For those who heard it once this week you most likely heard it 100 times: The House has not did not elect a speaker on the primary ballot in 100 years.
For generations it was the definition of party loyalty for each member of every party to vote for its nominee for speaker. In actual fact for 50 years after World War II, not a single stray vote was solid for anyone other than the 2 major party nominees.
On several occasions since 1997, we now have seen a number of members of the bulk party voting “present” or voting for somebody apart from their party nominee. However it has not prevented that nominee’s election as speaker.
But starting with the primary ballot for speaker on Tuesday, at the very least 19 Republicans voted for somebody apart from their party nominee, Kevin McCarthy of California. That meant McCarthy didn’t have enough votes to be speaker, and neither did anyone else.
For Congress watchers, this telegraphs that something is historically amiss on Capitol Hill, or at the very least throughout the party running one among its chambers. And that was definitely the message from the House the last time it had this much trouble electing a speaker – a protracted and eventful century ago.
Still, a distant mirror can show us things, and even across 10 a long time of profound change, there are parallels between this week’s meltdown on the outset of the 118th Congress and the fiasco that occurred within the 68th.
Then, as now, the party with the House majority was the Republican Party. Each times, the party’s nominee for speaker was someone who had been within the job or in line for the job for several years.
But in each cases, the outcomes of the newest November elections had been somewhere between disappointing and devastating, leaving the party clinging to majority control. That created anxiety and aggravated long-festering internal disputes over rules and procedures, including the powers of individual committee chairs.
Consequently, a restive faction throughout the party was in revolt and able to take it out on the party’s nominee for speaker.
This week, the goal was McCarthy.
In 1923, it was Frederick H. Gillett of Massachusetts.
In neither case had the nominee himself been especially controversial. Each had risen through the ranks, a survivor of earlier leadership upheavals, generally compatible with the party’s broad rank and file.
But having reached the highest of the leadership ladder, these men represented a celebration establishment regarded with hostility by a potent faction of the party. They became the embodiment of that faction’s grievances.
Here’s how things unfolded for Gillett
Gillett was a 72-year-old Boston Brahmin with a Harvard law degree who was serving his fifteenth term within the House. He had first grasped the large gavel years earlier, after Republicans seized the House majority within the 1918 midterms the month World War I ended.
Two years after that, Gillett’s party rode to an enormous majority on the identical postwar wave that swept Warren G. Harding into the White House in 1920. The party of Lincoln was gaining ground in a lot of the country and starting a decade of Washington domination within the White House and Congress alike.
However the transient era of the Harding administration stalled the party’s momentum. The economy was still recovering from its postwar recession and labor unrest was widespread, including major strikes by coal miners and railroad staff.
The House had also brought criticism on itself in 1921 and 1922 by refusing to just accept the official U.S. Census of 1920. That renewal of the decennial study documented how immigration had exploded and, for the primary time, more Americans were living in urban areas than rural.
These controversies, coupled with the standard swing of the midterm political mood led to Harding’s GOP losing 75 House seats and a net of 6 Senate seats in 1922. It was a worse shellacking than Barack Obama or some other president of the past 4 a long time would experience in his first midterm.
The 68th Congress was officially in office as of March 1923, but under the congressional schedule still in use at the moment, it didn’t convene its first session until late that fall. Within the meantime, Harding died in August and was succeeded by his vp, Calvin Coolidge. The vote for speaker finally commenced on December 5. (The present schedule, with a January 3 starting date, was adopted as a part of the twentieth Amendment in 1933.)
Gillett’s majority in 1923 was barely larger than Republicans have now, and he found it difficult to corral the factions inside his party. He got just 197 votes on the primary ballot, even fewer than McCarthy got in his first test this week.
On that first ballot, the Democratic nominee Finis J. Garrett of Tennessee got 195 votes and two other Republicans got a complete of 23. But the important thing obstacle for Gillett was a bloc of his party members who called themselves “progressives,” the term utilized by Theodore Roosevelt in his third-party “Bull Moose” bid for president in 1912.
Seventeen House members who identified as progressives (The Latest York Times called them “radical progressives”) would solid their first-round speaker votes for Henry A. Cooper of Wisconsin. Cooper was a former prosecuting attorney from Racine who represented southeastern Wisconsin from 1893 to 1919 and again from 1921 until his death in 1931. Over his long profession, Cooper only lost once, paying a price in 1918 for having opposed U.S. entry into World War I.
Cooper, whose parents had operated a station on the Underground Railroad by which escaped slaves reached freedom, was a longtime ally of Wisconsin’s legendary progressive governor and Sen. Robert “Fighting Bob” LaFollette. When Cooper was opposing Gillett within the House, LaFollette was conducting a smaller-scale revolt against the GOP leaders within the Senate.
Ultimately, nonetheless, Gillett survived. Although the voting continued for days, no clear alternative emerged with any probability of getting a majority. In the long run, he was capable of win over the Cooper voters with the assistance of his No. 2 leader, Nicholas Longworth of Ohio. Widely viewed as Gillett’s heir apparent, Longworth was capable of persuade enough of the progressives that there would the truth is be procedural reforms.
Getting Gillett over the finish line took a complete of nine ballots, and ultimately a few of Cooper’s backers simply voted “present.” The speaker was reelected with just 215 votes. (That was a majority because by then only 414 members were present and voting for a reputation.)
There have been those this week who suggested this may be a model for McCarthy’s strategy as well: Vote, wait, vote again, repeat. Over many votes and ballots, a few of the less zealous members might drift away because the hour grew late or the weekend grew near.
Here’s what has normally happened
Whichever party holds the bulk on the House side of the Capitol typically elects its leader because the speaker on the primary day of the brand new Congress. Each party nominates its leader and the bulk has probably the most votes and prevails, even when a number of members of the bulk party defect or vote “present” or simply don’t show up.
There really is no alternative. And not using a speaker officially in place, the House cannot even swear in its members, let alone do some other business.
That is why the rejection of McCarthy on the primary ballot and beyond was such riveting news. It left open the job that stands second in the road of presidential succession (right after the vp). It left undone the swearing in of the brand new House. And it left hanging the direction of the newly elected House Republican majority within the 118th Congress.
For a few of McCarthy’s critics, a serious motivation has been the decentralization of authority within the chamber. They need less reliance on the leadership and more empowerment of the committee chairs.
Additionally they wanted a rule change that will facilitate the usage of a slightly obscure item of House floor procedure often called “a motion to vacate the chair.” That provision allows a sufficient variety of members to demand a vote on the presiding officer, a threat to switch the speaker.
McCarthy had resisted this as it might essentially put his job on the road on a every day, even hourly, basis. But in his last rounds of attempting to secure votes, he was reported to have given in even on this issue.
The motion to vacate the chair was famously used to take down the autocratic Republican Speaker Joe Cannon of Illinois (the “last of the czars”) in 1910. Cannon had and abused absolute power over committee chairs and assignments, floor procedure and rules for debate. Nobody since has had anything akin to this level of authority.
At the peak of his power, Cannon not only selected all of the committee chairs, he selected all of the members of all of the committees. He was chairman of the Rules Committee and he determined which bills and amendments can be allowed on the ground and which members can be permitted to talk.
One inquiring constituent who asked a member for a replica of the House rules in that era was said to have received an envelope that contained only an image of Joe Cannon.
When Cannon’s high-handed practices had change into intolerable, a coalition of Democratic members and Republican progressives put together the bipartisan majority needed to “vacate the chair.” Cannon remained Speaker but lost most of his powers.
Defeated within the 1912 election, he returned two years later and served several additional terms as a rank and file member. On his last day in office he was featured on the quilt of the primary issue of the brand new Time Magazine (March 3, 1923).
The primary official constructing housing the offices of House members was opened in 1908 and called the House Office Constructing. Later it was called the Old House Constructing. In 1962, it was named for Cannon. It stands as a monument each to the preeminence of the speakership and the impermanence of power.
Copyright 2023 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.
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