Dems deserve some blame for costly House speaker ouster
The installation of Mike Johnson as the new House speaker and his shepherding of a stopgap funding bill has helped move Congress forward.
But make no mistake about it: Historians for decades to come will mark Oct. 3 as a low point in American political history — the day that the House of Representatives decapitated itself.
It’s an act for which the Democratic leadership in the House has artfully eluded public accountability, raising the risk that the wrong lessons will be learned.
Consequences are arriving.
On Nov. 9, Moody’s Investor Services, the last major ratings agency to maintain a AAA (i.e., top) rating for U.S. Treasury debt, formally raised the prospect of a downgrade.
Moody’s cited “the first ouster of a House speaker in U.S. history, prolonged inability of Congress to select a new House speaker, and increased threats of another partial government shutdown ... The issuer’s susceptibility to political event risk has materially changed.”
Even slightly reduced confidence in the safety of Treasury debt held by the public, exceeding $26 trillion and rising rapidly, could increase taxpayers’ interest costs by tens of billions of dollars annually.
The significance of the speaker’s ouster extends far beyond a potential debt downgrade.
For the president and the chief justice of the Supreme Court, there exist well-understood and sensible lines of succession.
For the speaker of the House, by design and current practice the most powerful person in the legislative branch, the line of succession is so oddly constructed – it is the secret choice of the sitting speaker himself or herself – that the successor cannot credibly serve as anything but a placeholder.
The vote on Oct. 3 was, thus, completely unlike the usual choice between alternative candidates for speaker. The proposal was to remove the speaker with no successor apparent, to try to run the House without a speaker — in effect leaving 330 million people without a functioning government.
Through 235 years of wars, economic crises, constitutional disputes, periods of intense partisanship and occasionally corrupt speakers, the House had never jumped off this cliff.
Democratic-leaning commentators have spun the ouster to a point of absurdity.
One New York Times columnist wrote: “A tiny gaggle of eight Republicans, mostly hard-right extremists, took down Kevin McCarthy.”
No. A tiny gaggle of eight cannot force any outcome on 435 members of the House. Voting to cast the speaker aside were eight rebellious Republicans and 208 Democrats.
Left alone, the Republican caucus, despite its sharp internal divisions, was ready to dismiss Rep. Matt Gaetz’s assault on governance by the overwhelming margin that common sense demanded.
The Democrats, reluctant to vote for the opposition’s speaker, needed only to leave town or vote present. (Increasing Democratic absences from four to 10 would have been sufficient to keep the House running.)
But the Democratic caucus, appar
ently consumed by the partisan pleasure of tossing a grenade into the Republican caucus, marched in denial behind Rep. Gaetz’s extreme and nihilistic trumpet.
And the far-right forces, empowered by the Democrats, eventually installed a speaker much farther outside the political mainstream than the one the Democrats dethroned.
In retrospect, the House Democrats could have preempted the dramatic vote on Oct. 3 by assuring McCarthy, after the reviled bargain that gave Gaetz authority to move unilaterally to remove the speaker, that they were uninterested in playing Gaetz’s game and would not support any such solo motions.
This would have been criticized as a gift to McCarthy, but it would have weakened the far-right and perhaps left the Democrats in a better place today.
But the wisdom of sometimes making a concession becomes heresy amid increasingly fervid partisan wrangling.
As an elected official in Tucson for more than 10 years, I learned this: after all the rhetorical spinning, fingerpointing and posturing, the vote is what counts.
On Oct. 3, the House made history by voting to decapitate itself. It should not happen again.
Mark Stegeman teaches economics at University of Arizona’s Eller College of Management. He served on the governing board of the Tucson Unified School District for more more than 10 years. Reach him at markwstegeman@gmail.com.