The House of Representatives has traditionally elected its Speaker by a simple system. Each party would hold an internal vote, and whoever got a majority would be its nominee. Then there would be a formal public vote on the floor of the House, and the Speaker nominee of the majority party would win because everyone in that party would vote for the same person, regardless of whether they had supported that candidate initially. Needless to say, that’s not how it works anymore.
In the past year, a majority of House Republicans have twice selected their candidate to be Speaker in an internal meeting, and twice that candidate has been thwarted by a minority of House Republicans. On Thursday night, Steve Scalise of Louisiana conceded that he would not be the Speaker less than 36 hours after he won a majority of the vote among House Republicans. Breaking with tradition, the party didn’t fall in line. Enough fellow Republicans made clear that they would torpedo his candidacy in the official vote on the House floor and prevent him from reaching the majority of 217 necessary to become Speaker. So, in frustration, he dropped out of the running.
Scalise’s exit follows the ouster of Kevin McCarthy earlier this month after eight Republicans moved to remove him as Speaker with the support of House Democrats. To even get the job, McCarthy had required 15 ballots in January after 20 of his fellow Republicans repeatedly blocked him from receiving the necessary majority of the House.
All of this is nominally within the written rules of Congress, but it wasn’t how people behaved in the past. The new precedent is that any small group can now not only wield the power to depose a Speaker at will but can block any replacement.
The result is that, at this point, in the words of California Republican Doug LaMalfa, “I don’t know that Mother Teresa could … get to 217.” (Which is the number of votes Scalise would have needed, and any other candidate will need, on the House floor to assume the speakership.)
Scalise’s decision to stand down Thursday night came as a surprise, after a sudden meeting of House Republicans was called after a long day where little progress was made toward uniting the caucus behind him. Meeting after meeting was held, and grim-faced members shuffled down Capitol corridors afterward. Within minutes of the evening meeting convening in a windowless basement room, the Louisiana Republican announced that he was giving up his bid.
Later, Scalise told reporters, “Our country still has to come together, and it is not there. There are still some people that have their own agendas … This House of Representatives needs a Speaker, and we need to open up the House again. But clearly, not everybody is there, and there’s still schisms that have to get resolved.”
The question is whether anyone else will be able to become Speaker at this point. The obvious candidate is Jim Jordan, the right-wing firebrand who finished second to Scalise in the internal vote on Wednesday. The issue isn’t so much Jordan himself as it is the people who support him. Jordan’s base is the hard right of the conference. His supporters included many of the 20 Republicans who thwarted McCarthy for days in January and many of the 8 who ousted him in October. What makes his emergence even more pointed is that Scalise stepped down because of holdouts, most of whom insisted that they would vote for Jordan on the floor no matter what. There’s also concern for the perverse incentives it would create in the future if supporters of a losing candidate could essentially overturn an internal election.
Don Bacon, a moderate from Nebraska, spoke to reporters and described the angst he and his fellow moderates were experiencing about the process. “We had a lot of members today who said they’d only vote for Jim, and that bothers us.”
As Bacon looked back on the past few weeks for House Republicans, he said, “We had 96 percent” — of House Republicans — “stick with Kevin McCarthy. It was terrible what happened. He was our MVP, coach, and, what, 4 percent threw him out.” And Scalise? “He won fair and square, and we have people that refuse to vote for him. And there’s a lot of us pragmatic governing types that don’t like rewarding bad behavior.” He added, “If you reward bad behavior, you’re gonna get more of it.”
The question is what can be done. At this point, Mike Garcia of California noted that House Republicans have “a history of displacing Speakers.” He described it as a “cultural challenge” the party faces. After all, the only House Republican leader to leave entirely of his own accord in modern history is Dennis Hastert (who has since been found criminally liable for child molestation).
At this point, the focus seemed to be as much on creating rules to try to somehow restrain those intent on hobbling the process. The idea was not so much that 217 House Republicans could be forced to agree on a single candidate, but a new mechanism could be created to try to force them to reach consensus behind closed doors and to at least minimize just how much their dysfunction would be exposed to the glare of television cameras.
Representative Kelly Armstrong of North Dakota insisted Thursday night that “we have to have some semblance of structure. So we have to have an honor system and a roll-call system (inside the internal meeting of the House GOP) so that the same people who could sabotage this on the floor have the opportunity to tell us what they’re going to do in conference.”
However, when asked if he was concerned about continued “sabotage” from these members, he said, “No, because I would have to be surprised to be concerned.”
But at this point, there can always be a new group of saboteurs. As Representative Nicole Malliotakis of Staten Island noted earlier in the day, it hadn’t always been the exact same group of dissidents. While there was some overlap, the precise composition changed every time. And be it moderates out for revenge, right-wingers out for more concessions, or simply nihilists looking for more cable-television appearances, everyone now has every incentive to use their leverage. The rules had changed and the House was now a tyranny of the minority.
