As immigration reform looks set to die a slow death in the House, TPM Reader JS looks to history to try to square the circle …
So as the wheels look like they’ve almost come off of immigration reform, and the 40 year urban-rural farm bill detente seems to have collapsed, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Compromise of 1850.
You probably know the story, but the gist was what to do with all the land acquired from Mexico after the Mexican-American War between 1846-8. Especially after the discovery of gold there, there was tremendous pressure to admit California directly to statehood as a free state, but also enormous pressure from southerners to abandon the old Missouri Compromise of 30 years earlier that prohibited slavery north of 36 30. Henry Clay, who had brokered the Missouri deal, had recently returned to the Senate and, having finally abandoned his presidential ambitions, embarked on a final attempt to resolve this crisis.
The problem was that every issue was tangled up with another — if California was admitted as a free state, what would happen if Congress created territories out of New Mexico and Utah (also won from Mexico)? Would they be slave or free, and who would decide? What about the disputed border between Texas and New Mexico, now an entirely American problem? Texas would give up land but only if Congress absolved it of a ton of debt. Slaveholders demanded a stronger fugitive slave act; anti-slavery northern and border state politicians sought an end to the embarrassing slave trade in the District of Columbia.
Clay’s approach was an omnibus bill (in fact, it was where the term comes from in American politics — it was first called that derisively in debate — kind of as in “everything but the kitchen sink” — but Clay later appropriated the term). It made perfect sense — every party got something it wanted while swallowing some stuff they didn’t while ostensibly resolving every outstanding issue created out of the new western territories. Of course, Clay couldn’t get the omnibus through the Senate because while there were majorities for each measure, there was no political constituency that could endorse them all, even in the name of compromise.
Blah blah blah, Clay gets sick, Stephen Douglas (who never believed the omnibus would work anyway), split the measure into its component parts as separate bills — California a free state, organizing the territories of Utah and New Mexico under the theory that their people would decide about slavery later, settling the Texas boundary and assuming its debts, the stronger Fugitive Slave Act, and outlawing the slave trade in DC — with the agreement to get votes in the Senate on each of them. And in fact, they each sail through in a matter of a few weeks but with different majorities supporting each measure. They were then similarly passed by the House shortly thereafter and each signed into law by President Fillmore.
So that’s all on my mind. Under a multitude of pressures, House Republicans today have bound themselves to the so-called Hastert Rule (except sometimes not, but with a weak Speaker, it’s not clear how many times he could break it again. And for the record, while commentators usually talk about how the stakes are Speaker Boehner keeping his job, it seems much more plausibly that the stakes are in fact holding the whole of the Republican party together..). Obviously, without the constraint of the Hastert Rule, Democrats and a rump of Republicans could pass normal legislation. But it seems unlikely to happen now. Republicans are talking about breaking immigration reform into smaller bills, and have already done so with the farm bill. These are dangerous developments for Democrats (and the country), but what if it’s actually the way out?
What if Generic House Conservative gets to vote for stronger border security (as in the Senate bill) and _actually have it become a law_, but still be able to tell his or her constituents that he or she voted against a pathway to citizenship? What if no one has to take a bitter pill?
Of course, the only compromise that has to be made is that every component is guaranteed to get a majority vote. (My theory is also premised on the assumption that there are enough Republicans in the House who believe it in their interest to vote for a pathway to citizenship.) This also obviously breaks the Hastert Rule, but in a way that actually (a) helps national Republicans move some of the policy needles they’ve wanted to move while (b) giving the incentive to conservatives to actually pass some genuinely conservative legislation they would accept and get to be proud of. Basically, are House conservatives willing and able to stay ideologically and legislatively pure and get stuff they want, while accepting that things like a pathway to citizenship will still happen? I don’t know the answer. Changing this dynamic was enough to get out of a debate that was literally tearing the country apart in 1850.
Now I don’t want to draw the possible parallels out too far — the Fugitive Slave Act was among the most odious ever produced by Congress, and created an entirely unexpected anti-slavery backlash, hastened the collapse of the Whig party, and set the stage for the rest of the conflict of the 1850s that would of course culminate in the Civil War. (For what it’s worth, the late Historian of the U.S. House, Robert Remini, argued in his nice survey of the subject that it nevertheless forestalled secession for a crucial ten years, thus allowing the North to develop both politically and economically in a way that would allow it to ultimately prevail in the conflict.) Additionally, the great political flaw of the compromise was that it was not really a compromise at all — it was a way to move forward without reaching a compromise by letting every faction get something it wanted without endorsing something it didn’t. Was that ultimately unstable? Perhaps, but again, it’s hard to see how things could have turned out better without it.
Basically, I think the episode is instructive on legislative paths forward when normal politics has reached an impasse. It’s hard to admit things have gotten this bad, but it’s getting harder to draw any other conclusions. And it’s at least a suggestion that Democrats consider the political benefits of breaking these omnibus bills into smaller ones — provided, of course, they can get a deal with Republicans to allow majority votes in both houses on each bill.
