local public radio station.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hey there, it's Tamara Keith, and it's that time of year again when we come to you and ask for a little bit of help. Every day we are here in your podcast feed, and there is so much that goes into gathering the facts and explaining what they mean and also making us sound good. And in order to keep this going, we need your support. By donating to your local NPR station, you are not only helping your station bring you local news that matters in your community, and that is really important, but you're also helping us cover the White House and Congress. Your donation is crucial, from your hometown all the way to Washington and everywhere in between. To help us out, go to donate.npr.org slash politics to get started.

And thank you. Hi, this is Santiago, just starting my cross-country road trip, currently leaving Lynchburg, Virginia. And now I'm in Atlanta, Tupelo, Memphis, Oklahoma City, Taos, New Mexico, the Grand Canyon, Los Angeles, and finally San Francisco. This podcast was recorded at 2.37 p.m. on Wednesday, the 15th of December. Things may have changed by the time you hear it, and they've definitely changed since the time I started this road trip. All right, here's the show. I love road trips. I hope we stopped at some of my favorite places. I used to do that trip every year with my family, all the way across country.

Wow. Amazing. Hey there, it's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. And I'm Deirdre Walsh.

I also cover Congress. We have talked a lot about internal disagreements among Democrats as they work to pass their legislative agenda, President Biden's legislative agenda. But Republicans are actually in a strong position to win back control of the House of Representatives in 2022. For a number of reasons, Biden's approvals are underwater and midterms are, historically speaking, bad for the party in the White House. Not to mention that the Democratic majorities are super thin and redistricting is tilting the ground in favor of Republicans in many states. But there's trouble in the GOP.

In recent weeks, some in the right wing of the party have openly attacked their colleagues, in some cases threatening to defeat them in primaries. Deirdre, this is something that you've been reporting on. What has this Republican infighting looked like? It's been really nasty and personal, but it's really not about substance. I mean, House Republicans are united, as you said, in their message. They have constantly been hammering President Biden's agenda, saying it's responsible for driving up inflation to record levels. But when it comes to their own rank and file, I mean, there are these fights that sort of continue to happen. And a lot of times it comes down to, you know, one member of the far right wing of the House Republican Conference saying something

racist or Islamophobic or controversial about another member of Congress. And, you know, a more sort of mainstream Republican saying, hey, cut it out. Like, that's not cool. It's sort of really been super juvenile, name-calling, fights on social media. And it's gotten to the point where the top House Republican, Kevin McCarthy, has to sort of take people in a room, sit them down, and say, you know, we got to cut this out. And these are distractions that are taking away from our message. But notably, McCarthy's not saying much of this or any of this really publicly. He's not going out there and telling them not to do this in a way that like the American public sees them being chastised by their party leadership. He's just doing this quietly. And I think that's kind

of an interesting part of this dynamic. It's also, you know, not an unfamiliar thing for Republicans to be facing. We saw this happen over and over and over again with former President Trump, where some members of the Republican Party would say, oh, well, I don't like his style, but you know, the substance of what he does, I got to stick with him. The difference here, though, is there isn't like a substance argument on a policy front, right? We're not talking about a situation where it's a sitting president who is advocating for positions like tax cuts or building the wall. These are members of a House minority and not the sitting president of the United States.

You have people like Madison Cawthorn and Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert who are able to generate a lot of noise. They're the ones that are getting in these fights. But guess what? They're also people who may not be doing a lot of legislating, but they are doing a lot of really effective fundraising. And a lot of it, as Kelsey mentioned, comes back to former President Trump. A lot of those far right wing members are, you know, tout their, you know, all in loyalty to the former president, to his style, to his taking shots at members of his own party as being totally appropriate. Others like, you know, I talked to a Republican from Nebraska, Don Bacon. He actually won by more votes in his district in 2020 than Trump did.

And he sort of cautioned about, you know, look, there's a lot of things that the former president did that we like, but we shouldn't go all in on Trump's rhetoric. And I don't think we should be the Trump-o-phobe party or the Trump-o-phile party. What I see from everyone is like 100 or 0. Why can't we just say, I agree over in this? Well, he did well working on the border. He did well with USMCA. Right. I mean, there's things that we can say we agree. We could all say we don't agree with the name calling and, you know, attraction. You know, General Powell. And that is the late General Colin Powell, who was a Republican. Right. And another sort of moderate Republican, I talked to Nancy Mace, who was sort of the subject of one of these big Twitter fights with Marjorie Taylor Greene. You know, she sort of warned that

Republicans risk alienating the independents and suburban voters that helped Trump win in the first place and helped the party make gains in 2020. And if they continue to sort of get into these sort of personality fights and don't talk about the issues that people care about, like the cost of gas and groceries, that, you know, they could alienate those people again. Yeah, I guess that is the answer to the question I had, which is, so what? What's the problem? Like, if these people want to have these fights and generate all this noise, is it really going to hurt Republicans that much, who are have sort of all of these structural advantages going into 2022? So there is some difference between the dynamics for winning an individual House seat and winning, say, the presidency or even, you know, winning a race to be a senator or a governor. And that is members of Congress are elected by a much smaller group of people.

It tends to be a lot more homogenous. And particularly with redistricting, there's been this effort to make Republican districts more Republican and districts more Democratic. And as that happens, people like Marjorie Taylor Greene become more and more able to continue winning in districts where that type of approach is popular. So she is also raising a ton of money. So it may be a situation where if you are a Republican who is running in a district where it's more politically advantageous to be the kind of chamber of commerce, big business Republican that we used to see maybe 10, 15 years ago, well, then you can run that way and say, well, I opposed Marjorie Taylor Greene and I opposed Madison Cawthorn or whoever it is you want to say you're opposing and still win. So the Republican Party can run that way when it's about personalities in a way that, you know, it's maybe different for, say, Democrats when they're having arguments. Oftentimes they're having arguments about policy things, right? Republicans will frame them as being the party of defunding the police or of

socialism. And that is a very different process of convincing your voters that you're different. All right, we're going to take a quick break. And when we get back, the Republican agenda, what the leadership would like to be talking about. Support for NPR and the following message come from ExxonMobil. As part of its ongoing commitment to help address climate change, ExxonMobil is increasing the efficiency of its operations and advancing low-carbon technologies that can be deployed at scale. With that and more, it expects to reduce its absolute upstream greenhouse gas emissions by an estimated 30 percent by 2025. Learn more at ExxonMobil.com slash solutions. And we're back. And we have talked about how House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy has had some family meetings or at least one family meeting where he has asked his members to stop fighting with each other about non-substantive things.

But what would he like the agenda to be? Well, McCarthy has set up these task forces in the House Republican Conference, and he talks about the policy plans that they're working on. But largely, their agenda is all about attacking inflation, talking about securing the border, addressing the economic and national security threat from China. They're also working on something that they call the Parents' Bill of Rights to address what they see as concerns with educational standards and the debate that we saw in some states this year over sort of the role of the government, local governments in education. Not necessarily a federal issue for Congress, but it's certainly an issue that is sort of a culture war issue that's captured a lot of attention. You know, it's unclear whether House Republicans are going to roll out,

you know, sort of like a formal agenda like they did in the past with like the pledge to America, the contract with America, like here's the five things or six things we're going to do. But it's pretty clear they're all singing from the same song sheet in terms of we're going to fight inflation. This is about the economy. This is about how much voters are paying for everyday things. Are they fighting inflation or are they fighting Democrats on the issue of inflation? Like do they are they offering a plan for how to reduce inflation? They are not. And that's part of what we've seen happen before. I've talked to some Republican strategists who say that they think it's effective just to combat the issue and basically go back on the idea that people associate them with tax cuts and, you know, with being pro-business as a way to right inflation without actually saying what they're going to do.

But that's not exactly an affirmative legislative agenda. At the same time, there are still a lot of Republicans, notably the former president, but a lot of his supporters. I mean, it's a very big motivating thing for the base to focus on the 2020 election and arguing that it was stolen. And certainly you have some of these more outspoken far right House members wanting to talk about that. You know, I think that they are talking about it in the sense that they're not pushing back against it. They don't want to get crosswise with the former president on that issue because they know the base. A lot of Republicans, according to polls, don't believe the election was fair in a lot of states.

But I haven't seen it as a campaign issue. I think what Kelsey was saying in terms of like culture war issues, I think that there are districts, there are some House districts where I've talked to Republican strategists who say those issues are resonating, like in suburban areas around, you know, big cities like Philadelphia or Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., where there were like big problems with remote learning during the pandemic. generated this big movement, a grassroots movement among parents that have been concerned about both the issue of schools not functioning, but also sort of this fanning of the flames about critical race theory and misinformation about that topic that could be an issue in some House races. It's unclear to me it will be like a widespread issue or in Senate races, but I think Kelsey's right. There's definitely going to be a lot of that talk in a lot of places around the country. I have a sweep of time question for you, which is, is this really the same fight that's been happening since the big Tea Party

wave of 2010? Is this the same dynamic of sort of bomb throwers versus establishment legislators? Well, the bomb throwers are the establishment in so many ways. I mean, the former kind of head of the insurgent side of the right, the House Freedom Caucus, was Mark Meadows, who was the chief of staff to former President Trump. And I can recall so many times, and I'm sure Deirdre was in many of these conversations, where Meadows used to tell reporters that his goal was to move the party to the farthest to the right that he possibly could. And we watched that happen over time during the Trump presidency and even before then. This is a little bit different now where the majority of the party is kind of in the camp of Meadows and the Freedom Caucus, not in the camp of, say, a John Boehner or, you know, even a Paul Ryan.

Right. The party has just really moved significantly since then. I mean, a lot of the House Republican sort of Main Street, you know, Chamber of Commerce types have retired or are considered moderates now. Or have lost primaries. Right. Or are being primaried because they're not deemed sort of Trumpy enough. So I think the sort of like, it's not the center right Republican conference. It's the, you know, I'd say moving farther to the right. Well, I would also say it also goes back to some of the questions about legislating,

because the Freedom Caucus does not have a history of being a legislative group. They were a group that were, like we said, bomb throws. They were the insurgents with their party who were trying to force an ideological shift, not actually getting policy approved. So the question becomes, what do they do if they take over control of the House or if they take control of the House and the Senate? If Republicans do win control in 2022, we're going to have divided government in the next, the first couple of years of their majority is more about setting up for the presidential election

than legislating. All right, well, let's leave it there for now. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Kelsey Snell. I cover Congress. I'm Deirdre Walsh. I also cover Congress. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.