The House Republicans broke ranks on Wednesday in a vote to roll back the President’s immigrations reforms, including the legalization of children of illegal immigrants, the so-called “dreamers.” Twenty-six Republicans could not reconcile this attack on the dreamers with the majority’s intent to stand against the overreach of Presidential authority that allowed these young people to remain in the country legally.

When Republicans act without compassion, they always claim there is a higher cause at stake, such as Constitutional limitations on the President’s power. “Higher causes” have a way of disrupting millions of lives, but the principle is what matters to the Republican majority.

But the good news is that some Republicans are willing to separate themselves from the party in order to vote their conscience or at least to vote the way their constituents would want them to. Acts of conscience did not distinguish the previous Congress, in which Republicans voted as a mindless block to prevent the Democrats from having their way on critical issues.

Partisan voting has always seemed undemocratic to me. Even voting a straight ticket at the polls often seems like a mindless exercise in power-grabbing. The united stand takes precedence over the candidate or the issue at stake. Unified partisans have even lately been roused to keep things from getting done.

The same group-think has been deplored by Republicans in the context of organized labor. To most Republicans unions represent a coercive power, capturing the minds of laborers without respect for their individual voices. And Big Labor could be accused of bullying its membership into unity. They have nothing on the Republican Caucus, however. They don’t call their leaders “whips” for nothing.

There are unified stands for principle, and there are unified stands for obstinacy, but the difference has vaporized in Congress. Standing together against the rights of immigrant children seems obstinate to me, regardless of the “higher causes” invoked, and 26 Republicans agreed with me.

Those twenty-six are a sign of “hearing a different drummer,” as Henry David Thoreau eloquently declared. The drummer is not the Majority Leader or the Party Chairman, but the drummer of sincere conviction. We would have a different Congress if all listened to that drummer, both Republican and Democrat.