Speaker of the House

The responsibility to govern falls to every representative.

Image from Flickr, taken by Caleb Smith.

Recently, I’ve been getting lots of hate on Twitter for tweeting this:

Justin Stapley @JustinWStapley

A lot of shade being cast at Republicans right now, but if the Democrats vote in bloc for Jeffries vote after vote instead of finding a compromise candidate to get on board with, they're demonstrating equal levels of non-seriousness & proving that they're part of the dysfunction.

Now, obviously, a lot of the responses are coming from people who don’t know me, who don’t know what I’ve tried to stand for over the course of my meager writing career, and also aren’t looking at what I’m trying to say with a good faith effort to understand the point I’m trying to make.

Still, since I’m the first to criticize Twitter as a poor place for political dialogue, given that politics is a long-form topic and Twitter is a short-form platform, I thought it would be prudent to address this topic in a long-form treatment.

As I tried to explain in follow-up tweets, which obviously went mostly ignored, part of our present political dysfunction is that members of Congress think of themselves as party members first rather than representatives first. At some point in our country’s history, we stopped thinking of the Speaker of the House as the Speaker of the House and started thinking of the position as a majority leader enshrined by institutional power.

When Democrats held the majority in the House, Republicans loved to use Nancy Pelosi as a foil to rile up populist anger and frustration with the status quo. But no thought was ever given to crossing the aisle and engaging in the real art of politics to see if there could possibly have been a compromise figure more palatable for broad support. Why? Because it was better for future election maneuvering to have someone in the position of Speaker who Republicans could hate. Rather than governing, the motivation is to engage in cynical maneuvering for future power.

And this very same dysfunction is evident at the present moment. McCarthy’s inability to obtain the votes necessary for the typical coronation most prospective Speaker candidates get has created an inflection point in the history of the House of Representatives. There is an opportunity before us to craft a governing coalition that breathes both function and legitimacy back into the halls of Congress.

Long have pundits and activists on both sides of the aisle complained that fringe groups have too much control in Congress and wield too much influence in how things operate in government. Yet few are realizing the opportunity we have to return the House to regular order and craft a true coalition of the decent that could insulate the next two years against the machinations of the unhinged margins of the Left and the Right.

And this is why I am just as frustrated with Democrats as I am with Republicans. For how much people like to paint a gulf of difference between our two parties, the reality is that to the extent differences exist, they are more differences in magnitude than differences in kind. The powers-that-be in the Democratic Party are not interested in “bailing out the GOP” because they want to see them fail, they want its fringe elements to maintain their influence, and they want the Republicans to be embarrassed and weakened. Why? For the same reason Republicans want the same for Democrats. They’re more interested in the cynical maneuvering for power and influence than in governing.

Much of this debate hinges on the lack of seriousness observed in political actors across the political spectrum and the lack of respect afforded to America’s political institutions and offices. Too often, debates of the kind currently ongoing in the House are treated more like reality tv than the serious business of governance (maybe that’s why we found ourselves governed for four years by a reality tv actor).

An observer from outer space, for example, would be surprised to discover that the Speaker of the House is second in the line of succession for the Presidency of the United States. Is that simply a Republican problem? Why does the whole house vote, this observer might ask, if only one party is expected to be a solution to the problem?

I understand that it’s difficult to understand the perspective of someone like me who has immersed himself in political theory and constitutionalism and spends more time reading the musty letters of the founding fathers than watching cable news. But someone has to speak up and say something when so many of the same people who complain about the dangers of hyperpartisanship fail to recognize when that very hyperpartisanship is at play.

The US Constitution established the role of the Speaker of the House, and it is a position voted on by all members. Each member has a responsibility to engage in good faith toward selecting who fills that role. It’s true that given the realities of two-party politics, members of the minority party often have no say whatsoever in the selection of the Speaker of the House. But in those rare circumstances such as we find ourselves in now, members of the minority party can and should play a role. And yes, if they’re unable or unwilling to play a role, then that most definitely is a reflection of the general political dysfunction our country currently faces.