It is sometimes said that politics involves the art of compromise. This does not mean that in politics one cannot have principles and stick to them but that at some point if there is a clash of principles, then there may be no means of resolution within the system other than having one or both sides back down, at least partially. This is because when it comes to the decisions of certain political institutions, there is no supra-arbiter to decide who wins and who loses. The contesting parties themselves have to work things out. This can be contrasted with (say) civil disputes between two parties where there is always recourse to an external entity like the courts that can step in and decide the issue.
This was perfectly illustrated in the vote for the Speaker of the US House of Representatives. The rules under which it operates created a box whose remarkable rigidity only became apparent when it went into operation this time. The rules said that the first order of operation had to be the election of the Speaker and that the Speaker had to be elected by a majority of the 435 members present and voting. Those members who were absent or voted ‘present’ or abstained were not counted. In a two-party system in which each side puts up one candidate and where the vote is along party lines, there is no problem in that the party that has the majority will always have its candidate win. And that is what usually happens.
The problem is if the majority party has a faction (whose number exceeds the party’s majority) that opposes its own nominee and refuses to vote for them and votes for various other people instead, because then no one will get the required majority. In theory, as long as the parties remain entrenched and refuse to change their views, the impasse could have continued indefinitely. According to the rules, there is no way to resolve this by appealing to any external body. The main way to get a result is for the members of the majority party to compromise among themselves on a candidate, which is what eventually happened. There are other options such as involving the minority party agreeing to vote for the majority party candidate under some kind of power-sharing agreement but those would be more extreme and unlikely to happen. But the need for some compromise is unavoidable.
Of course, creators of the original rules could have anticipated and forestalled this by (say) inserting a rule that if no Speaker is elected after a certain number of votes, the next vote would decide the winner by a plurality. This would give the majority party nominee an enormous advantage because then the holdouts would have to vote for them or risk the leader of the minority party becoming Speaker. There would be no reason for the majority party leader to compromise. I presume that it was this desire to force a compromise that caused the drafters of these rules to write them as they did. They assumed that the desire to have the government function would force the parties involved to arrive at some sort of compromise, as indeed eventually happened.
What surprises me is that what happened last week has not happened more frequently in the past. After all, there have been times when there were more than two parties represented in Congress and it was possible that no single party obtained a majority, though it did not happen. And there have been times, such as leading up to the Civil Rights era, when Democrats had conservative, mostly Southern factions known as Dixiecrats, also known as ‘Boll Weevils’, who later morphed into what are now known as ‘Blue Dogs’. So why did not those divisions, which were actually based on major policy disagreements, not lead to the kinds of impasse we saw last week, where it was not clear exactly what the divisions in the GOP were over?
It is hard to know for sure but my speculation is that in those former times, while people disagreed strongly over policy, they saw government as a vehicle for implementing their preferred policies. They did not see government as an evil entity in its own right that we would be better off without. The ‘government is the problem’ rhetoric that was promoted by Ronald Reagan caught fire even though he and his party had no real intention of getting rid of it because, let’s face it, government has been very good for the military-industrial-corporate complex. Being anti-government was a good vote-catching slogan for conservative politicians but they did not really want to get rid of it.
Fast-forward to the present where that anti-government sentiment has grown to the extent that there are people in the GOP who seem to believe that government truly is evil and are quite willing to shut it down. The vote for the Speaker is the most convenient weapon for doing that. By denying a successful Speaker vote, they essentially risked stopping the government from functioning altogether. And unlike the radicals of the past, they were comfortable with it, at least up to a point.
This time that problem was averted, albeit after a prolonged and messy fight within the GOP. But what of the next time? The people who think that shutting down the government is a good idea are still there. Where will their willingness to do so lead?
At least one Speaker was elected by a plurality. In 1855 there was a 3 way split and nobody could win for 2 months. The solution was to change the rules temporarily to allow a winner by plurality.
I don’t know about the exact mechanics at the time but the Constitution requires only that the House select a Speaker. The rule about first order of business being selecting a Speaker is only in the House rules. Rules that the House is free to change whenever they want.
With all due respect Mano, I think you are miss-reading the situation.
The 20 far-right conservatives are not interested in dismantling the federal government. They want to remove the restrictions the federal government puts on people who already have power and the laws and regulations the federal government has placed on business. They want the federal government to work for them, and to use the power of the federal government to increase their personal power and wealth. The rest is just window-dressing to convince people to vote for them. If they ever get to the position where they can retain power without requiring citizens to vote for them, they will stop even those activities.
Look at their actions…
They are going to eliminate the House Ethics Committee. This will help prevent exposure of their actions, and help prevent the public from knowing about the actions of people like George Santos and Matt Gaetz. The transfer of wealth into their pockets will increase simply because of less oversight.
They are going to remove the increased funding for the IRS. This increased funding was designed to help the IRS identify and collect taxes from wealthy people and companies who are claiming fraudulent tax credits, or using other loopholes to avoid paying income taxes. The campaign contributors to the far-right republicans will benefit, and will further line the pockets of the republicans beyond their own immediate benefit.
I expect them to make it harder for the FTC to put impediments on mergers and acquisitions, and it wouldn’t surprise me if some of the limitations on foreign investors buying US businesses for national security issues will be eliminated. Again, this will increase profits.
The upcoming battle over the appropriations acts will probably introduce things like means-testing for social security or other “cost-cutting” actions. The idea of privatizing social security will probably be raised again (which would be a $3+ trillion windfall to the stock brokers, and nothing to citizens). Repealing the ACA, even though it will increase costs of healthcare for the citizens, will probably be on the table. It won’t touch spending which benefits corporations or wealthy people. They will gut the EPA and regulations which require business to manage their pollution or waste.
The current crop of far-right republicans only give lip service to the Norquist pledge. They are not looking to shut down the government, they want to use the power of the government to increase their own power and line their own pockets. That’s the lesson Trump taught them. They are gaining power through the use of ultra-nationalism, racism, and authoritarianism. They are solidifying the power of an elite, which they are (or expect to be) part of. They are appealing to a populist conception of a past “golden-age”. They are fascists. The previous generation of “drown-the-government-in-a-bathtub” republicans is rapidly being replaced by fascists. Regardless of their rhetoric, they don’t want to drain the swamp, they want to own it.
I’ve been saying for years that the big problem currently in American politics is that the appeal to the racist/evangelical mob that started with Nixon and accelerated under Reagan has got to this point because now we’ve been through three generations since the project started, and the people who knew that the whole ‘the government is the problem’ attitude was all a grift and a rallying cry to get people to vote for them have gradually been replaced by the people who grew up with that cry and are pissed off that none of the promises made back in Reagan’s day came true. Which they weren’t going to, because back in Reagan’s day the anti-abortion crusade was just to convince people to vote for them, and they knew that if they followed through they’d have one less lever to use to rile up the mob again.
This is a multi-generational problem, where the people who were upset that the news media’s accurate reporting on Nixon’s crimes got him driven out of office went and set up their own parallel media landscape to trap people in so that it wouldn’t happen again. From early Conservative AM Talk Radio to modern Fox News, it was all a deliberate attempt at locking people into a separate culture that insisted on their way of doing things even in defiance of reality. Locked in by the insistence that the culture that defied reality was the True American culture, toxic macho attitudes and all.
Sadly, it’s probably going to be a multi-generational repair job, assuming that’s even possible at this point.
Part of the problem is the two-party system itself. It breeds contempt for the ‘other’ and it becomes an exercise in us vs. them, and any time “them” wins, that means “we” lose. It’s politics as a football game.
In contrast, if we had multiple viable parties, working with other groups to form a ruling coalition would be standard operating procedure, assuming no single party ever got a majority. You’d have to find areas of agreement in order to get anything done. Further, extreme outliers like today’s GOP would likely be shunned. On the playground, they’d be the ones that no one wants to play with.
That is, I think, a misinterpretation of the situation. The US House here is I think operating very similarly to the UK House of Commons, for both there aren’t actually very many hard ground rules. The Houses themselves determine their own procedures. That’s actually codified into the US constitution I believe, whereas in the UK is “merely” customary. Many of those procedures have such weight of history that they might seem hard rules, but in theory any could be revised or discarded by the agreement of the current session. So “original rules” aren’t really the/a problem.
One of the key things either House has to be able to do is pass resolutions, whether (external) bills or (internal) revisions to its own procedures. The litmus test for being able to get anything done at all is therefore electing the Speaker (US) or Prime Minister (UK)* -- someone who must be able to personally command the confidence of the House as a whole. If they can’t even get that done, what hope for the next supply bill (usually itself considered a confidence bill over here).
[*] Yes the Commons elects a Speaker too who does have a bit of power in terms of bill selection and order of business, but not as much as the Government headed by the PM, and in any case is expected to be non-partisan unlike the US Speaker. And yes, the monarch complicates PM selection a bit, but the end result has to be a successful confidence vote in the Commons.
So you could say: relax the requirements to allow Speaker election by a plurality, but then you’ve just chosen someone who by definition does not have the confidence of the House as a whole, who as a result may not be able to achieve anything and may end up presiding over a series of defeated confidence/supply bills. You might think you’ve solved a problem there, but your just pushed it one vote down the road.
Beware any politician who claims that government is incompetent at doing anything and want you to vote them into office so they can prove it.
Generally, a backroom deal of some kind can be reached, so you still get your wondrous “compromise,” just without all the spectacle.
Surprised you didn’t mention the most recent episode before this one, with the left talking about withholding votes for Pelosi.
Nah, this is just confused I think. There’s no sense in the first place in treating Kevin fucking McCarthy as if he actually stood opposed to all that, which is the implication here. These are all Reaganites of one denomination or another, and that dogma is not really in dispute as far as they’re concerned.
Also, what you should never forget is that, deep down, these people are clowns, and they only know how to thrive in the circus. Thus, their choice is “spectacle,” even when they have basically nothing substantial to fight for.
JM @#1,
They did not change the rules in that case. What they did was arrive at a compromise agreement to take the winner of the plurality and then give that person a majority vote.