On Friday, though, the Blue Dogs celebrated their 25th birthday, a quarter-century run of bonding over what it is like to represent the most conservative terrain inside the House Democratic caucus. Their ranks have ebbed and flowed over the years, a movement that could usually be seen as tracking whether the Democrats were holding the majority.
If their weekly meetings had several dozen lawmakers, that meant things were going well for House Democrats. When attendance dropped into the low teens, as it did five years ago, that meant Democrats were out in the political wilderness searching for a path to relevance.
Now flush with 25 members — including nine freshmen, eight of whom flipped GOP districts in 2018 — this coalition feels as if it is once again thriving. They look a lot younger and more diverse than the original 23 members, with a geographic focus that is shifting into the suburban districts that were once Republican strongholds.
“While the makeup and size of our coalition has changed over the years, our focus on fiscal responsibility and a strong national security has never wavered,” Rep. Stephanie Murphy (D-Fla.), the current co-chairman of the Blue Dogs, said in a House floor speech last week.
Their focus on fiscal matters, however, comes at a fairly stark moment in national politics. After spending the Obama White House years howling about the federal debt, Republicans have largely abandoned fiscal restraint both in terms of tax and spending policies, with the debt soaring by more than $3 trillion in President Trump’s three years in office.
Democrats running for president often critique Trump and Republicans for rank hypocrisy on the issue, but none has any real plan to tackle the debt. In fact, while they all generally would push to repeal the 2017 tax cuts, those presidential candidates then would use those funds on expansive federal programs, such as the Medicare-for-all proposal touted by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.).
This makes the Blue Dogs, while strong again in numbers and clout, feel almost as isolated now on a key policy as they were when Tanner madly scrambled to find staff and strategists to attend their first retreat.
“Most importantly, Blue Dogs remain focused on our founding principles of fiscal responsibility,” said Murphy, who has endorsed former New York mayor Mike Bloomberg in the 2020 race.
Clearly the coalition is quite concerned that Sanders, the self-described democratic socialist, at the top of the ticket would put many of their seats in peril. So far, among those who have endorsed, the Blue Dogs heavily favor Bloomberg and former vice president Joe Biden.
After the 1994 elections swept Republicans into the House majority for the first time in 40 years, making huge gains in defeating rural Democrats, some of those remaining felt as if they needed a new home.
Tanner, who retired in 2010, put together a group of more than 20 Democrats who survived the previous election and wanted to find some middle ground, particularly after Republicans successfully lampooned the Clinton administration’s health-care proposal as big government.
They were even willing to work with Republicans on their proposals to balance the annual federal budget.
“If you don’t get control of your budget, whether you’re a nation, a country, a business, or a family, you lose control of your destiny. This is a great disservice to future generations who can’t vote and make decisions. So I thought we needed to work toward balance,” then-Rep. Glen Browder (D-Ala.) told a biographer, transcripts of which were included in a detailed Medium post that is a retrospective on the coalition.
About two-thirds of the original group hailed from the South, and only two were women.
Founded on Feb. 14, 1995, they chose the name after a painting of a blue dog with yellow eyes hanging in the offices of Rep. W.J. “Billy” Tauzin, then a Democrat from Louisiana who hosted their early meetings.
What that group did not realize was that it would be another 12 years before Democrats regained the majority. By that point, Tauzin, after switching parties later in 1995, had finished up a three-year run as Republican chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
A few other original Blue Dogs also switched parties, and it was not until the 2006 midterm elections — when Democrats successfully recruited a crop of candidates who appealed to those rural and exurban regions — that both the coalition and the broader caucus swept back into power, allowing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) to make history as the first woman ever to wield that chamber’s gavel.
By 2010, their numbers soared to 54, but the group was set up for another big fall, getting wiped out in those midterms and seeing their ranks dropped to a fraction of that record high.
By 2015, just 15 House Democrats joined the coalition, a low mark that left the Blue Dogs without any real bark or bite.
But in 2016, following a shooting massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Murphy jumped into a House race in Florida.
Rescued by the U.S. Navy as an infant Vietnamese boat refugee, Murphy, 41, defeated a 24-year incumbent and then easily won reelection in 2018, providing the portrait for the new era of Blue Dogs: younger, more diverse, socially liberal while still fiscally conservative.
There are five women among the Blue Dogs, including four who won GOP districts in 2018.
As he gathered current staff and Blue Dog alumni to celebrate last Thursday, Tanner told the secret of how he made the annual retreat a success: no policy or issue agenda items, just socializing.
