The death of the moderate Republican

Republicans just lost eight seats in the House. But if you'd wandered into the House of Representatives last week without reading the election returns, you might have concluded that the GOP won big on Nov. 6.

"We have the second-largest Republican House majority since World War II," California Rep. Tom McClintock told reporters last week. "The American people agree with the positions of the Republican Party and heartily disagree with the positions of the Democratic Party."

And if that's how you see things, why compromise?

Take taxes. Exit polling showed that, though most Americans don't like higher taxes, they'd accept a tax hike on the wealthy to reduce the federal deficit. Not House Republicans.

"We have a mandate to fight it," said Rep. Raul Labrador of Idaho. "I think that's what the American people elected us to do. We will continue to fight it, and we will fight any member of the (Republican) conference who decides it's a good idea to raise taxes."

It's not surprising that House conservatives see things their own way. Even if the country as a whole voted for President Barack Obama this month, conservative House members did just fine in their own districts.

Thanks to the inexorable forces of polarization, most House Republicans won re-election easily, and with margins bigger than Obama's, as they like to point out. ("I don't consider a 51 percent victory much of a mandate," sniffed Rep. Tim Huelskamp of Kansas.)

Members of the tea party caucus did even better than that; only about 5 percent were defeated. (The losers included Allen West of Florida and Joe Walsh of Illinois, two especially fiery members whose constituents ran out of patience.)

Which Republicans lost their seats? Moderates and moderate conservatives, disproportionately.

Among the incumbents who ran for re-election, 48 were members of a group called the Republican Main Street Partnership, nonradical conservatives who sometimes call themselves "center right." Seven of those 48 lost their seats - a mortality rate of 15 percent, more than twice as high as Republicans in general.

When you add retirements and other departures, more than a dozen moderate conservatives won't be coming back next year.

Moderate Republicans were an endangered species in Congress even before this year's election. Now they're even closer to extinction.

"You know how many pro-choice Republicans are in the House today?" he asked me. "One - Richard Hanna (from Upstate New York). There used to be eight."

Since 1994, the GOP has been increasingly dominated by a conservative wing that demands orthodoxy on social issues as well as fiscal matters. Moderates often face primary challenges backed by well-organized national conservative groups. (That's how Sen. Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, a moderate conservative icon, lost his job this year.)

Gerrymandering has produced more districts that are markedly conservative or liberal, with fewer swing districts in the center.

"It's happened in both parties," Bass noted. "It's easier to run to the far left or the far right."

The tea party movement hasn't helped either. "They've been good for the debate but not for the party," Bass said.

"I've been a voice crying in the wilderness," he said. "We need more pro-business Republicans who don't wake up every morning to legislate a no-tax agenda and a (conservative) social agenda. But it won't be easy."

In the meantime, we're left with a House Republican caucus that's more conservative, more Southern, more rural and seemingly less inclined than ever to compromise with a Democratic president and a Democratic-run Senate.

That means it won't be easy for House Speaker John A. Boehner to make a deal with Obama to avoid the "fiscal cliff" of automatic tax increases and spending cuts at the end of the year.

To a moderate conservative like Bass, the answer is easy: Increase taxes on wealthy earners by limiting tax deductions and raising the capital gains tax rate. "You can do it without increasing the tax rate at the top," he said. "The green-eyeshade guys can work it out in no time."

But that's not the mood among most House Republicans.