For All the Talk of a Tea Party of the Left, Moderates Emerge as a Democratic Power

WASHINGTON — For all the talk of a Tea Party of the left, the true power in the House revealed its face last week — the Mighty Moderates.

The failure of House liberals to attach strict conditions to billions of dollars in emergency border aid requested by President Trump highlighted the outsize power of about two dozen centrist Democrats, mainly from Republican-leaning districts, who are asserting themselves to pull the chamber to the right.

Their views diverge sharply from the mostly liberal cast of Democrats seeking their party’s presidential nomination and from the diverse new crop of outspoken liberals in the House who have captured the public’s imagination and infused new energy into the progressive majority of their caucus. But their victories in districts that Mr. Trump won in 2016 are the reason Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, a staunch liberal herself, holds her gavel. For now, they are proving far more effective at wielding their influence than those in the party’s vocal and headline-grabbing left.

“Where they come from is crucial to holding the House, and that makes them very influential,” said Laura Hall of the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington. “If you’re Speaker Pelosi or another member of the Democratic leadership, you have to always be thinking about those members whose seats went from red to blue and helped to flip the House.”

The moderates’ latest use of that clout played out in sometimes ugly fashion last week in the Capitol, in heated scrums on the House floor, angry exchanges between erstwhile allies, mudslinging on Twitter, and late-night meetings with leadership. One liberal accused his moderate colleagues of enabling child abuse. A moderate clapped back that the name-caller, Representative Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, was just chasing followers on social media.

Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, whose rock-starlike popularity on the left has given her a louder than usual microphone for a first-term lawmaker, accused the moderates of being the new Tea Party.

Their tactics, she huffed, are “just horrifying.”

The nasty intraparty divisions looked familiar to Republicans, who could scarcely restrain their glee as Ms. Pelosi grappled with the same dynamics their party faced when it held the House majority. The former speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin and his predecessor, John A. Boehner of Ohio, had to contend with the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus, the ideological outgrowth of the Tea Party, which routinely threatened to vote against crucial measures they considered insufficiently conservative.

“It seems to me that Nancy Pelosi’s facing exactly the same set of problems that John Boehner faced,” Representative Tom Cole, Republican of Oklahoma, said with a chuckle. “She’s very able, but it’s rough. We’ve been there.”

Well, not quite. The Tea Party, which drew its name from the mantra “Taxed Enough Already,” represented the far-right of the Republican Party, while the coalition of Democrats that is now asserting itself is in the center, often allied with moderate Republicans across the aisle.

But unlike Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and her like-minded colleagues, the moderates have taken a tactical page from the roughly 40 Republicans who make up the Freedom Caucus, whose sway in the Republican majority came from their willingness to defect from the party line on crucial votes unless they received concessions.

While the House’s liberal superstars are adept at promoting their progressive positions and routinely generate headlines for breaking with the party line, they have not made a habit of lobbying their colleagues to defy Ms. Pelosi en masse. Last week, the foursome known as The Squad — Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and Representatives Ilhan Omar of Minnesota, Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Ayanna S. Pressley of Massachusetts — announced their opposition to a Democratic border spending bill that included strict rules on the way the money could be used, saying it was not liberal enough. But when that first vote was tallied, they were the only four Democrats opposed, and the measure passed easily.

The moderates, in contrast, have been ready and willing to bring legislation down. In a majority that holds the House by a narrow margin, Ms. Pelosi can afford to lose no more than 17 of her fellow Democrats on any vote. That gives a potent weapon to any faction that can hold together that many lawmakers to insist on its position.

The moderates began demonstrating their penchant for breaking with their leaders on the House floor early this year, siding with Republicans on procedural votes meant to put Democrats in a tough political spot. They also balked at a two-year budget measure they worried would worsen a fiscal picture already badly stained by red ink. Threats to block any effort by liberals to increase domestic spending essentially assured that the bill would not have the necessary support to pass, and the vote was postponed indefinitely.

Their influence has also been felt on one major initiative that has not taken off; concern for their fates is one reason that Democratic leaders seldom talk about impeaching Mr. Trump, a move that is now supported by more than 80 House Democrats, about one-third of the caucus, almost all of them progressives.

But last week was the centrists’ most visible and audacious power play yet.

With the Senate and House at a stalemate over the $4.6 billion humanitarian aid package, several of the moderates banded together and threatened to side with Republicans to block a Democratic alternative that contained less money for immigration enforcement and more conditions for the administration. The move pushed Ms. Pelosi to abandon her plan to pass the more restrictive bill, which had higher standards for facilities holding migrant children. Instead she brought up a Senate version that had bipartisan support and swiftly cleared it to become law.

The move left Ms. Pelosi’s natural allies in the House’s Hispanic and progressive caucuses stunned and feeling betrayed. “Since when did the Problem Solvers Caucus become the Child Abuse Caucus?” Mr. Pocan said on Twitter. Representatives Max Rose, Democrat of New York, and Dean Phillips, Democrat of Minnesota, were later seen angrily confronting him on the House floor.

Representative Raúl M. Grijalva, Democrat of Arizona and a former co-chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said the episode left him “very resentful,” and feeling as if the moderates had essentially forced the House to silence its natural inclinations.

“I just hope that in forcing us to do nothing, they don’t feel like they’ve actually accomplished anything,” Mr. Grijalva said. “I don’t know what the motivation was, to try to assert some power or what, but in the future, we shouldn’t hesitate bringing our agenda and our legislation forward because it might offend 23 or 24” centrists.

The episode also exposed divisions among the moderates themselves. On the House floor on Thursday, about 10 moderate freshman Democrats huddled near the marble dais, arguing about the way forward. One lawmaker said if they sided with the other party in a bid to force the House to consider the weaker Senate bill, “we might as well be Republicans,” according to one person familiar with the exchange who described it on the condition of anonymity.

Representative Abigail Spanberger, Democrat of Virginia, grew red-faced and emotional during the exchange, and stormed off the House floor, returning a short time later and accepting an embrace from Representative Katie Porter, Democrat of California. Both ultimately supported the bill.

It was a version of a point that had been made, in much gentler fashion, during floor remarks by Representative Jim McGovern, Democrat of Massachusetts and the chairman of the Rules Committee. He warned that the procedural move the moderates were threatening to join “is a vote to give control of the House floor to the Republicans.”

But the moderates said they had done the party a favor, getting the House to the only tenable position as quickly as possible.

“The question was, would you rather just obstruct and delay, as some wanted to, or were we going to get humanitarian aid to children at the border right now?” said Representative Josh Gottheimer, Democrat of New Jersey and the co-chairman of the Problem Solvers Caucus, a group of 23 Republicans and 23 Democrats that presses for bipartisan compromises.

The group met on Wednesday and discussed the mounting anxiety many of them had about going home for a July 4 recess having failed to pass the border bill. After taking a vote, members decided to issue a news release calling for the House to pass the Senate bill, effectively surrendering a politically risky fight over immigration so the aid could go through.

“There was a very significant and real concern that we wouldn’t act at all and leave town with no immediate humanitarian aid for children at the border,” Mr. Gottheimer said. “That was unacceptable.”

The result was a bitter pill for liberals who had insisted they could not vote for the aid package without tough new restrictions and higher standards for facilities that hold migrant children.

Ms. Pressley conceded that the left had work to do to figure out how to wield its power more effectively.

“We are building new muscle,” she said in an interview, “and as we build that new muscle, we will better understand how to flex it.”