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With all that’s happening elsewhere in the world, you could be forgiven for not noticing that the House of Representatives still lacks a Speaker. Jim Jordan, an extremely far-right congressman from Ohio, has at the time of my writing failed to be blessed with the position on two separate ballots. House Republicans then turned to an idea to empower temporary Speaker Patrick McHenry as a stopgap until they can get their act together, only to have even that plan fall apart as well. This means that the path to the House getting a Speaker is at the moment entirely unclear. Meanwhile, the United States is careening towards a government shutdown, and the Biden administration will soon present Congress with a request for a package of $100bn in military aid for Ukraine and Israel.
I’ve frequently endorsed the idea that it is House Republicans’ dramatic shift to the right that has led them unable to perform the basic tasks of governing, such as making sure the House has a Speaker. Changes in the Republican Party over the past decade or so have empowered a group of politicians who - while often remarkably close to their “moderate” colleagues on policy substance - embrace a bomb-throwing style of politics which makes it impossible to perform any constructive tasks.
But there’s also a deeper reason for Congress’ dysfunction. Put simply, Congressional politics increasingly looks less like the U.S. Congress and more like a Westminster-style Parliament.
Parties and legislatures
One thing that people often don’t realize is that the Constitution was not designed with political parties in mind. In the political theory of the Founders, “party” was synonymous with “faction” or even “disunion” - the tendency of a political body to split into rival groups who looked to their own private interests rather than the general good. George Washington gave over much of his Farewell Address to “warn[ing] you in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party”. But by then it was too late: political parties had began to form, and they have remained a feature of American politics down to this day.
This hostility to parties meant that when the Constitution was drawn up, many of the features of American politics which seem natural to us today were barely envisaged. The framers of the Constitution drew up a system with a great many veto points, meaning places at which a particular action can be stopped. For instance, passing legislation requires the agreement of the president, the House, the Senate, and multiple individual committees within each of the latter two. It then has to be upheld by the Supreme Court. This system can work well when all of the individuals involved are making independent decisions and engaging in compromise and negotiation. But when you combine it with hyper-polarized parties who are dead set on preventing the other from taking any action whatsoever, it is a recipe for the “gridlock” which characterizes American politics today.
American politics long avoided this outcome because for most of American history, parties were relatively weak markers of identity. For much of the twentieth century the Democratic Party was a coalition of white Southern racists and multiracial Northern liberals, and the Republican Party was a coalition of Midwestern conservatives and Northeastern liberals. Congressmen readily crossed party lines to support or block a particular piece of legislation, and from 1937 to 1963 Congress was dominated by a “conservative coalition” made up of both Democrats and Republicans who were opposed to liberal economic policies. The lack of strong party ideological identities was so notable that many American political scientists thought that the best thing that could happen for American democracy was for it to become more polarized so that voters would have a more consequential choice on election day.
Those observers got their wish, and American politics today is highly polarized, both inside and outside Congress. Congressmen no longer cross party lines to vote very often, particularly on fundamental matters like picking a Speaker or voting on an annual budget. This means Congress operates more like a Parliamentary system, where proposals and budgets are overwhelmingly developed within one of the parties and invariably opposed by the other. Congress, and the House of Representatives especially, is no longer a group of individual legislators for whom party is only one consideration - now it consists of two unified, disciplined parties, a Government and an Opposition, one trying to get things done and the other trying to stop it at all costs.
But what happens if one of the parties isn’t so unified after all?
Parliamentary behavior, Congressional rules
Unfortunately, the institutional structure of Congress has not evolved to keep up with the changing nature of the parties.
This is one of the chief lessons to be taken from the downfall of Kevin McCarthy, and the inability of Republicans to find anyone to fill his shoes since. Although this was the first time in American history that a Speaker has been booted from office in this way, the chain of events is all too familiar to anyone who has lived in a Parliamentary system, or indeed in most European countries. In these systems, it’s not at all uncommon for governments to lose “votes of no confidence” in which different groups of legislators band together to turf the government out of office. This can happen either because one party has withdrawn its support from a multi-party coalition, or because some of the government’s own lawmakers have decided that the best way to stay in power is through new leadership.
But there’s a crucial difference: in most systems, a vote of no confidence is followed by national elections. If the legislature is unable to decide on who should hold power, they have to go back to the people for updated instructions, with the hope that a new configuration of power will result and a new government will be formed. In the United States, that doesn’t happen - instead, the House of Representatives gets stuck in the sort of purgatory we now find it in, unable to pick a leader and unable to change the conditions which left it without one in the first place.
An additional complication is what happens in the American system when polarization between the parties stays high, but unity within the parties frays. Republicans are unable to pick a Speaker because their unity is conditional on context. Every Republican can almost always be counted on to oppose what the Democrats want to do, but when they’re trying to hash things out inside their tent, the story is different. In those cases, the party behaves more like a coalition of different groups - sometimes called the “Five Families” - who have different goals and styles. In a European country with six different viable parties, Jim Jordan and Kevin McCarthy probably wouldn’t even be in the same one. In the U.S., they’re jammed together in a fiercely oppositional two-party system which rules out compromise with the enemy party and does little to help them compromise with each other.
What next?
At the time I’m writing this, I have no idea how the present impasse resolves itself.
One thing that might happen is that we see a temporary exception to all of these trends, and a group of Republicans and Democrats come together to select some sort of “unity” Speaker. The wafer thin majority that Republicans have makes this not entirely impossible - it would only take a few Republicans, probably those in districts Biden won, to cross over. But the durability of any such arrangement would be in doubt.
Congress might continue with just an acting or figurehead Speaker for as long as it can, with ad hoc votes on government funding and military aid packages. This could be similar to a “confidence and supply” arrangement which is frequently found in Parliamentary legislatures, in which a large enough group of lawmakers agrees to do the bare minimum - protect against votes of no confidence and fund the government - but nothing else. This arrangement would also be highly unstable and could easily see some basic act like funding the government go unperformed, with disastrous results.
But the only lasting solution is another election, and one of those can’t happen until over a year from now. We’re probably in for a bumpy ride in the meantime.