House grinds to a slow start over speakership election 

A rule of thumb for would-be House leaders: Never capitulate totally to the naysayers in your caucus or, at some point in the future, you will not be able to get past “Nay” to enact urgently needed measures to address the country’s pressing problems. 

All this was brought home to me last week while watching the messy food fight on the House floor that stretched-out the usual opening day of a new Congress into a four-day slow grind. It was all occasioned by the House Freedom Caucus’s resistance to electing its party’s own nominee for Speaker, Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.).  

For three days and 11 ballots, McCarthy remained stuck on 200 votes versus the Democratic nominee, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries (N.Y.), who consistently garnered all 212 of his caucus’s votes. Finally, late Friday night, by the 14th ballot, McCarthy was able to attract 16 additional votes from the hardline, “Never Kevin” crowd —still one vote short of a majority vote win.   

After an adjournment vote was reversed (before the final result was announced), McCarthy prevailed on the 15th ballot, well after midnight. He was then sworn-in, swore-in other members, and delivered a magnanimous acceptance speech that reached out to his opponents on both sides of the aisle and downtown. 

One major concession McCarthy ceded to Freedom Caucus members was to allow a single member to offer a privileged resolution from the floor “to vacate the Chair” (the speakership). Previously, Republicans published a proposed House rules package that included a change requiring that a motion to vacate be sponsored by five members.   

That was a giant leap from the rule Democrats instituted four years earlier that provided such resolutions could only be brought to the floor as privileged by direction of a party caucus or conference majority. Moving to a single-member motion to vacate for immediate floor action restores the pre-2019 House rule. 

The concern expressed by some is that lowering the threshold could lead to repeated votes on motions to vacate if a faction of either party is angered by an action of the Speaker. Supporters of the most recent iteration claim they would be prudent and not abuse the privilege by offering cascading motions to vacate. But no one can commit others to prudently hold their peace. 

Such a motion to vacate has only been attempted twice in House history. The first was in March 1910 after Speaker Joseph (“Uncle Joe”) Cannon was removed as chairman and member of the Rules Committee. The revolt against “Cannonism” (aka “Czar Speaker”) succeeded when a group of progressive Republicans joined with Democrats to change the rules on the House floor to defenestrate Cannon from his committee perch and expand the size of the Rules Committee, with all its members to be elected by the House.   

Cannon, who was still presiding as Speaker at the time, invited his opponents to finish him off with a privileged motion that he vacate the chair. A Democratic member gladly accepted his challenge and moved that the chair be vacated. This time, though, the Republicans rebels voted with their party against the motion  —not wanting to turn control of the House over to Democrats. 

The second time such a motion was attempted was in July 2015 when Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), the founding member of the Freedom Caucus, introduced a resolution to vacate the chair then occupied by Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio).  The motion, however, was worded in such a way that it was not privileged for floor consideration and was instead referred to the Rules Committee.   

Meadows claimed he was simply trying to promote a “family discussion” in his party’s conference about actions taken by Boehner that angered his hardline conservative colleagues. The threat was sufficient to prompt Boehner to resign his House seat two months later in September.   

His successor as Speaker, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) didn’t fare much better with his hard-right detractors. He retired at the end of the 115th Congress in 2018. The Republicans’ contretemps were enough for Democrats, when they retook control of the House in 2019, to change the vacate rule so that only party caucus-reported resolutions would be privileged floor consideration.       

One final rule of thumb: The appropriate alternative to what many perceived as the iron-fisted rule of previous Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif), is not to tie both hands behind the backs of Speakers and instead to empower a strong, even-handed Speaker committed to a more open, orderly, and deliberative legislative process. 

Don Wolfensberger is a Congress Scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, former staff director of the House Rules Committee, and author of, “Changing Cultures in Congress: From Fair Play to Power Plays.”  The views expressed are solely his own.