The Jim DeMint Test
This is your politics on dopamine.
You don’t hear the name Jim DeMint a lot anymore, but he was a very powerful force in the far-away era that was the Republican Party just before Donald Trump.
DeMint represented South Carolina in the U.S. House from 1999 to 2005, and then in the U.S. Senate from 2005 to 2013. While his same-state colleague Lindsey Graham had a reputation as a moderate, DeMint was known as a rock-ribbed conservative. He played a crucial role in pushing the GOP to the right, helping unleash the grassroots energy that Trump seized on in 2016.
In the 2010 cycle, DeMint emerged as a “godfather” of the Tea Party movement, one of the few incumbent GOP senators who not only didn’t fear the incoming class of rebellious Republicans but actively worked to bring them to Washington as reinforcements. His PAC, the Senate Conservatives Fund, poured money into Tea Party candidates that year. In 2011, he joined with those who were victorious, like Mike Lee and Rand Paul, to found the Senate Tea Party Caucus.
Then, in 2013, DeMint decided, in the Republican Party that he had helped transform, he would have more power as an activist than as a lawmaker. He resigned from the Senate and became president of the Heritage Foundation, the influential conservative think tank.
DeMint has been on my mind recently because of a quote he gave in 2009, at the height of the Tea Party fervor: “I would rather have 30 Republicans in the Senate who really believe in principles of limited government, free markets, free people, than to have 60 that don’t have a set of beliefs.”
The one thing I’ll say in defense of the quote is that, in the U.S. Senate, a small, passionate minority can slow down a lot of things. (That’s sort of the whole point.) But that’s about it. Being the 30 in a 70-30 Senate would be tantamount to suicide for any of your policy ideas. Because the other party would have a filibuster-proof majority, they would spend their days ramming legislation down your throat on every issue under the sun. You could slow things down, but you’d be powerless to stop them.
If you ever wanted to affirmatively pass a policy idea of your own, not just stall those of the other side? Forget it. 30 senators is not enough to pass a single thing. To prefer that to a 60-seat majority, which might require more difficult coalition management, but could actually turn bills into law, is crazy. It’s the difference between a fractious majority that can actually do things when you’re able to get everyone on the same page, and a committed minority that can do nothing. You would have purity, but no power.
That DeMint line has been echoing in my ears because it seems to be a popular philosophy lately.
First, of course, there’s President Trump, who seems not at all bothered by the prospect of replacing a fractious majority with a committed minority come November. According to reporting by Axios, “President Trump doesn’t much care if Republicans lose the House and/or the Senate in the midterms this fall,” precisely because he knows he will “enjoy a more pro-Trump” congressional Republican caucus, “win or lose.” Put another way, Trump would rather be sure that John Cornyn will be out of the Senate next year, than be sure that a Republican will be in his Texas seat.
“It seems like he’s given up on holding the majority and focusing on loyalty in the minority,” one House Republican told Politico in May.
You see strands of this thinking in the Democratic Party as well.