Blame the system for the House speaker mess

The gridlock caused by the Republican Party’s failure to elect a speaker of the House of Representatives looks like a dysfunction of our old-fashioned Constitution. But the fault actually lies in the evolution of the American party system and the House’s own rules.

The speaker’s origin

Start with the Constitution’s text, which has almost nothing to say about the speaker of the House. It says only that “the House of Representatives shall chuse [sic] their Speaker and other officers.”

There is no further mention of the speaker until the 25th Amendment, which dates to the 1960s and assigns the speaker a role in receiving communications about a president’s temporary inability to perform his duties. The fact that the speaker is second in line for the presidency derives not from a statute, the Presidential Succession Act of 1947.

The reason the framers paid so little attention to the role of the speaker is that they assumed everyone knew what it looked like. Colonial and state legislatures typically had speakers in their lower houses. And England’s House of Commons had speakers since before 1367.

Incidentally, the speakers of the House of Commons were always members of Parliament. That is yet another reason to reject the preposterous urban legend that the speaker of the House doesn’t have to be a member of Congress.

The speaker’s power

Sure enough, in the U.S., the first speakers were not powerful figures — in fact, the odds are you’ve never heard them. (Frederick Muhlenberg, anyone?) Henry Clay, elected to the speakership in 1811 in his first term in the House, was the first national political figure to exercise substantial power in the role.

But the truly dominating position of the speaker began only in the 1880s through the power of the speaker’s position as chairman of the rules committee.

The rules of the House are a thicket of complexity and arcana that I won’t enter.

The key point is that those rules, which also govern how the speaker is chosen, are what say the House can’t pass legislation without a speaker. That wouldn’t be a big deal if the speaker were chosen non-politically to be a neutral parliamentarian.

It is highly relevant, however, in a world where the speaker needs to be chosen by the majority party and that party can’t settle on a candidate.

Because the dysfunction is caused by the combination of House rules and polarized partisanship, the only way to fix it would be to change one of those factors. The rules could be shifted so that a temporary speaker could preside over legislation. Or the minority party could provide some votes to a candidate from the majority party. Either fix would be political, not constitutional.

But the tricky thing about a standoff that emanates from the rules of the House is, of course, that you would need a clear majority to make any changes.

The takeaway is that, whenever a semblance of normalcy returns and it becomes possible to choose a speaker with meaningful support, there should be a bipartisan effort to change the rules to make it possible for the House to operate at a baseline level even when it is without a speaker.

The speaker’s absence

This wouldn’t entail giving all the speaker’s power to an interim speaker. It could include only, say, the possibility of presiding over emergency spending measures — including keeping the government running and providing military aid to allies.

Limiting the interim speaker’s role would avoid the problem of turning that person into the real speaker or weakening the real speaker by allowing some of the office’s power to be exercised by the interim speaker.

Although the Constitution says little about the speaker, the purpose of the document was to create checks and balances — not allow total meltdown when one party can’t get its act together.