Pelosi would tell them that when they had 218 votes behind them, a majority in the House, she’d be happy to talk to them again: “But otherwise, recognize that we have to build consensus … and live to fight another day.”
The speaker’s role comes with many such moments, she recalled in an interview in her office on Thursday; as we talked, Republicans who now hold a tenuous majority in the House were huddled across the street in the Capitol, unable to come together to select their own leader to take over the wreckage that Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) has left behind.
Pelosi and others who held the gavel learned — but the deposed McCarthy never did — that one of the hardest and most vital things a speaker must do is say no, sometimes to friends and ideological allies. At times, her majority was so narrow she could afford to lose no more than three votes. But without a leader willing and powerful enough to summon that kind of fortitude, the House is ungovernable.
McCarthy’s constant appeasement of a handful of bellicose GOP members is what got us to this pitiful moment. He put their legislation on the floor knowing it would go no further, gave them key committee assignments — and even signed what was effectively the death warrant of his own speakership by agreeing to allow the rule in which any member could call for a vote to vacate the chair.
All of this should be an object lesson to whoever gets the job next. As departing speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) advised his own successor, Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.): “You can promise effort, but don’t promise results.” Both Boehner and Ryan saw their leadership undermined by the demands of a rising hard-right faction within their party, but it was McCarthy who ceded effective control of the chamber to them.
“Part of the job of the speaker is to manage reality rather than fantasy,” former speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) told me.
For Pelosi, who had a solidly liberal record, an early test came shortly after Democrats regained their majority in the 2006 election and elevated her to the speakership. The big issue in that election had been the Iraq War, and she had been one of the most outspoken opponents to it. Which is why many in her caucus felt betrayed when she did not stand in the way of Congress providing more funds for the conflict without insisting on a clear timetable for ending it — an end date that would not pass the Senate nor survive George W. Bush’s veto.
“My message to them was, I’ll compare my credentials on opposing this war to anybody here, but as long as the troops are at war, we must support them,” Pelosi recalled. “I basically said to them, we all support the troops. But we have to do it when it’s difficult as well as when it’s easy.”
In 1996, Gingrich brought legislation raising the minimum wage to the House floor — a popular measure conservatives were against and yet knew would pass with a combination of Democratic and more moderate GOP support.
In that year’s election, “we had 23 districts where members thought they would lose if they didn’t get a vote,” Gingrich told me. It was an especially bitter pill to swallow for Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Tex.), who opposed the very existence of a minimum wage. And yet, Armey argued in a private meeting, the survival of their majority hinged on allowing the House to work its collective will.
When Boehner was speaker, one of his closest friends in the House would regularly come to his office and plead for a seat on the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee. Boehner would hear out the member, then tell him: “Not gonna happen.”
But now “the reality is we have a lot of members who have distorted views of what’s possible,” said Brendan Buck, a former aide to both Boehner and Ryan.
It might be that only one of the bomb-throwers themselves — say, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) — would have the credibility it takes to say no to them, though there is little evidence he has that capacity for pragmatism and respect for the institution. Or maybe it has to be a graybeard such as Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), who is respected across the various factions within a party that is squabbling with a pettiness that would put a small-town city council to shame.
But someone has to do it. At this moment of peril for the country, and the world, there is too much at stake for any new speaker to continue indulging the least responsible actors in Congress. Is there a grown-up in the House?
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