This Is How Congress Is Supposed to Be

T he press wants to portray the ongoing speakership election as chaos. What political observers are actually experiencing is a rare vote in Congress where the outcome is not already known in advance. More votes should be this way.

Adding to the purported chaos is the fact that the members of the House are actually in the Capitol, together, at the same time. This, too, is a welcome reprieve from legislative life under the proxy-voting rules Democrats used when they controlled the chamber, supposedly over Covid concerns. It’s also welcome because the House has not been accustomed to assembling all at once for years, pandemic or not.

The rows of chairs in a semicircle before the rostrum under “In God We Trust” that most people envision when they think of Congress are only usually occupied simultaneously during the State of the Union address. The legislative branch has atrophied so much that one of the only times members all get together is when the leader of the executive branch pays them a visit.

What we’re seeing in the House isn’t chaos. It’s what Congress is supposed to be.

The word “congress” comes from the Latin word “congredi,” meaning “to come together.” The point of Congress is for legislators who are independently elected by constituents from separate, geographically defined districts to come together in the Capitol and argue. In the House, those arguments are supposed to be raucous.

The problem is that the people demanding these changes are by and large unserious. Chip Roy (R., Texas) is being serious, but Matt Gaetz (R., Fla.), who has now started voting for Donald Trump as speaker, is not, and Lauren Boebert (R., Colo.) is so ridiculous even Marjorie Taylor Greene (R., Ga.) has had enough. And no one has yet offered a viable alternative to McCarthy who could win over the GOP conference. McCarthy has made numerous concessions that holdouts say they want, and yet they still won’t vote for him.

But nowhere in the Constitution is any level of seriousness required for House members. You only have to be 25 or older, have been a U.S. citizen for seven years, and live in the state you represent. Federalist No. 52 says of the House that “the door of this part of the federal government is open to merit of every description.”

That includes whatever description applies to Gaetz and Boebert. They are exercising their legitimate privileges as duly elected members of Congress. You get to be a troll in the United States House of Representatives. Some Americans are trolls, and they get representation, too. Congressmen have been at this for a very long time. As Dan McLaughlin concluded after surveying a history of raucous speakership battles, “The House may often be a mess, but it’s a very American mess.”

From a political party’s point of view, it may be wise to clamp down on disruptive members. Party leadership has any number of ways of doing so with committee assignments and legislative priorities when in office. At the election stage, there are two major ways to keep the trolls at bay. The first is defeating them in primary elections, by recruiting and funding sounder candidates. The second is by winning a large enough majority that the trolls don’t matter.

McCarthy failed to do either of those things. The GOP has been notoriously tolerant of shenanigans from members in safe GOP districts. And McCarthy’s leadership in the last election cycle failed to deliver the majority the GOP should have gotten, given that the incumbent Democratic president is unpopular and responsible for a variety of policy failures, and his party was facing the voters for the first time after his election.

Now McCarthy has to deal with the trolls, and he’s not up to the task. His case to the GOP conference was, “I earned this job,” and he has so far insisted on remaining a candidate. Not enough GOP House members agree with his claim, and they seem content to keep making their feelings known, as many times as the clerk calls the roll.

Part of the reason the GOP doesn’t have a majority as large as it should was Donald Trump’s endorsements in winnable House races that ended up handing seats to Democrats because Trump’s preferred Republican nominees were unpalatable to the general electorate. Instead of foreseeing that possibility, McCarthy attached himself to Trump at the hip and, even after seeing the ill effects of Trump’s actions, remains so affixed. He continued touting his endorsement from Trump and urging GOP House members to vote for him. They’re ignoring him.

Which is good. It should not matter in the slightest who Donald Trump thinks the speaker should be. He’s a proven election loser, but more fundamentally, he’s not a House member. The speakership contest is a constitutionally mandated decision that lies solely in House members’ hands.

The House is not in chaos right now. The House is acting like a legislature. We’re so used to seeing it act like a servant to the executive or like a stage for cable-news hits that we’ve forgotten what a legislature looks like. As Yuval Levin wrote, it would be preferable if this legislative behavior was in pursuit of something more worthwhile. But Congress has to start somewhere to regain its legislative capabilities, and this contest, despite all its nonsense, is a start.