Fighting for the Speakership

The House and the Rise of Party Government

Jeffery A. Jenkins, Charles Stewart

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780691156446, 9780691118123
• eBook ISBN: 9781400845460
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The Speaker of the House of Representatives is the most powerful partisan figure in the contemporary U.S. Congress. How this came to be, and how the majority party in the House has made control of the speakership a routine matter, is far from straightforward. Fighting for the Speakership provides a comprehensive history of how Speakers have been elected in the U.S. House since 1789, arguing that the organizational politics of these elections were critical to the construction of mass political parties in America and laid the groundwork for the role they play in setting the agenda of Congress today.


Jeffery Jenkins and Charles Stewart show how the speakership began as a relatively weak office, and how votes for Speaker prior to the Civil War often favored regional interests over party loyalty. While struggle, contention, and deadlock over House organization were common in the antebellum era, such instability vanished with the outbreak of war, as the majority party became an "organizational cartel" capable of controlling with certainty the selection of the Speaker and other key House officers. This organizational cartel has survived Gilded Age partisan strife, Progressive Era challenge, and conservative coalition politics to guide speakership elections through the present day. Fighting for the Speakership reveals how struggles over House organization prior to the Civil War were among the most consequential turning points in American political history.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

The U.S. House of Representatives is organized by whichever political party holds a majority of its seats. This fact has consequences. Controlling the organization of the House means that the majority party decides who will preside over its deliberations, who will set the policy agenda, and who will dominate the workhorses of the chamber: the standing committees. Organizing the House does not mean the majority party will win all battles, but it does give the party a leg up in virtually any question that gets considered by that body.

There is nothing in the Constitution that rests the organization of the House in the hands of the majority party. The practice has evolved over the past two centuries to the point that party organization of the House has become routinized. Ahead of each election, the two parties announce that they will meet in caucus on a certain date, just after the election, to choose not just their own leaders but also their nominees for the leadership positions of the chamber, notably the Speaker, as well as other officers, such as the Clerk. The party caucuses also select the committee slates, including the chairs. When the new House finally convenes, the decisions determined in the caucus are presented to the full House by the caucus leaders, where they are ratified either by party-line votes (as in the case of the speakership election) or by unanimous consent (as in the case of committee slates, including the chairs).

It was not always this way. For the first half century after the nation’s founding, it would be a stretch to say that parties controlled the organization of the House at all; it would be a lie to say that the organization of the House was routine. Although the Speaker and other officers who were chosen to lead the first several Congresses were known by contemporaries to be dedicated Federalists and Republicans, they were not nominated by Federalist or Republican caucuses. When caucuses arrived on the scene in the 1840s, their record was spotty. They sometimes settled on a nominee, sometimes not. Even when they did, the nomination often exhibited little weight on the final outcome. For example, anyone who was not physically present at the caucus meeting was under no obligation to support the nominee and was free to carry the fight onto the House floor. Thus, party caucuses might settle organizational matters, but they could also just be the first round of a fight that would spill out into the entire chamber.

Before the Civil War, struggle, contention, and deadlock over the organization of the House were common. Nearly one-third of all speakership contests from the founding of the Republic until the outbreak of the Civil War (13 of 41) took more than one ballot to resolve. At least twice, the minority party actually saw one of their own elected Speaker. Even the selection of subordinate officers could be contentious. During the same antebellum period, the House required multiple ballots to select its Clerk nine times and its Printer four times.

If the majority party did not routinely control the top officers of the House, why would we expect them to control the committees? Even though party caucuses and leaders had a role in determining committee lists, the composition of important congressional committees frequently favored the minority party well into the nineteenth century (Canon and Stewart 1995, 2001; Canon, Nelson, and Stewart 2002).

The first Speaker, Frederick Muhlenberg, was selected through an informal process that lacked any trappings of formal party politics, and he initially lacked the authority to appoint committees. Modern Speakers, such as Newt Gingrich, Dennis Hastert, and John Boehner, are recognized primarily as partisan agents who are expected (normatively and empirically) to use the formal levers of power in the House to further their parties’ legislative goals. The standing committees are constructed by party-based “committees on committees” that have increasingly used party loyalty as a major criterion in the distribution of prime committee assignments and chairmanships (Cox and McCubbins 1993; Dodd and Oppenheimer 2001; Aldrich and Rohde 2005; Sinclair 2005, 2006).

How did we move from the world of Muhlenberg to the world of Boehner? What difference did this evolution make for internal House politics, policy making, and the course of American political development? These are the questions that animate this book. At the empirical core is our account of how the majority party, formally constituted as the caucus sitting as a decision-making body, came to own the chief House officers, but especially the Speaker.¹ The empirical core of the book goes hand in hand with the theoretical core, which is to note that this “ownership” of the speakership and other top offices was the focal point of an organizational cartel in which the House offices were used in the furtherance of majority party goals. These goals were of three types:

first, to claim the patronage benefits that flowed from controlling the top House offices for the general benefit of the majority party, ultimately for the electoral advantage of the party;

second, to garner favor with the various factions within the majority party, so that they had more to gain by supporting the party’s leaders (who had been determined through a majority vote of the caucus) than by challenging those leaders in the larger arena of the House floor; and

third, to bend the agenda-setting apparatus of the House in the direction of the majority party’s policy aims.

This third goal suggests an overlap between the organizational cartel and the procedural cartel that Cox and McCubbins (1993, 2005) have identified as being at the heart of partisan power in the House. That is no accident. As Cox and McCubbins note, the existence of a procedural cartel—a coalition that controls agenda-setting power in the House—relies on an intraparty agreement about the election of the Speaker and the distribution of committee assignments. Our theoretical contribution is in showing that the organizational cartel on which the procedural cartel rests is itself endogenous. That is, an organizational cartel—a coalition that controls the selection of key House officers, including the Speaker, with certainty—did not emerge spontaneously; rather, it had to be built. Our empirical contribution is in showing how difficult it was for the majority party in the House to coordinate and become such an organizational cartel. While political entrepreneurs envisioned the construction of such an organizational cartel in the decades before the Civil War, a host of political forces delayed the majority party’s ability to consistently organize the chamber until the latter part of the nineteenth century.

Our larger theoretical agenda aside, the fact remains that political scientists and historians have shown little attention to how the Democratic and Republican Parties reached the point that they both now rely on self-contained, routinized procedures to manage—wholly within the caucuses—the struggle over who will be elected Speaker. Therefore, we proceed inductively by first asking about the series of battles that helped establish the caucus as the stage on which the fight for the speakership was conducted.

Party caucuses first arose in the mid-1790s in an attempt to bind party members on the critical organizational votes that are the first order of business when a new Congress convenes (Harlow 1917; Risjord 1992).² Yet they were only sporadically employed in the earliest years of the Republic and largely fell into disuse in the early years of the nineteenth century.

The role of the majority party caucus in the formal organization of the House reentered regular practice later in the nineteenth century. The grip of the majority party caucus on organizational matters tightened twice, at moments when the political stakes were high and party leaders saw control of the Speaker and other senior House officers as central to achieving their political goals. The first instance was during the early years of the Second Party System, when Martin Van Buren and his followers recognized that the formal leadership of the House possessed valuable resources for the creation of effective mass political parties in the United States. The second instance was during the Civil War, when efforts to effect a cross-party organization in the prior Congress nearly backfired for the majority Republicans.

These were two critical moments in the history of the House’s organization that resulted in the majority party caucus claiming an enhanced role in determining who would sit in the chair and who would dominate the committees. However, the influence of party on the House’s organization did not grow monotonically. Rather, from the 1830s to the 1860s, the House often fought bitterly over who the Speaker and other officers would be, with the party caucus playing a variable role in determining the final outcome. The primary reason why the majority party failed to guarantee its predominance in organizing the House after the 1830s is that Van Buren and his followers also unwittingly created a visible platform on which anti-and proslavery forces could test their strength in national politics. This platform was constructed by a House rules change in 1838 that for the first time made the ballot for Speaker public. (Previously, the balloting for all House officers, including Speaker, had been secret.) The rules change was instituted to give party leaders reliable information about who had supported the party nominee for Speaker and other officers. Before long, it was transformed into a mechanism for the ultras on both sides of the slavery debate to observe who was voting for nominees considered to be on the “right” side of the issue—not at all what the Van Burenites had in mind.

The modern Republican Party, starting with the second Civil War Congress, established the party caucus once and for all as the only legitimate venue for the resolution of intraparty divisions over who would be Speaker. The utility of settling internecine disputes in caucus and then presenting a united front on the floor was quickly recognized by the minority Democrats, who followed suit by settling on their Speaker nominee in caucus, too.

The Civil War Congresses were unique in American history because of the exclusion of the South from the body. The majority Republicans were a purely regional party by construction and highly cohesive. The minority Democrats were also Northern, but not by construction. After the South returned to the House and Reconstruction came to an end, the two parties became more evenly matched numerically. They also became more ideologically diverse. These two factors—narrow party margins and ideologically divided parties—had been the primary ingredients that fueled the intense battles over the speakership before the Civil War. And yet, unlike the antebellum era, the parties after the Civil War managed to keep their fights to themselves and prevent their ideological divisions from spilling out onto the House floor. As a consequence, when Thomas Brackett Reed (R-Maine) became Speaker in 1889, the common understanding in the House, bolstered by more than two decades of experience, was that the party caucuses were cohesive on organizational matters.³ The imposition of the Reed Rules in 1890 supported the development of tools to help the majority party control the legislative agenda and guide the course of policy making in the House. The regime set in place by the Reed Rules—which transformed the majority party into a procedural cartel and established the “modern structure of agenda power in the House” (Cox and McCubbins 2005, 50)—was nearly a century in the making.

The centrality of the party caucus for the organization of the House was demonstrated in the two most important challenges to majority party authority in the twentieth century. The first was the revolt against Speaker Joseph Cannon (R-Ill.) in 1909. In that case, the insurgent faction in the majority Republican Party refused the offer by Cannon to knock him out of the Speaker’s chair, which was an important recognition that when it came to personnel matters, the caucus was still king. The second was the revolt by progressive Republicans at the opening of the 68th Congress (1923), when, in a dispute over the rules, 20 progressives refused to vote for Frederick Gillett (R-Mass.) for Speaker. In the ensuing three-day standoff, there was never any doubt about whether the insurgents might join with the Democrats to organize the chamber—all the negotiating was internal to the Republican Party and centered on the majority leader, Nicholas Longworth (R-Ohio).

Finally, it is significant that in the middle part of the twentieth century, when the most dominant interparty policy coalition ever to walk the halls of Capitol Hill—the Conservative Coalition—was at the height of its power, disputes over who would be Speaker were always settled within the confines of the two party caucuses.

Thus, the modern Speaker sits at the top of two powerful institutions: the House of Representatives and the legislative party of which she or he is the leader. The former flows directly from the latter. The core narrative of this book explains how this happened and explores why the role of Speaker-as-party-leader is an institution that took as long to build as a small cathedral.

THE WIDER IMPLICATIONS OF SPEAKER-AS-PARTY-LEADER

The first contribution to scholarship this book makes is providing a comprehensive accounting of how Speakers have been elected in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1789 to the present. In our view, the fights over how the House would be organized, especially the fights before the Civil War, are among the most consequential turning points in American political history. They should be better known by students of Congress, parties, American history, and American political development. Therefore, telling the history of these conflicts fills a serious hole in our understanding of how Congress evolved into the institution it is today. We hope that by laying out these conflicts and suggesting how they fit into the larger politics of the age, we will entice others to pick up where we have left off.

Yet the history we recount in this book does more than plug an important empirical gap in our understanding of how Congress evolved. Studying how organizational politics developed in the House allows us to encounter more general themes about Congress and its role in the American political system. Here we mention two that particularly stand out: (1) the construction of mass political parties in the early nineteenth century and (2) the role that political parties play in guiding the agenda of Congress today.

The House and the building of mass political parties

In its early years, the American polity was an elite game by design. In time, mass politics came to dominate American politics at the national level. The circumvention of the original elite polity owes its initial success to Martin Van Buren, who was the brains behind the rise of Andrew Jackson and his transformation of American political life. It is an oft-told tale of how Jackson, denied the presidency in 1824, even though he won the most popular votes, connected with the Little Magician, who masterminded a plan that altered the American electoral landscape. This occurred when a network of pro-Jackson forces gained control of a critical set of state legislatures, which in turn changed the laws that governed how presidential electors were selected. Electors were now to be chosen directly, through the popular vote of a state’s electorate, rather than indirectly, through the vote of the state legislatures. This reform shifted the electoral terrain onto ground that Jackson’s followers were more adept at holding. This, in turn, led to a rapid democratization of American politics, as voters gladly took to the polls when they knew their votes would have a direct impact on choosing the next president.⁴

An important...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Introduction
• Chapter 2 The Evolving Roles and Responsibilities of House Officers in the Antebellum Era
• Chapter 3 Organizational Politics under the Secret Ballot
• Chapter 4 Bringing the Selection of House Officers into the Open
• Chapter 5 Shoring Up Partisan Control: The Speakership Elections of 1839 and 1847
• Chapter 6 Partisan Tumult on the Floor: The Speakership Elections of 1849 and 1855–1856
• Chapter 7 The Speakership and the Rise of the Republican Party
• Chapter 8 Caucus Governance and the Emergence of the Organizational Cartel, 1861–1891
• Chapter 9 The Organizational Cartel Persists, 1891–2011
• Chapter 10 Conclusion
• Appendixes House Officer Elections and Caucus Nominations
• References
• Index