Tim Balcerski: The First 44 Votes, and the First 48 Years of the House GOP Session-Debated Referendum
Thomas Balcerski is a professor at the Ray Allen Billington Visiting Professor of U.S. History as well as a fellow at the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. He is the author of “Bosom Friends: The Intimate World of James Buchanan and William Rufus King” (Oxford University Press). He tweets about presidential history @tbalcerski. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.
Despite holding a numerical majority, the House GOP caucus revealed itself to be intractably divided in the election for speaker of the House this week, with Republican frontrunner Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California failing to receive the needed majority of votes. McCarthy is falling short of the votes needed after six rounds. House Democrats, meanwhile, have decisively united around Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York as their party leader.
Not since 1923 has a speaker of the House failed to be elected on the first ballot. With very little margin in the houses of congress, the new normal is shaping up to be an extremely volatile year.
In either instance, a compromise of some sort – whether by choosing a new candidate for speaker or by placating the splinter faction in some significant way – has usually been the result. If history is any guide, we may once again be living a version of one of these two scenarios.
Four years later, the House of Representatives was again divided, with a majority of Republicans looking to place Rep. John Sherman of Ohio in the chair. The Republicans tried to end the debate by using the plurality rule. Sherman stepped aside and urged Republicans to support a freshman congressman from New Jersey when there was still no clear majority. After 44 ballots spanning eight weeks, Pennington was elected speaker.
In the year 1855, the race for speaker faced its most serious challenge to date. Without enough Democrats or former Whigs, the compromise candidate was Nathaniel P. Banks of Massachusetts, a member of the nativist American Party. William Aiken, Jr. of South Carolina lost the speakership because his backers thought a plurality resolution would once again capture the votes of competing groups. Instead, Banks ultimately defeated Aiken on February 2, 1856.
The tolerance for the progressive Republicans was short-lived, however. In 1925, after several progressive Republicans refused to support then-President Calvin Coolidge’s reelection bid, Longworth, who was then speaker, punished them by stripping them of their seniority within House committees. The Republican Party had removed its liberal wing in order to make it more conservative.
After deadlocking for eight ballots, an emergency meeting was held between the Republican majority leader Nicholas Longworth of Ohio, and the radical faction, represented by Rep. John M. Nelson of Wisconsin, Rep. Fiorello LaGuardia of New York and Rep. Roy O. Woodruff of Michigan. As a result, the House agreed to a number of procedural reforms and Gillett became speaker.
McCarthy is so ingrained in the GOP machine and has spent so much time trying to contrast Republicans from former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democrats that he might not be the right person to form a consensus and coalition government.
Ask anyone in Washington about you and they will laugh and shake their heads. McCarthy will never ask Democrats for help. And Democrats wouldn’t give it to him. It’s so silly.
Which leaves the vast majority of Americans to watch as McCarthy gives more and more to the intransigent fringe of his party, even as it becomes painfully clear that more than four of them have no intention of ever supporting him. He can only afford to lose four GOP votes.
But the biggest problem with the bipartisan solution is that McCarthy and Republicans just won their slim majority after an election in which they tried to separate themselves from Democrats. It wouldn’t make sense to join with them now.
As CNN political analyst John Avlon pointed out on CNN This Morning, there were variations of power sharing or moderate speaker upset in multiple states this year.
ADemocrat was the speaker of the House in Pennsylvania. Following the vote, he announced he would govern as an independent.
“A block of House Republicans should get together with Democrats to pick a speaker to run a coalition government, which will moderate the House and marginalize the extremists,” suggested John Kasich in a tweet that was viewed more than 5 million times. He is a cheerleader for moderation, the former governor of Ohio.
The congressman from Nebraska is interested in finding some help from the Democrats. He told CNN’s Jim Sciutto on Wednesday that McCarthy may have to start looking across the aisle and perhaps give Democrats more committee members or other concessions in order to get the government running.
If the small group refused to be a part of the team, it would be impossible for them to hold you hostage and take power from the fringe, as suggested by Bacon. They don’t think we have the ability to do anything without them. We need to show them otherwise.”
When Avlon suggested the idea of a bipartisan consensus-builder on CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront” on Wednesday, former Rep. Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania agreed that it is indeed what would happen in a “functional Congress.”
He is correct. If Jeffries is elected Speaker he would be the first black lawmaker to do so.
Fred Upton, the retired Republican, who voted for Donald Trump to be impeached, said he was intrigued by the idea of being a consensus candidate for speaker. Current House members do not have to be speaker.
Former Rep. Adam Kinzinger, the moderate Illinois Republican who was part of the House January 6 committee and is now a CNN contributor, pointed out to Burnett on Wednesday that the role of the speaker as a partisan leader is relatively new.
Speakers previously simply oversaw House proceedings. Perhaps Democrats could get on board with supporting a consensus Republican who is not trying to use the House for partisan purposes.
“I think the institution, and frankly the country, could use somebody sitting in that position simply saying, here is how the House is gonna work. Go debate,” Kinzinger said. He said that the out-of-the-box solution could be possible as this roadblock drags on.
It is true that there is bipartisanship in Washington. President Joe Biden appeared with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on Wednesday to announce new funding to rehab the deteriorating Brent Spence Bridge that ties McConnell’s home state of Kentucky to Kasich’s Ohio.
McConnell might have thought it was a photo op with Obama, but he really didn’t do that with the former president.
What would be the outcome of a coalition government in Washington? A comment on Kasich on the epsilon of extremism
While the Republicans and Democrats who vote for the bipartisan option might be celebrated by the moderate middle of the American electorate, they’d be attacked by people deep in the party trenches, the politically engaged people who contribute to political campaigns.
There’s also the issue that members of Congress wait around for years for plum committee assignments. They know that leaving the system would endanger it.
What would happen if there was a coalition? Those are all unique situations with their own local dynamics, but it’s worth wondering what a coalition government in Washington might look like. “A block of House Republicans should get together with Democrats to pick a speaker to run a coalition government, which will moderate the House and marginalize the extremists,” suggested John Kasich in a tweet that was viewed more than 5 million times. He was the former Ohio governor and representative that has become a cheerleader for moderation in recent years.