This week, the House of Representatives made history, voting out Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in a 216-210 vote. The surprise move might have been shocking to many Americans, but it would have been familiar to anyone who grew up in a parliamentary democracy. If you want to understand congressional Republican dysfunction, you have to stop thinking in terms of ordinary party politics and start thinking in terms of coalition government.
House Republicans today are now divided into three distinct parties: the Republican Governance Group, the MAGA Republicans (ardent supporters of former President Trump), and the Freedom Caucus. Despite being organized under one banner, they each have entirely different goals. And then, of course, there are the Democrats and their party’s priorities.
In a parliamentary democracy where none of these parties had a majority, a government would be formed by horse-trading between the parties until they were able to form a faction that controlled a majority of the seats in parliament. That’s exactly what you saw earlier this year, when McCarthy found himself forced into making deals with groups of his fellow Republicans to secure a House majority and his speakership.
As was made clear on Tuesday, such ideologically driven alliances are often doomed to fail.
We are stuck with the current Congress until January 2025. Unless something is done, that means more chaos and dysfunction — and that’s on the good days. More often, it will mean complete paralysis.
The alternative is a new coalition. And, for better or worse, that means involving Democrats. Of course, Democrats are Democrats and it will be hard-going for them to form a partnership with Republicans — even those in the Republican Governance Group. Nonetheless, they all have a shared interest in the basics of governing, which we saw on Saturday when more Democrats than Republicans voted for McCarthy’s shutdown-avoiding continuing resolution.
When you think in terms of the usual party dynamics, that sort of long-term cooperation might be impossible. But it’s just another day in parliament when it comes to coalition governments.
What we need in the House is something called a “confidence and supply” agreement. In a deal like this, one party agrees to allow another party to form a government by helping them vote in a prime minister and agreeing to support that prime minister when it comes to no-confidence motions and funding the government.
Democrats have already been doing a lot of the confidence and supply heavy-lifting by supporting McCarthy’s efforts to raise the debt limit and avoid a government shutdown, which McCarthy was utterly incapable of achieving relying solely on Republican support. So it just makes sense for them to formalize the arrangement.
It would work like this. Instead of simply nominating Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) for Speaker, Democrats would vote, as a block, for a centrist Republican like Rep. Dave Joyce (R-Ohio), the chair of the Republican Governance Group. If all Democrats voted for this candidate, it would take only a handful of Republican votes for him to clinch the speakership. This would either quickly elect a Speaker with bipartisan support or force the Republicans to get their act together and agree to a compromise candidate. Either way, that’s a win for America.
And what would the deal be? Democrats would protect Joyce from a new motion to vacate the chair and, in return, Joyce would abandon the Hastert Rule — the idea that the Speaker should prevent any bills from reaching the floor that are not supported by a majority of the Speaker’s own caucus — when it comes to appropriations bills. That means that the legislation necessary to keep America’s lights on will get up-or-down votes in the House and that they will pass if they have majority support, regardless of what party those votes come from.
Such an arrangement is likely to be far more stable than McCarthy’s speakership because the new Speaker would have a much larger working majority (at least when it comes to the nuts and bolts of governing). Democrats and Republicans could still amuse themselves by having food fights over social legislation, but a confidence and supply agreement would keep the lights on until we can elect a new and, hopefully, more functional House.
Democrats have a choice to make. The politically wise thing to do is to break out the popcorn and watch Republicans flounder. But the responsible thing to do is to govern.
Chris Truax is an appellate lawyer in San Diego and a member of the Guardrails of Democracy Project.