In early August, a Republican majority in the U.S. House of Representatives voted for the 40th time to repeal the Affordable Care Act. This repeal, like the previous 39, will be voted down by the Democratic majority in the U.S. Senate.

The 113th Congress is particularly gridlocked and ineffective. The legislative branch must end its dysfunctional pattern of partisan politics. To do so, it is crucial that the Republican Party end its extreme slide to the right.

The American system of government is built on compromise. Before our Constitution was even enacted, compromise existed between camps of differing political ideologies.

But since the late 1940s, the two parties have increasingly diverged ideologically, fostering mistrust and disdain for each other and even within their own ranks.

“Tribalism” has replaced simple ideological divisions within the parties, according to researchers at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and the Brookings Institute, both prominent think tanks.

A quintessential example of “tribalism” is the conservative Tea Party that is pushing the Republican Party ever further to the right. It is hard to find a liberal camp with members as entrenched in their views and with as much political clout to match as those in the Tea Party.

And in the Washington, D.C., of today, the extremity of a politician’s political ideology plays heavily into his or her popularity.

A recent study from Quinnipiac University ranked politicians based on a “feeling thermometer” of their likability. The study found that in the eyes of all American voters, Republican New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was ranked most likeable.

However, when considering only self-identified Republican voters, Christie ranked eighth in likeability, behind a few other Republican presidential hopefuls. The takeaway is that, while all collective voters ranked Christie highest, he is unlikely to make it past the Republican primaries — he is not conservative enough. This was also a criticism of Mitt Romney in the 2012 election.

Times have changed from what they once were.

The Republican Party of Mitch McConnell and John Boehner is hardly recognizable to the party of Eisenhower, or even Reagan.

The manipulations of the far right have alienated moderate members of its own party. In doing so, the Republican Party has pulled even further right of center.

In early 2012, Olympia Snowe, a Republican senator from Maine, announced her retirement from the Senate.

Snowe was famous for being an effective politician, despite being a moderate Republican. She cited hyper-partisanship and a gridlocked Congress as reasons for her retirement.

Others, like former Republicans Jim Jeffords and Lincoln Chafee, took her example even further and left the Republican Party altogether because of hyper-partisanship.

The problem has even affected Republican stalwarts such as former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor.

O’Connor is famous for her Republican affiliation and is the last Supreme Court justice to have held elected office — she was a state senator from Arizona.

But in late April of this year, she publicly expressed misgivings about the Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore, which effectively gave the 2000 presidential election to President George W. Bush. She has also been openly critical of the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United, an important Republican judicial victory.

O’Connor is not the only famous conservative judicial member to express doubt about the direction of her party.

As Jeffrey Toobin of The New Yorker points out, former conservative Supreme Court justices David Souter and John Paul Stevens were so alienated by the aggressively conservative direction taken by the Republican Party under President Bush that they waited until he was out of office before resigning, allowing President Barack Obama to appoint two liberal judges to the court.

The gridlock in Congress is undoubtedly due to problems on both sides of the aisle. But until the Republican Party can reject the influence of the Tea Party and Koch brothers-funded conservative liberalism, the right will continue to be pulled even further away from the center.

This ideological divide within the party alienates moderates and halts compromise. This in turn, stalls congressional action, damaging America for the coming generations.

Michael Hacker is a senior political science major. His column appears weekly. He can be reached at mahacker@syr.edu and followed on Twitter at @mikeincuse.

Published on August 12, 2013 at 12:34 am