This Washington Post article portrays House Speaker Denny Hastert’s announcement that he won’t bring bills to the floor that aren’t supported by a majority of Republicans as new and noteworthy. In a certain sense, of course, that’s true. But the howls of indignation from various good government types in the story seem vastly overblown. A better way to look at the trend is that Congressional Republicans are publicly acknowledging the sort of hardball politics that have been going on in private for a long time.

First, the party controlling the House rarely brings legislation to the floor that is opposed by the majority of the majority caucus. The Post’s Babington musters a single counter-example, NAFTA in 1993, but that was unusual and the result of heavy lobbying by President Clinton. A better way to look at this issue is to ask why we would expect anything different. The majority caucus elects the party leadership. If the leadership then helps pass legislation the caucus opposes, it will probably be removed. Hastert himself made precisely this point:

In a little-noticed speech in the Capitol a year ago, Hastert said one of his principles as speaker is “to please the majority of the majority.”

“On occasion, a particular issue might excite a majority made up mostly of the minority,” he continued. “Campaign finance is a particularly good example of this phenomenon. The job of speaker is not to expedite legislation that runs counter to the wishes of the majority of his majority.”

(For more on the logic of parties, see Why Parties? by John Aldrich, my advisor, or his more recent work with David Rohde on conditional party government, which argues that parties elect leaders to systematically move policy toward the median voter in their caucus — precisely what Hastert is trying to do.)

Second, the much-maligned Specter “loyalty oath” is essentially a more public version of the promises and assurances that are always made during the distribution of party leadership positions and committee chairmanships.

(To be clear, though, the Republican majority is historically significant in its partisanship in other ways; see this excellent Boston Globe series from earlier this year for more.)