With the privilege of hindsight, we may look back on 2023 as the year that the tensions between the design of our political institutions and how we have operated within those institutions reached a breaking point. The dysfunction with which the Republicans have governed in the House of Representatives after winning a slim, eight seat majority in 2022 has been unprecedented in many ways and is, for many, validation of the general public's disapproval of congress.
So far, the 118th Congress has been paralyzed and unable to perform many of its basic tasks. Not because of partisan gridlock slowing, or even preventing, the passage of legislation, but because of intra-party disagreements. Republicans took four days and fifteen votes to elect Kevin McCarty (R - California), Speaker of the House at the beginning of the congressional session. A speaker who members of their own party could tolerate for no more than nine months before bringing forward a motion to vacate, starting the process over; taking nearly a month to find a Speaker the second time.
Over the course of that month, the Majority Leader, Steve Scalise, was nominated to be speaker but withdrew his name before a House floor vote could be held due to insufficient support from his own party. Similarly, Majority Whip, Tom Emmer, would be nominated but ultimately withdraw his name before a floor vote could be cast. Republican Conference Chairperson, Elise Stefanik (R - New York), and Republican Policy Committee Chairman, Gary Palmer (R - Alabama), were both in consideration, but neither were nominated.
These are the leadership positions within the House Republican's own party and would normally be considered as a natural line of succession. Instead, none of these individuals were able to gain enough support from within their party to take their nomination to the House floor for a vote, if they were even able to get a nomination in the first place. Instead Republicans would nominate and elect Mike Johnson (R - Louisiana), a relatively unknown representative.
After the ousting of McCarthy, Ben Jacobs wrote for Vox that this saga illustrates, at least under Republican control, that the House of Representatives is functioning like a parliament when it was not structured to accommodate those forces. In his article, Jacobs spoke with Joshua Huder, a senior fellow at the Government Affairs Institute at Georgetown University and Huder had the following to say on the current situation in the house;
"One of the problems we have in the American system is that we don't have elections based on parties at all, so we can never have that kind of parliamentary-style accountability. What happened Tuesday[, October 3, 2023,] was not a no-confidence vote in the way that you would see in a parliamentary election. It didn't start an election. There was no new governing coalition, and we are sort of stuck. And, in some ways, nothing has changed in the House."
Huder's assessment here appears to be correct. McCarthy was ousted by only eight members of the Republican Party. Under a parliamentary system the existing governing coalition would likely shed these members and find another caucus to maintain their governing majority, or perhaps an entirely new governing coalition would be formed with a new leader. Instead, the Republican Party held together.
McCarthy was no moderate conservative, yet he was not sufficiently conservative for certain members of the Republican Party. Now, fourteen Republicans who represent districts that Biden won voted to elect an election denying, abortion and same-sex marriage opposing, Evangelical conservative as Speaker of the house in Mike Johnson. Either members of the Republican's far-right are going to have to answer to their constituents in primary elections why they supported "moderate" McCarthy, or members in swing districts will have to answer to their constituents during the general election why they supported a far-right candidate for Speaker. This is the dissonance that congressional Republicans have to reconcile.
Our winner-take-all, single representative district electoral system is to blame for widely disparate policy positions within a single party. This electoral system pushes parties and candidates to stake out positions that are broadly appealing and the counter point to the opposing party in order to win elections. Consequently, voters are presented with a similar dilemma; forced to determine which of two parties they agree with most (or disagree with least).
This system masks parliamentary tendencies just below the surface of the two major parties. The Democratic Party is made up of three major caucuses; the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the New Democrat Coalition, and the Blue Dog Coalition. Similarly, the Republican Party is made up of the Republican Study Committee and the Freedom Caucus. The problem is, the way these caucuses align themselves is assumed and there is no movement between the coalitions to create a new majority and governing coalition because the representatives that make up these caucuses are Democrats or Republicans first and members of a caucus second.
But this is not the only time in recent memory that our institutions have buckled under the weight of partisanship. Ezra Klein might disagree that 2023 is the year our institutions broke and may instead trace the cracks back to late 2019 when President Trump was impeached the first time, if not before. Leading up to the House voting to formally impeach President Trump, Klein argued in favor of impeachment, writing;
In Federalist 65, Alexander Hamilton considers the problem of impeachment. The process, the Constitution framer writes, is meant for offenses “denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”
Political offenses are, by nature, politicized. They “agitate the passions of the whole community” and “divide it into parties more or less friendly or inimical to the accused.” The danger, Hamilton says, is that the impeachment process will be decided “more by the comparative strength of parties, than by the real demonstrations of innocence or guilt.” If that proves either the perception or the reality of impeachment, the process loses its legitimacy, and America loses critical protection against tyrants and criminals.
Everything, then, rests on the independence and authority of the body charged with impeachment. Hamilton admitted that there was no tribunal capable of “the most exact standard of perfection,” but the best possible hope lay with the Senate. He believed that no “other body would be likely to feel CONFIDENCE ENOUGH IN ITS OWN SITUATION, to preserve, unawed and uninfluenced, the necessary impartiality between an INDIVIDUAL accused, and the REPRESENTATIVES OF THE PEOPLE.”
Hamilton worried over the ill-effects of political parties and partisanship on the institutions he helped to shape. Washington shared in Hamilton's anxiety over political parties, warning that parties could lead to foreign influence and outright corruption in his farewell address.
Klein continues;
Hamilton wrote in defense of a political system he thought would resist organized political parties. Today, the Senate makes no pretense to impartiality. The modern Senate, like the House, is controlled by a political party — and it is the political party Trump leads...
Impeachment was meant to be a political remedy for political offenses. But over time, it has mutated into something quite different: a partisan remedy for political offenses. And partisan remedies are subject to partisan considerations. If Trump falls before an impeachment trial, the Republican Party will be left in wreckage. The GOP’s leaders can’t permit the destruction of their own party.
Elsewhere, Klein summarized his modern anxieties with the impeachment process this way;
This isn't how the system the Founders constructed is meant to work. Ambition was supposed to check ambition. Instead, the ambition of congressional Republicans has become an enabler for the ambitions of President Donald Trump.
What Klein is arguing here is that the Founders believed each institution—in the case of impeachment the Presidency, the House of Representatives, and the Senate—would be jealous of the power of other institutions and would, in turn, guard their own power jealously. This incentive would motivate individuals within the system to act as institutionalists instead of partisans. An institutionalist would act to preserve the integrity, independence, and authority of their institution whereas a partisan would act to further the interests of their party.
Hamilton was not being naive to think that institutional motivations would outweigh partisan motivations. This balance held through much of our nation's history. Though never convicted by the Senate, the impeachment process worked to remove President Nixon when he resigned instead of being convicted.
Tip O'Neil, Democratic Speaker of the house from 1977 through 1987, channeled Hamilton's institutionalist spirit when he responded to a staffer referring to the Republican house members as the enemy, saying,
The House Republicans are not the enemy, they're the opposition. The Senate is the enemy.
Hamilton argued that Senators in particular, with their staggered elections and six-year terms, would be able to resist the partisan pressures of an impeachment trial and be able to act as institutionalists. While Hamilton may not have been naive or irrational in this believe, the most glaring omission in his argument, is that for the Senate to be able to exercise its independence articles of impeachment first have to be ratified by the House of Representatives, which is the most likely institution to be captured by populist sentiments.
The less obvious mistake in Hamilton's reasoning was failing to recognize that the power of a party and the power of an institution are linked; in that the power held by an institution are irrelevant to the party that is out of power. What Republicans in 2020 recognized was that if they were to vote to impeach and convict President Trump, the leader of the Republican Party, they would be endorsing the idea that the Party was corrupt. This could have a few implications;
(1) Republicans would be robbed an
incumbent Presidential candidate who was very popular with the Party's
base in the upcoming 2020 Presidential election. Vice President Mike Pence would be the presumptive nominee, but the Republican party would still likely hold a primary and Pence would be saddled with being the Vice President to an impeached President,
(2) It would have certainly meant that any Republicans that did vote to
either impeach or convict President Trump would be primaried, and
(3) It may have hurt the party down-ballot with moderate and independent voters who may have felt uneasy voting for a party who's leader was found guilty in an impeachment trial.
On these last two points; while all of the members of the House of Representatives would be up for reelection in 2020, only a third of the Senate would be up for reelection. However, then Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, recognized that if Republicans lose control of the Senate, the institutional power of the Senate would be irrelevant to Republicans. McConnell's calculation was that Republican's best chance to hold on to the Senate was to be in lockstep with the President through the impeachment process; diminished Senatorial power for Republicans is better than Republicans not holding power in the Senate.
The ultimate mistake Hamilton made was believing that the political systems and institutions the Founders created could prevent the creation of parties or, in the end, withstand partisan pressures. For all the care put into designing a system of checks and balances to guard against consolidation of power by any one institution, the Founders failed to recognize the benefit of creating a system that would encourage and empower parties. Importantly, though, not a system that would incentivize and create a two party, bipartisan system. Men who welcomed debate and believed in the benefit of the competition of ideas surely would see the benefit of a multitude of parties reflecting nuanced positions, competing for popular support.
If the power of the Republican and Democratic parties was disaggregated between the five existing major caucuses in the House it would be less likely that partisan incentives would outweigh institutional incentives. Ideologically the majorities in the Senate and House might align with the ideology of the President, but it would be less likely that the President's party would have an outright majority in the Senate and House. As such, the partisan incentives of impeachment outlined earlier would still exist for some members of the House and Senate, but not a majority. And while votes for or against an impeachment may fall along party lines, the votes would not necessarily fall along ideological lines. Furthermore, because there would not be a bifurcation of Senate and House between two parties, impeachment would not be seen as a "partisan remedy for a political offense", as Klein put it.
A multipolar House would also relieve that institution of its operation-design tension identified by Jacobs. Holding the makeup of the 118th Congress constant, if the five individual caucuses were instead independent political parties the context for the events this year look very different. Presumably the conservative leaning parties caucus together and create a "Republican governing coalition". Kevin McCarthy is still elected Speaker of the House after fifteen votes over four day. However, this would not be characterized as unusual as this is how coalition building goes. It takes time and concessions. Similarly, it would also not be unusual when the motion to vacate was brought forward and McCarthy was removed.
What would be unusual is that the Republican governing coalition would remain intact and simply search for a new leader of the exact same constituency after the removal of the coalition's leader. Since the assumed existing coalition consists of conservatives from the furthest right of the ideological spectrum to moderates, the coalition could only drop the far-right party in favor of bringing in a moderate liberal party to create a new governing coalition with a new leader.
Ironically, perhaps, the solution then is not to reject parties or parliamentary tendencies, but embrace them more fully.
