Month: September 2015

Replacing Speaker Boehner

voteviewblog 114th Congress, Congressional History, Contemporary American Politics, Uncategorized

Speaker Boehner saw the handwriting on the wall and resigned from Congress effective on October 30. As we noted in our last post the Speaker was caught between a rock and a hard place. He did not have 218 votes in the Republican Caucus leaving his fate in the hands of Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic Caucus.

Today Boehner said that there would be no government shutdown and he would set up a select committee to investigate Planned Parenthood. Boehner appears to have decided to put a number of bills on the floor increasing the debt ceiling and funding the government (including the Export-Import Bank) before he leaves office. These bills will presumably pass with the support of the Democratic Caucus and a portion of the Republican Caucus. This will, of course, outrage Ted Cruz and the “drive the car over the cliff” Conservatives who would rather shut down the government than fund Planned Parenthood.

The irony in this Republican train wreck is than John Boehner is hardly a “Liberal”. Below we show, using our Weekly Constant Space DW-NOMINATE scores, the 83rd, 104th, and 114th House Republican Caucuses along with the positions of the Republican Speakers — William Martin (R-MA), Newt Gingrich (R-GA), and John Boehner (R-OH).

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Boehner is positioned near the middle of the Caucus at 0.515 but what appears to be core of his problem is that the 111 Southern Republicans are located at 0.533 and the 135 Northern Republicans are located at 0.444. Not all of the Southern Republicans oppose the Speaker but as shown by the graph below it is the Southerners who are the most conservative. Boehner’s likely replacement is Kevin McCarthy of California. McCarthy is located at 0.459 near the mean of the Northern Republicans and he is more moderate than Speaker Boehner. The “Ted Cruz” Caucus is unlikely to be able to elect one of their own so that McCarthy is likely to win. The wild card is how intense the civil war in the Republican Caucus will be when Boehner attempts to pass the Debt Ceiling and Government funding bills. The next few weeks should not lack for drama.

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Planned Parenthood and the Fate of Speaker Boehner

voteviewblog 114th Congress, Contemporary American Politics, Uncategorized

The controversy touched off by undercover videos allegedly showing Planned Parenthood officials discussing fetal tissue sales has thrown a monkey wrench into the efforts to pass government funding bills in the House. Last Friday (18 September 2015) the House voted 241 – 187 to defund Planned Parenthood. We use our Weekly Constant-Space DW-NOMINATE Scores to do the vote plots. The House vote to defund is shown below:

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Two Democrats, Lipinski (D-IL) and Peterson (D-MN), voted with the Republicans and three Republicans, Dent (R-PA), Dold (R-IL), and Hanna (R-NY), voted against defunding Planned Parenthood.

Earlier, the Senate failed to reach 60 votes for Cloture in an attempt to defund:

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The two Democrats who voted for Cloture are Donnelly (D-IN) and Manchin (D-WV). The two Republicans who voted against are Kirk (R-IL) and Majority Leader McConnell (R-KY) who voted Nay so he could bring up the Cloture motion another time. McConnell’s “error” has the effect of pulling the cutting line away from Donnelly and Manchin just enough so that they are also “errors”.

There is absolutely no chance that Planned Parenthood will be defunded. Even if it passed it would be vetoed by President Obama. What is at stake is yet another government shutdown. Neither Speaker Boehner nor Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi want a government shutdown. The problem for Speaker Boehner is that a sizable bloc of Conservatives would rather have a shutdown than fund Planned Parenthood even though public opinion would blame the Republicans for the mess a shutdown would cause.

One casualty of this fight over Planned Parenthood could be Speaker Boehner. A number of Conservatives want to oust Boehner from the Speakership and replace him with a more hardline member. Below we show a hypothetical up or down vote on Speaker Boehner where we count 47 Republicans voting against him — all 42 members of the Freedom Caucus plus 5 non-members who voted against him for Speaker in January (note that newly sworn in Darin LaHood (R-IL) is not shown in the plot):

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Speaker Boehner’s fate is clearly in the hands of Democrats. If they all vote No then Boehner loses the Speakership. The problem is that a replacement is almost certainly not going to be one of the extreme Conservatives so the Republicans are back to square one. If the Democrats abstain then the Republican Caucus votes 199 – 47 for Boehner (Boehner abstains and LaHood votes Yes).

Regardless, it appears that another train wreck may be at hand in Washington, D.C..

House and Senate Votes on the Iran Agreement

voteviewblog 114th Congress, Arms Control, Political Polarization, Uncategorized

This past week the House and Senate considered the nuclear deal President Obama negotiated with Iran. The deal was essentially done when the U.N. Security Council voted unanimously to lift the sanctions placed on Iran. By prior agreement with President Obama, Congress could vote to disapprove the deal but it would take a two-thirds majority in both chambers to over ride the President’s veto. However, in the Senate, Republicans were unable to muster 60 votes to overcome a filibuster by the Democrats to prevent a vote on the deal itself. We use our Weekly Constant-Space DW-NOMINATE Scores to do the vote plots. The vote on cloture is shown below:

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Only Cardin (D-MD), Manchin (D-WV), Menendez (D-NJ), and Schumer (D-NY) voted with the Republicans in favor of cloture. All except Manchin are to the interior of the caucus so the vote does not fit the spatial model that well with a PRE of only 0.14.

In the House there were three votes. The first was on whether or not the President had fully disclosed all the side deals of the agreement. This was essentially a straight party-line vote:

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The second vote was to Approve the Agreement. On this vote 25 Democrats in the Center and the Center-Right of the Caucus voted with the Republicans against the agreement. The vote had a respectable PRE of 0.77:

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Finally, the House voted on a resolution “To suspend until January 21, 2017, the authority of the President to waive, suspend, reduce, provide relief from, or otherwise limit the application of sanctions pursuant to an agreement related to the nuclear program of Iran.” This was another party-line vote:

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Given the outcome of these votes the issue is essentially settled. No doubt there will be attempts made by the Republicans to claim that the “period for review” had not started because the President had not fully disclosed all the side agreements (e.g., IAEA with Iran). But because of the Security Council action there is little Congress can do. What is likely to happen is the Congress with President Obama’s support will transfer more advanced weaponry to Israel.

Alpha-NOMINATE Applied to the 113th House

voteviewblog 113th Congress, Contemporary American Politics, Political Polarization

Following up on our previous posts, below we apply Alpha-NOMINATE to the 113th House. There were 1,202 total votes in the of which 1,021 are scalable (at least 2.5% in the minority). We used the R version of Alpha-NOMINATE to perform the analysis. We used 2000 samples from a slice sampler in one dimension with a burn-in of 1000. The first graph shows the Trace and Density plots for alpha.


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The mean of alpha was 0.99033 with a standard deviation of 0.001125 strongly indicating that the Representatives’ utility functions were Gaussian.

The next five plots show the estimated ideal points for the 443 scalable Representatives (Emerson (R-MO) only voted 11 times) and President Obama (using CQ Presidential Support votes his location is at -1.41) along with their 95% Credible Intervals. On the left, Representative Schakowsky (D-IL) is located at -2.262. Her 95% credible interval runs from -2.460 to -2.077. The five Republicans on the right end are Massie (R-KY) at 3.93 (3.77 – 4.09), Broun (R-GA) at 3.94 (3.80 – 4.10), Amash (R-MI) at 4.00 (3.85 – 4.14), Duncan (R-TN) at 4.08 (3.89 – 4.26), and all by himself, Jones (R-NC) at 9.16 (8.59 – 9.80).

Walter Jones is also the most extreme member of the 114th as of the August recess. Indeed, many of the more extreme members of the Republican caucus continued into the 114th. With the volatile issue of Planned Parenthood funding on the table there will be attempts to attach defunding language to many must-pass bills. Neither President Obama nor the Republican leaders want another shutdown but with the number of intense conservatives in the House Caucus it will be a tricky row to hoe.

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Leaving out Jones (R-NC):

The Median of the Democratic Party is -1.317 with a standard deviation of 0.0166 and the Median of the Republican Party is 0.993 with a standard deviation of 0.0166. The probabilities for the median Representative are 0.083 for Gerlach (R-PA) located at 0.455, 0.079 for Wolf (R-VA) at 0.449, 0.073 for Frelinghuysen (R-NY) at 0.478, 0.073 for Meehan (R-PA) at 0.451, and 0.071 for Dent (R-PA) at 0.433. Given the large number of Republicans concentrated around 0.45 these probabilities are no surprise.