Speaker Mike Johnson’s Challenge: The Battle Between Ideology and Governing Realities

(Originally published in The Messenger 10/26/23) 

The election (at long last) of backbencher Mike Johnson (R-La.) as the new Speaker of the House will do little to reverse a trend of divisions within the Republican House conference that have translated into a drastically weakened speakership. 

Many casual observers of House politics assume that a powerful speaker, corralling his or her own party, containing the minority, while standing up to the Senate and White House is the historical norm. In actuality, that kind of speaker has been a rarity in the last century. Even legendary speakers like Sam Rayburn (D-Texas) and Tip O’Neill (D-Mass.) ran a House in which the bulk of power resided in the committees and especially in chairmen, which is why historians regard the period 1910-1994 as the “committee system.”

For two decades prior to that time, speakers played an outsized role, naming chairmen, assigning committee slots, and determining the floor schedule. Reforms imposed by Speaker Thomas Reed (R-Maine) in 1889 concentrated power in the speaker’s hands until a bipartisan revolt in 1910 against the authoritarianism of Speaker Joseph Cannon (R-Ill.). Much of the power was devolved to chairmen who were selected by seniority rather than fealty to the speaker. The decades of domination of chairmanships by hyper-conservative Dixiecrats finally provoked the long-simmering reformers’ revolt in 1974 that replaced some chairmen, subjected all of them to caucus approval, and returned significant power to the elected leadership.

During the late 1980s, as partisanship in the House was ramping up significantly, Speaker Jim Wright (D-Texas) imposed some of the managerial discipline that had earned predecessors like Reid and Cannon the nickname “Czar.” And when Wright’s Republican tormentor, Newt Gingrich of Georgia, became the first GOP speaker in 40 years, he further centralized power in his office, recognizing that narrowing party margins in the House required greater intra-party discipline to steer legislation through the convoluted congressional process.

The return of the strong speaker was firmly established with the ascent of Nancy Pelosi in 2007. Although she enjoyed larger margins than her Republican predecessors, there were significant factional disagreements within the party — from the left (anti-Iraq War, pro-single payer health care), from activists, and from more moderate Blue Dogs and pro-business New Democrats. Passage of major legislation, from TARP to health care, necessitated the exact set of skills that Pelosi possessed to meld her party’s factions to overcome nearly unanimous Republican opposition, making her the most dominant speaker in a century.

The strong model began to wither after Republicans regained the majority in 2010. Dozens of newly-elected Tea Party activists were skeptical of their own leaders, whom they suspected were prepared to cut deal with Democrats to avoid government shutdowns or massive tax increases. Recognizing the deep fissures within his own party, incoming Republican Speaker John Boehner, of Ohio, confided to me that “in six months, I’ll be more popular in your caucus than in my own.” Boehner de-emphasized his role in directing his fractious and fragmented conference. “I try to stay out of … all the issues” he explained, insisting that running the House “doesn’t need the heavy hand of the Speaker all over everything.”   

Boehner was wrong. The sharp ideological divide, small margin between the parties and minimal crossing of the aisle meant Pelosi-style discipline was needed, not hands-off management. Factionalism took deep root in the GOP conference and exponentially exploded with the ascent of the Freedom Caucus and the election of the blatant anti-establishment Donald Trump in 2016. Boehner was overwhelmed by extremists unwilling to countenance his collaboration with  Democrats — and his successor, Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), faced the same crisis of ungovernability.

In his maiden speech on Wednesday, the previously invisible new House speaker declared decentralization of his power as a central goal of his administration. A junior member of the House first elected in 2016, Johnson might be excused for not knowing the operational weaknesses of recent GOP speakers. Needless to say, if Johnson follows through on his decision, every subgroup within the Republican conference will believe itself empowered to interfere, obstruct and prevaricate whenever its interests are compromised, as they invariably will be.

The debacle visited upon Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and House Republicans over the past month is the logical outcome of this progression of the GOP conference over the past two decades. Indeed, the challenges to House leaders has only become worse because so many members can appeal to the activist base for primary votes and online solicitations, allowing them to ignore the kind of leverage the leadership historically could impose on recalcitrant legislators.

The underlying challenges that have bedeviled recent Republican speakers will soon be visited upon Johnson: the conflict between the ideological rigidity it took to win the speakership and the realities of governing that compel compromise with a Democratic Senate and president. Such bows to reality cost Boehner, Ryan and McCarthy crucial support and, ultimately, their jobs.

Unless the new speaker is prepared to oppose a continuing resolution and trigger a massive and costly government shutdown of indeterminate duration, he will find himself with the same dilemma.

In the meantime, it is probably a good idea for Johnson not to hang too many pictures on the walls in his new office.

A Path Forward?

When celebrating a victory during his career as a wrestling coach, a vocation he shared with former disgraced speaker Dennis Hastert, Rep. Jim Jordan was said to break into “an odd victory strut, marching in a Zombielike circle, straight-legged, arms aloft.” That is doubtless how he envisioned the members of the Republican conference marching him up to the top of the House of Representatives dais to present him with the speaker’s gavel. 

This time, however, there was no strutting as Jordan was thrice rejected by his faction-ridden colleagues. “I’m concerned about where we go from here,” said deposed speaker Kevin McCarthy, who demonstrated yet again his mediocre political skills by backing the volatile Jordan. “It’s astonishing to me.”

Neither McCarthy nor anyone else should be “astonished” by the Republicans’ capacity for undercutting their own leadership. Conservative Republican speakers since Newt Gingrich have been confronted by a growing cohort of obdurate, extremist colleagues who disdain the very institution in which they serve and who have no particular interest in performing even the most basic tasks of serving in the majority, including the timely selection of a speaker. 

For the better part of a decade, the Republican extremists steadily expanded their influence in the conference, helping the GOP win the House majority in 1994 for the first time since 1952. A decade and a half later, the emerging Tea Party yielded enough victories to oust the Democratic majority with an anti-establishment message that targeted the Republican leadership, too. As the Tea Party evolved into the Freedom Caucus, the radical tilt accelerated, receiving an enormous influx of energy (and legitimization) from the Trump victory of 2016. 

This sizable group has been more interested in obeisance to anti-government dogma than in actually governing. For years, its leaders were content to fulminate against liberal Democratic leaders like Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi than formulate their own legislative agenda. In 2020, the party didn’t even bother to fashion a national platform, a first in modern history. With the departure of their favorite targets from Democratic leadership roles, the MAGA Republicans have been exposed as the disorganized nihilists they are. Moreover, many of their favorite legislative targets have become too popular to attack – when was the last concerted effort to repeal the Affordable Care Act —  leaving them to create issue out of whole cloth: Democrats favor “open borders” or Joe Biden takes money from China. 

Their lone achievement in the majority, other than swelling the deficit by $2 trillion, has been to accomplish what the January 6^th insurrectionists failed to do: a prolonged shutdown of the operations of the Congress at the exact moment when American leadership is desperately needed internationally. All that is missing is the Viking helmet.

The novice legislators now announcing their candidacies for speaker would have generated guffaws a couple of weeks ago for suggesting they should be entrusted with leading The Peoples’ House. Even if one can, briefly, win the support of 217 of their colleagues to be elected speaker, none has the experience to unify what has become a woefully fractured conference let alone successfully represent the House’s position in negotiations with the Senate and White House. That failure diminishes not only the hapless Republicans but the House as an institution as well.

If the Republicans hit the stone wall yet again this week, an effort might be made to entice a few Democrats to support a supposed “moderate” or “institutional” candidate on a temporary or  permanent basis. Democrats should be very cautious about being lured into that unholy alliance. Right now, Republicans own responsibility for every failure of Congress to act. Should Democrats provide the crucial votes to elect a Republican speaker, they will share that responsibility for every decision the GOP majority makes for the next 14 months, and you can bet very few of those decisions will involve good-faith concessions to the Democratic majority. 

If Democrats want to extend a helping hand to their bumbling GOP brethren, they might consider insisting on concessions to ensure their assistance in ending the speaker nightmare is not rewarded with a hyperpartisan Republican agenda including: (1) any spending cuts beyond those already enacted must be limited to individual appropriations bills, not forced in partisan Continuing Resolutions that risk government shutdowns; (2) a guarantee that amendments chosen by Democrats will be made in order on all floor legislation; (3) a suspension of Jim Jordan’s impeachment charade until the whole House votes to initiate such an investigation (as McCarthy had promised); (4) additional seats on House committees to reflect the actual ratio of the parties in the full House.

This package of concessions to Democrats may represent a Godfather-like offer Republicans can’t accept.  Agreeing would almost certainly generate a MAGA primary challenge. Yet offering such a solution would position Democrats as being the reasonable party to the 67% of Americans who want a speaker elected quickly and demonstrate a willingness to work on a bipartisan basis if Republicans would only agree to manage the House in a fair and balanced manner. If Republicans can’t get their act together quickly and the paralysis continues, it might be an offer worth extending.

Why Can’t Republicans Govern the House?

The implosion of the Republican House under former speaker Kevin McCarthy and the repeated failures to command a majority to elect his successor is a humiliating admission of the incapacity of the current GOP majority to govern. This mortifying collapse is the end result of a decade and more of the Republicans political decomposition into dysfunction. The thought that a snarling partisan like Jim Jordan was viewed by the overwhelming majority of his conference as the ticket out of the current netherworld confirms the bankruptcy of the party and its remarkable obeisance to Donald Trump. Electing a new speaker, as they eventually will, or passing a slapdash continuing resolution is unlikely to change this historic arc of the heterodox skeleton of a party the GOP has become, and just in time for Halloween. 

Kevin McCarthy bears some of the blame, of course, because in his relentless, craven effort to secure the speakership that had eluded him in 2015, he not only welcomed novice extremists into the GOP conference, but also handed them the dynamite, fuses and matches needed to symbolically reduce the GOP to rubble. By kowtowing to Trump and making repeated concessions to the lunatic wing of his conference (the ones former speaker John Boehner has castigated as “false prophets” and other unprintable names), McCarthy allowed a tiny fraction of his colleagues to intimidate the party and destroy his speakership.

But the problem is not simply McCarthy or Jordan or other “false prophets” in the conference. There is something intrinsically flawed about the modern Republican party, especially in the House, which leaves it with a chronic handicap in exercising the responsibilities of the majority. An influential and growing cohort of the party is not only indifferent to lectures about the obligation of the majority to govern but also disdains the institutions of government and views obstruction and legislative impasse as effective ways of demonstrating the futility of depending on Washington or Congress to solve the nation’s problems.

This is, of course, the legislative equivalent of the old court room ploy: a person who murdered his parents throws himself on the mercy of the court because he is an orphan. In the case of House Republicans, they decry the ineffectiveness of government – whether that is passing basic appropriations legislation, confirming military promotions or addressing serious policy issues like gun violence and immigration reform – while creating a hellish climate and utilizing procedural obstructions that prevent Congress from functioning.

This goes back a ways. Back in 2011 and 2012, John Boehner was dealing with those he described as “noisemakers” and “knuckleheads,” the Tea Party wave that delivered the majority to Republicans and the speakership to Boehner.  (Thanks to the anti-establishmentarian bent of this group of House freshmen, Boehner confided to me, he would soon be more popular among Democrats than among his own conference members.) After resisting demands to allow a government shutdown and then cutting budget deals with President Obama and Democrats, in 2013 he finally acceded and the result was a 16 day shutdown that cost taxpayers $24 billion. Two years later, the tanned, merlot-drinking chain smoker, discouraged with the increasing unmanageability of his conference, cut another inevitable budget deal with Democrats and quit Congress altogether, eventually becoming a lobbyist for marijuana legalization (a policy he had opposed while in Congress).  

His successor, Paul Ryan, similarly negotiated budget plans with Democrats to avoid shutdowns, but proved incapable of passing any of the GOP’s extremist legislative goals — cutting Social Security and Medicare, weakening food stamps and Medicaid and repealing the Affordable Care Act – and his speakership ended in failure in 2018 having achieved one central goal: a massive tax cut that showered 83% of the benefits on the wealthiest 1 percent (while ballooning the national debt by $2,000,000,000,000). 

The threadlike Republican majority that remains in search of a speaker is even less governable than the ones that drove Boehner and Ryan from the jobs. As they learned (like Gingrich before them in the 1990s), anyone taking the gavel during a period of divided government is inevitably going to have to cut a deal with the other party or face a protracted shutdown that will end with a compromise. Early in her first speakership, Nancy Pelosi cut unpalatable deals with George W. Bush that kept funding the Iraq war her members hated and she had vowed to end. In her second speakership, she governed effectively with a two to four vote margin not simply because of her iron fist but because Democrats, even the most moderate among them, need government to achieve their goals and so make compromises to build confidence in government so voters will entrust them with expanding upon those earlier policies. But Republicans, increasingly disdain the government they are given the majority to govern and conference members are far less susceptible to arguments about putting aside policy disagreements to make the institution function. 

 If the next GOP candidate for speaker can provide a credible answer to the question of how he will govern without accepting the same pragmatic concessions that forced McCarthy, Ryan and Boehner from office, the country undoubtedly would appreciate hearing it. 

But there is no answer except to engage in the negotiations and concessions that are inherent in the legislative process, particularly when you don’t control very much of that process. “We campaign in poetry,” the saying goes, “but we govern in prose.” Demanding no concessions gets the cheers going in the MAGA rallies but in reality, it makes no sense. It is a pure Orwellian nightmare that chaos is order and failure is success. But that is the Republican gameplan. No wonder finding a unifying leader is such a challenge.

McHenry’s Misfire

 “No free government, or the blessings of liberty, can be preserved,” Revolutionary patriot Patrick Henry declared, “but by a firm adherence to justice, moderation, temperance, frugality, and virtue.” In his first decision as interim speaker, interim speaker Patrick McHenry decided to forgo such wisdom and opted instead for an act of juvenile puerility.

One might have thought McHenry, who was designated by repudiated Kevin McCarthy as a short-term replacement, would have attempted to reduce the level of antagonism pervading the House and send a symbolic message of reconciliation – of “moderation, temperance, and virtue” – to demonstrate an interest in restoring civility among the waring elements of his own conference and with the minority Democrats he will need to govern. Something that didn’t cost much but that sent a clear signal that the House needed to bind its festering wounds and find a way of going forward together, if not in total harmony. Maybe lunch in the Speaker’s Dining Room.

Fergettaboutit.

McHenry’s very best idea for setting the tone of his sure-to-be-brief reign, which probably won’t even net him a miniportrait in the Speakers Gallery, was to boot Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi and the unrelentingly collaborative (and former Majority Leader) Steny Hoyer from their Capitol hideaway offices. McHenry decided to announce this inspired piece of hyper-partisan madness on the day Pelosi was in San Francisco preparing for the funeral of longtime Sen. Dianne Feinstein – and therefore not even on the floor to vote to give McCarthy the boot.

OK, a bit of explanation and history here. 

The speaker (even the interim speaker, it seems) controls the rooms on the House side of the Capitol. Unlike in the case of the Senate, very few non-leadership members are given one of these rooms, which unsurprisingly are in high demand. Typically, former leaders like Pelosi have left the Congress and so are not considered for such positions, but given her status (the first woman and fifth longest-serving speaker in history), McCarthy had allotted her and Hoyer (famous for his unrelenting efforts to find common ground with Republicans) small offices.

When she was speaker, Pelosi had agreed to give a particularly lavish set of rooms to her predecessor, Dennis Hastert, while he remained in the House. She didn’t have to do that; but it was an act of respect and courtesy that surprised no one who knows Pelosi and the high regard she has for quaint ideas like “respect” and “courtesy.” (Hastert soon left the House and Pelosi reclaimed the rooms; Hastert later moved on to a far less attractive prison cell, but that’s another story.) Pelosi also gave rooms to close allies like George Miller and Chris Van Hollen, as well as to John Dingell, in respect for his decades of service and medical conditions that made running back and forth to his Rayburn Building office a challenge.

Room allocations can be difficult. In 2007, Hoyer demanded a large set of rooms as Majority Leader, equivalent to those occupied by a predecessor, Tom DeLay, whom many viewed as the real power in the House during most of the Hastert speakership. Pelosi could have said “no” and pointed out that she needed the space, but she gave Hoyer what he wanted, to the consternation of some of her staff who crammed into the remaining offices. Later, the Appropriations Committee lost some of the rooms it had long held in the Capitol, which wasn’t terribly popular with its members. But speakers have to make decisions that build alliances and allocate limited resources to facilitate the operations of the House, even if that means disappointing supporters.

Not interim Speaker McHenry. He decided the very best signal he could send, on the first day of his abbreviated tenure, was to insult Pelosi, Hoyer and House Democrats for refusing to rescue the failing Republican speaker who had just blamed them for risking a government shutdown (although they had provided the votes to pass the continuing resolution), ignored House rules that assured all members time to review legislation, and lied about seeking full House approval before initiating a meritless impeachment investigation of President Biden. Good luck with that.

Those who have been around Nancy Pelosi know well her typical response when some smarty pants thinks they have landed a crushing blow against her. While the reporters await an angry rejoinder, the Speaker would reach up and pretend to indifferently flick a dust particle off her shoulder. Deprive her of her Capitol office as punishment for a vote she didn’t cast and that Republicans couldn’t manage? I can see her flicking from here.

The End of McCarthyism in the House

House Republicans have made history, mainly with the votes of House Democrats, by ousting a sitting speaker, ostensibly because he committed the heresy of worshipping at the forbidden altar of compromise. Only 4 percent of Republicans voted to oust Kevin McCarthy (CA) for violating the terms under which they warily granted him the gavel in January, but that was enough, in combination with every voting Democrat, to send the movers into the Speaker’s office. 

McCarthy’s fate was sealed when Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (NY) advised his Democratic colleagues that they should leave the onus of determining the speaker’s fate with his own members. After all, Democrats had their own candidate for speaker, Mr. Jeffries himself. Selecting the speaker is the exclusive purview of the House majority, and that is the Republicans. Don’t mess around in the other guy’s sandbox.

For Democrats and Republicans alike, McCarthy had proven an unreliable ally over the past nine months, walking away from negotiated agreements like the debt ceiling spending caps and the promise to secure a House vote before launching an impeachment investigation of President Biden (which exploded on the launch pad last week). McCarthy is moving quickly to rewrite history to make himself look better than the record warrants; at his post-deposal press conference, he dared a reporter to name any examples of his having misled colleagues. The press obligingly recall his walking away from the debt ceiling agreement and the impeachment pledge.

History suggests the process of replacing him will be painful.  One need only look back to the anguish of John Boehner (OH) as he relinquished the gavel, after having been savaged for several years by the Tea Party faction of his own conference. Paul Ryan (WI), the choice of most House Republicans, shied away from the honor of replacing Boehner, knowing he would face the same unrealistic demands from the conference’s extremist wing that drove his predecessor  into retirement. “All of this crap swirling around was going to make it tough for me to cut any deals with Obama as the new House Speaker,” Boehner recalled. His task was immeasurably  complicated by the “lunatics,” “anarchists” and “legislative terrorists” he described as populating the GOP conference.  

Using procedures developed after 9/11 to ensure the continuity of government, McCarthy designated Patrick McHenry (NC) as Speaker Pro Tem to keep the House functioning. But that is a short term solution while everyone sorts out what comes next. The Constitution is very clear that “the House” chooses the speaker, not the outgoing speaker, so this arrangement will only be in place while the Republicans figure out whom to offer up as a candidate. The odds are overwhelming that the successor will suffer the same fate that Boehner and his successor, Ryan, did: dysfunctional management of the House that resulted in a Democratic victory.

If the new speaker wins Republican support – and they would need nearly all those eight Republicans who voted to oust McCarthy – they doubtless would have promised to take a hard line against compromising with Democrats, which is what did in McCarthy and Boehner. But refusal to negotiate assures inaction on pending appropriations bills while edging closer to the shutdown precipice in November; ultimately, in divided government, you have no choice but to engage with the other party. McCarthy tried to explain that reality to his hardliners and tonight, he is the former speaker.

If Gaetz has an alternative strategy, other than shutting down the government until January, 2025, this would probably be the time to share it with his Republican colleagues. But don’t bother talking to Democrats; as today’s votes demonstrated, Hakeem Jeffries has no intention of saving Republicans from themselves.