I’ve found it pretty hard to get alarmed about the fascinating tussle over the House speakership in recent days.
For one thing, the whole spectacle is just catnip for political junkies, and especially for Congress junkies like myself. The House has no rules until a speaker is elected, and among the rules it doesn’t have are the rules governing what the C-SPAN cameras can show on the floor. The good folks at C-SPAN have made ample use of this opportunity by giving us a real glimpse of what things look like on the floor when something is really going on in the House — focusing on groups of members engaged in heated arguments and showing the kinds of easy cross-partisan conversations that we’re supposed to think just never happen anymore. I have some problems with C-SPAN (particularly in committee hearings), but this week it has been glorious, almost enough to make me nostalgic for my time as a House staffer. Almost.
But more importantly, we have seen some real applications of factional leverage intended to drive some institutional change. That’s not all we have seen, of course. A fair number of the 20 members who have opposed Kevin McCarthy’s bid for speaker are engaged in a circus act intended to build their personal brands as rogue outsider troublemakers. They got into this fight without a plan for getting out. And in some cases, they seem to have gotten into Congress without any desire to be part of anything that might be called governing. They want to stand outside and to the right of whatever is happening and complain about it to a camera. They, therefore, see their “no” votes on McCarthy as ends and not means, so they are ultimately not in a position to advance any substantive goal by what they’re doing. Some are even just engaged in a personal vendetta. But by no means are all 20 in that kind of category. There’s a very big difference between Matt Gaetz and Chip Roy — the latter being one of the House’s sharpest and most institution-minded members.
You can see that in what is reportedly a set of reforms offered by Kevin McCarthy in the latest round of negotiations with the more serious among the 20.
The Washington Post describes it this way:
In a major allowance to the hard-right Republicans, McCarthy offered to lower from five to one the number of members required to sponsor a resolution to force a vote on ousting the speaker — a change that the California Republican had previously said he would not accept.
McCarthy also expressed a willingness to place more members of the staunchly conservative House Freedom Caucus on the House Rules Committee, which debates legislation before it’s moved to the floor.
And he relented on allowing floor votes to institute term limits on members and to enact specific border policy legislation.
The first of these — bringing the threshold for motions to vacate the chair back down to just one member, so that anyone can call a vote on the speaker at any time — is getting the most attention. The Post describes it “a major allowance” to his opponents. But I don’t think this is actually a particularly important concession at all. If you oppose a speaker of your own party, you wouldn’t move to call a vote on a motion to vacate unless you thought it would prove that the speaker lacks support. Otherwise, you’d end up demonstrating the speaker’s strength and so doing the opposite of what you want. That means you wouldn’t move to vacate if you were not pretty confident that a large number of your fellow members want you to. The effective threshold for calling a vote is, therefore, much higher than one member, or five members, regardless of where the formal threshold is. So this just isn’t a very important change.
Bringing a border plan or term limits up for a vote isn’t much a of concession either. No Freedom Caucus priority is likely to pass the Senate, so even if they were to pass the House, these would be essentially symbolic votes. Offering them now leaves the next speaker one less symbolic concession to make during some later impasse, but in itself, there’s not much to it.
But seats on the Rules Committee are another matter. That committee essentially controls access to the floor, debate timing and rules, and opportunities for amendments. It, therefore, has enormous influence over what gets put before the House and how. The Rules Committee is very tightly controlled by the majority party, and in recent decades it has been very tightly controlled by the speaker. Republicans will probably have roughly ten seats on that committee in this Congress, and Democrats will probably have about four, a mirror image of the arrangement in the last Congress. It has been reported that McCarthy is willing to give Freedom Caucus members or supporters four of those ten Republican seats. That would be an enormous and highly significant concession and one with real consequences for the operation of the House.
But the narrowness of the Republican majority in the House means that those consequences are likely to look like even less getting done rather than like Freedom Caucus priorities getting advanced. Republicans don’t have much of a legislative agenda, don’t have the numbers to work out meaningful legislation that might also have a chance in the Senate, and don’t have the margins to negotiate much with Democrats in the House. So the power the Freedom Caucus would get with four seats on the Rules Committee is largely a power to stop more.
This is how they themselves seem to be thinking about it. Last night, a group of reporters asked Chip Roy what he was after, and he said it was all about “empowering us to stop the machine in this town from doing what it does.” That machine won’t do much in the next two years, for good or bad, and if that’s what these members are after, then you’d have to say they will succeed — whether McCarthy survives or not.
Congress probably wouldn’t have done all that much anyway, of course, given the narrow margins in both houses. And as a practical matter, the added power to stop the machine will be most significant when it comes to a debt-ceiling fight — which was also always going to be a huge challenge in this Congress. If they want to see the debt ceiling raised, the administration and congressional Democrats need to think now about how to avoid making it the subject of a pointed confrontation that would leave Republicans without any room to give ground. That’s not at all how the Democrats seem to be thinking about it at the moment, though, so a breach of the debt ceiling is an all-too-real possibility. That’s the most significant predictable systemic risk of the coming year, and if either party thinks it can just blame it on the other and win the day, it is dreaming.
Even if the spoils of the speaker fight aren’t transformative, though, and even while its conclusion remains uncertain, its contours already offer an important lesson. If the members opposing McCarthy end up with seats on the Rules Committee, they will have shown that applying pressure in vulnerable moments can create opportunities for structural change in the House. They don’t seem to agree on a broad vision of what such change should look like. But a faction of members who did share such a vision could really advance some significant and much-needed reforms — of the budget process, the committee system, the role of the leadership, and more.
The history of the Congress has been shaped by periods of frustration that are ultimately broken by bursts of reform. It’s hard to shake the feeling that such a burst, although it’s not yet here, is imminent. But it will take a little more frustration to get there, and this Congress looks likely to provide it.