LaTourette Syndrome

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Rep. Steve LaTourette

Yes­ter­day, nine-​​term Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Steve LaTourette (R-​​Bainbridge Town­ship, OH) announced that he will not be seek­ing another term in Con­gress. LaTourette marks the lat­est in an ever-​​growing list of politi­cians who are choos­ing to leave due to the rapid increase in extreme par­ti­san­ship in the Capitol.

Yet LaTourette is a mod­er­ate only when com­pared to the cur­rent crop of Repub­li­cans. His DW-​​NOMINATE score of +0.394 is well to the left of the 111th Congress’s Repub­li­can mean of +0.623 (a mean which is cer­tain to be more to the left of the cur­rent Con­gress), but also to the right of the Reagan-​​era Repub­li­can mean of +0.298. He is almost pre­cisely at the +0.384 mean of all mod­ern House Repub­li­cans dat­ing back to the Nixon administration.

As a point of com­par­i­son, the 111th Congress’s Demo­c­ra­tic mean was –0.362, just slightly more lib­eral than the –0.334 mean of mod­ern House Democ­rats (again, going back to the Nixon years). House Democ­rats are, in fact, more con­ser­v­a­tive than at any time since Bill Clin­ton was elected Pres­i­dent, bar­ring a sig­nif­i­cant jump to the left in the 112th Congress.

Why does this mat­ter? Because the extreme par­ti­san­ship of the past two decades has come entirely from Repub­li­cans becom­ing more con­ser­v­a­tive. Com­pare the his­tograms of the House in the 111th Con­gress of 2009 to that of the 102nd Con­gress of 1991.

Note how the two par­ties have a slight over­lap in 1991, with Democ­rats rang­ing from –0.8 to +0.1, with a peak at –0.4. In 2009, Democ­rats still had a range of –0.8 to +0.1, and still had a peak at –0.4. Yet Repub­li­cans of 1991 ranged from 0 to +0.8 with a peak at +0.4, while today they range from +0.2 to +1.3, with a peak at +0.6.

Sim­ply put, Democ­rats have remained rel­a­tively unchanged, but Repub­li­cans have been mov­ing sharply and con­sis­tently to the right.

And it is this shift­ing that leaves peo­ple like LaTourette, who would have been a main­stream Repub­li­can when Clin­ton was elected, to feel that he must leave Con­gress due to being mar­gin­al­ized as a lefty liberal.

We used to be able to get things done in Con­gress because com­pro­mise was pos­si­ble. LaTourette’s depar­ture is another nail in the cof­fin of suc­cess­ful action.

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  1. Pingback: AP sources: Nine-term Ohio Rep. Steve LaTourette to retire – Washington Post - Give Truth A Chance

  2. Rep. Geoff Davis (R-​​Hebron, KY) just announced his retire­ment, effec­tive immediately. 

  3. Btw, TX pri­mary is tonite. Cruz is up early for the GOP Sen­ate seat and looks pretty close for a Dem House pri­mary against a fresh­man GOP’er.

  5. Thanks for the Texas pri­mary reminder, rgbact. If DC does not cover it tomor­row, I may do an arti­cle for Thurs­day morning.

  6. Sorry, Mono, but Davis’ suc­ces­sor will NOT be appointed by Gov. Beshears, as that would be QUITE uncon­sti­tu­tional. Art. 1, Sec 2.4

  9. Btw, I think this arti­cle reads way more like red meat for hun­gry lib­er­als than seri­ous analy­sis. I would’ve been more inter­ested in:

    1) An update on cur­rent retire­ments, a com­par­i­son to his­tory, and poten­tial impact

    2) How much is cur­rent envi­ron­ment of daily PR games dri­ving peo­ple out (noth­ing get­ting done, every­thing is done with an eye on fundrais­ing and campaigning)

    May be time to think about a part time Con­gress since I don’t really see why these guys need to engage in food fights full time for.

  10. I guess–like Olympia Snowe who has long been a favorite of mine–LaTourette is another mod­er­ate casu­alty of partisanship.

    Sad, really. It sounds like he’d actu­ally like to get things done.

  11. Sur­prised this has not got­ten more atten­tion. Start­ing tomor­row, under Oba­macare, women in Amer­ica begin  receiv­ing 8 spe­cific health ben­e­fits . Insur­ance com­pa­nies are required to cover these things with­out co-​​pays.

    Dis­play­ing his usual keen polit­i­cal instincts, Mitch McConnell chose today to announce the lat­est GOP effort to hold a Sen­ate vote on repeal­ing the health care bill in its entirety.

  12. Olympia Snowe gets zero sym­pa­thy from me. She has toed the par­ti­san line in well over 95% of the votes the past sev­eral years.

  13. fil­istro,

    McConnell prob­a­bly chose today inten­tion­ally, to dis­tract media atten­tion from yet another exam­ple of Oba­macare help­ing people.

  14. This arti­cle fur­nishes one more exam­ple of the silli­ness of the tu quoque argu­ments, the false-​​equivalence “both sides are increas­ingly par­ti­san” non­sense that the media engages in as it tries to be “fair.”

    Repub­li­cans are going nuts. That’s the truth of it.

  16. Pingback: Logarchism » Texas: It’s Like a Whole Other Country