I'm repeating myself a lot this week, but let's do it one more time.
The tradition that the minority party doesn't interfere with the majority's election of a Speaker is a strong one—and for good reason. Suppose, for example, that some moderate Republican had the support of 30 other Republicans. In other words, very fringe support. But then Dems threw all their votes to him and he won.
Do we really want to open up that kind of ratfucking as an acceptable norm? Both sides can play, after all. Think hard.
POSTSCRIPT: Maybe we do! It certainly presents some interesting possibilities. But if we go down this path, we should do it with our eyes wide open.
That sounds a bit like politics in a parliamentary democracy. Anyone dissatisfied with being limited to 2 major political parties ought to seriously consider this, although within the American constitutional framework I'm not sure that even this would work out quite so well. That imagined "moderate-supported" Speaker would still have to wrangle votes, after all.
Yeah, I was going to say, it's a tiny step towards parliamentary norms and I'd be 100% OK with that.
This I think is where McCarthy really fell down and missed an opportunity to try something historical. Had he gone to the Dems and said "look, here's the deal--enough of you support me or vote present that I survive this attempt by the crazies, and I'll formally retire the Hastert Rule and start bringing legislation to the floor if it has majority support regardless of party," that would have been a new and possibly very good development in Congress.
Not sure it would have worked, and definitely sure that McCarthy lacked the mental horsepower/interpersonal capital to give it a good faith try, but still, it would be nice if the House freed itself from the strictures of whatever fringe group of Republican nutbags demand simply because their votes are essential to giving the Rs a majority.
McCarthy had the brains to do that, but his id got in the way.
McCarthy had the brains to do that, but his id got in the way.
I don't know. McCarthy's not a total lunatic like Marjorie Taylor Greene, but he's a very conservative, very partisan Republican, and I don't think it's at all clear he possesses a worldview that values any degree of input or participation from the Unconstitutional Socialist Party.
If he thought it would have worked for him to get help from the "Unconstitutional Socialist Party", he certainly would have done it. But he thought the response from the MAGA would be too much to take.
I think he doesn't necessarily see this as a failure - he's still in Congress, and he may be calculating that he can outlast the crazies by being hyperpartisan but not part of the crazy caucus (which he is).
There's no reason for him (from his perspective) to have worked with Democrats on anything - and doing so might have gotten him primaried and losing his seat, which is probably his biggest concern. With his seat, he still has power. Without his seat, he's just another former Congressperson. Given how badly he wanted to be speaker, I'd imagine that being a Congressperson is number 2 on his list of priorities and everything else falls under that.
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I'll formally retire the Hastert Rule and start bringing legislation to the floor if it has majority support regardless of party,"
I may be mistaken, but I think the Hastert Rule is already defunct. That old standard held that legislation would not be considered unless it enjoyed majority support in the Republican conference.
The new rule (not sure what to call it; the McCarthy Rule?) holds that legislation won't be considered unless it can be enacted solely with Republican votes. It's a natural outgrowth of the widespread GOP view that Democrats are a fundamentally illegitimate political party (because they support things forbidden by the Constitution), and therefore possess no moral right to govern when they win elections.
I've always been confused by that very aspect of the "majority of the majority" rule-- supported by a majority of the R caucus, as could be implied, or passed only with R votes? In practice it's been the second, which is really perverse under current circumstances. It's the very rock that the late SS McCarthy foundered on and the reason the R caucus is steaming around rudderless right now.
McCarthy is a liar who made many promises to Dems over the past year that he did not keep so the problem with this scenario is no Democrat would have believed him.
Sadly, that's exactly it. He didn't have the interpersonal capital necessary to get Ds to trust him. He could have, but he built little and squandered more.
Yeah, I was going to say, it's a tiny step towards parliamentary norms and I'd be 100% OK with that.
Ditto. I doubt there's a moderate really worth supporting—someone's whose speakership would be measurably better for the country than a Speakership of Jim Jordan or Marjorie Tayor Greene.
But if this were a possibility, I don't see the harm in making it happen. Indeed, it's surely the responsbility of Democrats to try to bring it about.
I'm not worried about future "intereference" on the part of the GOP next time Democrats have a majority, because I strongly suspect the latter will be able to hold their majority together.
Yes exactly. Parliaments are superior
One possibility (at least theoretically) is for democrats to offer a change in the procedure to elect a Speaker that ensures that there is one, and offer to support a temporary Speaker that will change the rules and resign immediately to do the choosing using the new rules. The new rules should prevent the current absurd that less than 10 members can mess thing up.
An advantage of this idea is that changing the rules for the Speaker doesn't seem to be something that the MAGA can use to primary out a member, so republican members should be able to support it.
The exact rules don't really matter, as long as they make successful choice highly likely. An example of new rules:
Start with 5 round of votes with the same rules as now.
Then:
1. Retsrict the potential candidates pool to persons that got more than X votes in the previous rounds.
2. Each round remove the bottom candidate(s) from the pool.
3. Last candidate to survive is the Speaker.
4. If all remaning candidtaes get the same number of votes, each one of them get o be a Speaker for a short time (A month), and then choose a Speaker again.
It would basically be a coalition government, which doesn't make a lot of sense in a two party system. We could, of course, try to abandon a 2 party system, but that would take some major structural and potentially Constitutional changes to work.
Tranferable vote may achieve this, because it will make sense to vote for candidates which are not of the main parties (other-party candidates) as another choice, so such candidates actually have chance to win.
Currently voting for other-party candidate is highly likely to be a waste of your vote, so the vast majority of voters don't do it, which makes it very difficult for other-parties.
I think it does make sense at this point - because the Republican party has basically broken in two. You have the Magite/Trump/Ratfucker party and a rump of trad republicans. So go after them. Offer some deals. See what happens.
Since there are more than two parties, why would that require constitutional changes?
The position is speaker of the house, not majority leader. One could argue that the constitution not only anticipated but encourages this kind of arrangement.
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A 'moderate' Republican is still a Republican, so what good would it do?
Might as well let them get all the way to the end of their plank.
So there's no difference between Mitt Romney and Matt Gaetz?
Of course there is a difference: Mitt is a Senator.
* rimshot *
There is no Republican Rep who could conceivably be elected Speaker who would be either better or worse than McCarthy. The problem is the party this person would represent. And the chaos in the R party is good for Democrats and let's the country see just how screwed up these people are.
It's been done in several of the statehouses.
Do you really think changing this would make a whit of difference if the Rs saw a chance at that kind of ratfuckery? You trust that Rs wouldn't do that in a heartbeat if they thought it'd help them?
They could. But they haven't yet. We shouldn't be the ones to break that norm. We're supposed to be the good guys, after all.
But the fundamental problem here is not the process of selecting a speaker. The process works just fine for the D's, after all. The problem is that the R caucus is ungovernable. The R's have only a 9-seat majority, which means that if only 5 R's vote against something then it fails. There are more than 5 bomb-throwing fanatics in the R caucus. That's the problem.
The test that confirms a _working_ majority in the Westminster system is usually the budget vote or a standalone confidence motion. In the House, the test that confirms a working majority has been electing a speaker. From about the 1830s until this week the basis for forming a working House majority has been party adherence.
If the party that claims by adherence to have a majority can't elect a speaker, then that basis for forming working majorities has failed and a different one will have to be contrived (whether for this one time or longer is still to be determined). Reaching that point is when Ds negotiate with Rs and get involved in the speaker selection. We're very, very close to that so it isn't too early now for some discreet probing by D leadership (which actually does have its members' respect).
The biggest obstacle to any kind of solution is the R party's stance. All Rs claim they have a majority because of their numbers, but they're not a _working_ majority because of a small faction that wants to rule everything and insists that Rs have to stand on their numerical majority to control everything and everybody. The whole R party has vilified and demonized Ds so effectively that a big proportion of their own voters won't accept any kind of cooperation.
They have earned the hell they're living in. They need to find a way out of it. Tim Miller says it happened once upon a time in Texas when factions of both parties in the lege settled on a compromise speaker. Maybe that's a way to go.
Ds are unified, Rs deeply divided. That's where we start.
Any Republican who enters in good-faith negotiation with a Democrat knows they will be primaried out of their seat by a MAGA cultist. It doesn't matter to team MAGA that the party loses the seat, only that revenge is taken.
And exposes self and family to potentially mortal danger, to boot. Yeah, that's the problem. Although in some states like CA the jungle primary makes the primarying tactic a much longer shot.
But it's what they signed up for and they have to figure something out. The party-label basis for setting up a working majority isn't working now. They either figure out how to make it work or they come up with something that will. Shit gets real fast. This isn't a junior-high playground we're talking about here.
The nature of California's "jungle primary" means that McCarthy is probably less vulnerable to a primary challenge than most R reps.
I think it would help focus the majority's mind. If the D's all vote for the least far-right R, I think the R's would quickly reach consensus about which of their radical nut jobs should be speaker.
Something I don't see nearly as much talk about is that in the scenario Kevin describes, those thirty Republican moderates are dead men walking. They will be immediately expelled from the caucus, denounced by their party and the wider conservative ecosystem, and lose primaries badly.
It used to be that when Republicans were in charge, they'd bring bills to the floor if a majority of their party liked them. Now they'll only bring bills to the floor that will pass with only their party supporting them. That way, small differences in votes between Democrats and Republicans means pushing the bills to an extreme, not to the middle.
The "Main Street Caucus" or whatever their name is could try to be power brokers. If they did that, Republicans would go after their members of that group viciously. Democrats? ...meh....
I think a more traditional thing is for Members (or Senators) to switch who they caucus with. This has happened a fair bit. It could happen in the next month. I still don't see it likely, but as it turns out Tom McClintock (from CA Central Valley) has fronted the possibility, so they are thinking about it.
They should be. They are the party of Trump now, which means they are the party of bad faith. This is poisonous to them, it's eroding their ability to do much of anything. All that bad faith seems like it makes one powerful, and it can for a time. Usually, though, the chickens come home to roost.
It seems like where these suggestions are coming from is a place of deep-seated anger at MAGAs and the House Freedom Caucus. Which I very much feel. Many of the poison pills offered in the last few weeks were anti-trans riders.
That's pretty personal for me. It's also garbage, based on no principle of science, medicine, law, or human decency. So, I'm angry.
AND, I don't think that messing with the other party's speaker selection as a tactical thing, is a good idea at all. It does not produce a stable situation. When somebody such as Jim Jeffords switched parties and handed the Senate to the Democrats, he switched for all purposes. Not as a tactic. Likewise with other switches.
I don't think it will produce any better outcomes. I think it will produce more chaos. Some like chaos, its true, but I don't. I think that one's ability to protect the weak is severely diminished in such situations.
As a practical matter, there's no way a Republican speaker can be elected on the strength of Democratic votes. It may be a nice fantasy, but it's not real and not a way out of this mess. (The reality negates the criticism of Dems for not bailing out McC. Time to move on.)
Imagine D's gave an R 10 votes and made him speaker. What would happen next? The new speaker would be deemed illegitimate by someone like Gaetz, who'd file a motion to vacate and the House would have to vote again. Except this time, the R speaker would need not 10 votes but dozens or more. Repeat the process and soon you'd see every D vote for and every R vote against the speaker. Then you need a new R candidate who can get elected with only R votes.
Call it the one-drop rule. Any R who needs as little as one drop of D support to be voted in as speaker will be deemed illegitimate. Whether he makes a deal with D's or not, he'll be accused of being hopelessly corrupted by the process and regarded as unfit for the job of speaker. A motion to vacate will follow, as surely as the night the day.
You're not really engaging with the hypothetical that's under discussion. In it, some group of Republicans large enough to deny the rest of their party a majority finds a deal with Democrats to be less odious than supporting their own party.
That's a pretty fanciful scenario. But hypotheticals don't have to be plausible to be interesting.
Also? A hypo very like that is looking more plausible all the time.
Suippose, for instance, the Democrats in the current congress make themselves more appealing to deal with than the Gaetz crew. It's difficult, but not outright impossible, to imagine. The Gaetz people are pretty full of themselves and may make, and refuse to budge from, outright unacceptable demands. And meanwhile, here comes hypothetical Hakeem Jeffries, offering the votes of most of his caucus in exchange for more even representation on committees and a floor procedure that's more open to amendments from the minority.
Like I said, super difficult to imagine, but not outright impossible. If anyone on this Earth could get Republicans to hate him more than they hate Democrats, it'd be Matt Gaetz.
Hypothetically the it could work. The Democrats have the credibility to cut a deal like this. I wonder that any of the current Republicans are in a place to follow up on a deal like this. The far right reps would make their lives a living hell, not to mention Trump and others piling on.
It would be more plausible if say 10 Republican reps switched parties in return for some sort of benefits for them and their districts. Unlikely, but maybe that could work as a practical matter.
A lot of stock market debate is one side saying investment X is going up and the other side saying X is going down. Often the case, both sides are right. They're looking at different time frames.
That may apply here. This discussion seems to be about crafting a deal between D's and semi-sane R's that will allow the House to function for the foreseeable future (till the next election). Well-intentioned maybe, but a doomed fantasy, as I see it. There is no appetite for R's to work with D's. It would be suicidal for R members to do. The appropriate D position right now is to stand back and let the R's eat their own shit sandwich. It's been cooking a long time.
This week the dysfunctional R party is having at last the internecine war that's long overdue. How it resolves I don't know. Maybe they'll elect a new speaker next week and sing kumbaya. But I doubt it. More likely, the internecine war we see is nothing compared to the one ahead. Who survives, who doesn't, and who's left bleeding on the battlefield I can't predict. But it's a mistake for D's to get involved. There's no glory in being collateral damage.
At some point, the House has business to do and someone will need to do it. Will Dems have a role? Maybe. I just think it's too early to tell, and debating the terms of a moderate, bipartisan compromise to solve the problem right now seems like fantasy.
In 1939, you might have been right to say, Here's what we do: team up with the Brits & Russians, divide Germany, make a democracy in Japan -- problem solved! But it was fantasy to think that was going to avoid the damage and dangers ahead.
I'm hoping the damage here is limited to the R party. Could be. We will see.
Don't threaten us with a good time!
Yes, a Dem minority aligned with moderate Republicans would be a good thing. Much better than current situation of giving in to the extreme right radical minority.
We were close to this: McCarthy could have saved his speakership by giving in something to the Dems (no more frivolous impeachment and Ukraine funding). Would the country better off?
Now, if a majority of the House is in favor of some Speaker, elected by a majority of Ds and a minority of Rs, even though the Rs have the overall majority, what's wrong with that. A *majority* of the House is in favor, how is that not respecting the will of the people.
If organizing Democrats is like herding cats organizing Republicans is like herding bats, and all they're going to do is bat shit.
Pure whimsy of course: Five or more Democrats announce that they're officially going over to the other side. Stuff Gets Done. After which they say they tried it, didn't like it, and switch back.
Hey, it could happen 🙂
If anti-Trump Republicans were serious they'd drop the Republican party and declare themselves independents, because if they actually did anything anti-Trump they'd be primaries by psychos anyway.
But in the meantime they're still in the House and they immediately become a sought after voting bloc which they will never be otherwise.
All it would take is one to do it first to give the others some guts.
There have been any number of independents who have spent their whole careers caucusing with the Democrats so it isn't like there aren't any precedents.
Sorry to pile on but....
Martin Longman has been writing about this for months, possibly years, arguing that the "real majority" in the House is that coalition that raise the debt ceiling and passes the budget and keeps the government operating. And there's nothing inherently wrong about that being a cross-party coalition (see, for example, Willie Brown in the CA Assembly in the 90s).
I presume Jeffries (and Pelosi before him) has had a deal on the table for McCarthy (or any Republican who can deliver 15+ votes) that looks something like this: GOP speaker, Jeffries = #2, GOP chairs most/all cmtes, coalition funds government, funds Ukraine, stops Biden admin impeachments, everything else status quo until Jan. 2025 unless Speaker & Jeffries agree.
All a deal like that does is provide structure to the de facto majority and eliminate a repeat of the chaos the GOP has dragged the House into twice already this year. What's wrong with that?
It is not going to happen, because Republicans are worried of the response from the MAGA.
Before the (convicted paedophile) Hasturt rule, this used to be how politics works. Now, Republicans in the House feel entitled to not even bring a bill to the floor, unless it can pass with all Republican votes.
They've bound and gagged themselves. There's nothing Democrats can do. It's up to the House Republicans to actually want to change.
It's not obvious that this is a problem. In Drum's hypothetical, we'd end up with both a Speaker (serving at the pleasure of this cross-party coalition) and a majority leader, presumably a very frustrated person who feels entitled to the speaker's gavel but has been denied it by some faction of her party.
Maybe there's huge problems with such an arrangement, but they aren't obvious to an amateur outsider like me. Anyone see any?
Not to speak for Kevin, but he does say this is a scenario Dems should NOT do.
The obvious problem, to me, is the logical next thing to happen. Motion to vacate. That'll happen any time an R gets elected speaker with D votes as long at the one-member-MTV rule is on the books.
A D-backed speaker cannot last. At least until the R party is broken and loses its majority.
The problem is that it can only happen if a faction of Rs recognizes in public the obvious fact that the R party is broken, ie no longer holds a coherent world view that all of its House members can recognize their reflections in. Almost no House R is near that point yet-- party identification runs too deep, and identification means loyalty to the label. They have to get to where they see electoral poison in the jar labeled R.
One way it can go from there is for a group of maybe 20 or 30 more-centrist Rs to hold a big media event and announce that the bomb-throwers have lost the True Faith and this group, the Honest-to-God Republicans (or whatever) must sadly withdraw their cooperation until the party returns to its roots. Or something along those lines-- because they'll need to set themselves up as the ones who have kept the faith and the numbnuts caucus as the heretics. It wouldn't be the first time in our history for a move like that, and it's more likely than straight-out defecting individually or as a group to the other party, the one Rs have been casting as Satan's spawn for at least 30 years.
It's vanishingly unlikely right now because it'd be very dangerous politically and personally, and it's unlikely overall because of trump's hold on the most active grass-roots Rs. But it could get less unlikely if the Rs give us a bomb-thrower speaker who tries to force through a bomb-thrower agenda and/or deliberately and obviously forces the government to a standstill. Which a Scalise or a Jordan would probably do.
An awful lot will depend on the kind of feedback and polling that the more centrist(-ish) get from their districts as the nutjobs get nuttier and more aggressive.
Republicans have been calling Democrats "the Mommy Party" for decades now. And they continue to believe "Mommy" will clean up their messes for them.
WHY would Democrats save a party that intended to let people die from a virus, are disinclined to stop a war from spreading into the rest of Europe, and intend to prevent us from stopping climate change?
WHY?