In light of the recent kerfuffle regarding the many elections for a new Speaker of the House, we decided it was time to break down the powers and history of the second-most powerful job in DC.
Dan Cassino of Farleigh Dickinson University tells us all about the Speaker; from fundraising to the rules committee to the steering committee to a self-proclaimed Beelzebub to what the repeated failed elections for a Speaker portends for Congress.
Click here to listen to our episode on How A Bill (Really) Becomes a Law and click here to learn more about committees.
Transcript
C101_Speaker of the House.mp3
Archival: With that, I want to congratulate the speaker. I do not have the gavel.
Archival: I passed this great gavel of our government with resignation, but with resolve.
Archival: Speaker, as I hand you this gavel, I just ask that you keep in mind of all the voices in America that have a voice on this floor.
Archival: Before I hand the gavel over to our new speaker, let me say to him simply, let's bury the hatchet.
Nick Capodice: You're listening to Civics 101. [00:00:30] I'm Nick Capodice.
Hannah McCarthy: I'm Hannah McCarthy.
Nick Capodice: And today we are talking about the history and ever shifting powers of what is sometimes referred to as the second most powerful job in Washington, D.C., the speaker of the House.
Hannah McCarthy: Nick. So this position has been in the news an awful lot lately and probably shall continue to be in the months to come. So should we do an as of this recording thing here?
Archival: Major breakthrough [00:01:00] in the House of Representatives. After three weeks of chaos and dysfunction among Republicans, the GOP finally came together to elect a new speaker of the House, conservative Mike Johnson of Louisiana.
Nick Capodice: As of this recording November 1st, 2023, after many failed votes and three weeks of no speaker in the House for the first time in US history, the newly elected current speaker of the House is Mike Johnson. He is a Republican congressman from Louisiana, and he is the 56th person to claim that [00:01:30] role.
Hannah McCarthy: And I would really like to talk about what it means that there have been so many failed votes. But can we just talk about the job first?
Nick Capodice: Absolutely. That sounds good. I'll save the current situation, dealing with the speaker of the House for last.
Hannah McCarthy: All right. So for starters, is this job in the Constitution?
Nick Capodice: Barely, Hannah. Article one, section two says the quote, House of Representatives shall chuse their speaker and other officers.
Hannah McCarthy: That's it.
Nick Capodice: That's it. And it's choose with a 'u'.
Hannah McCarthy: So [00:02:00] in the case of the speaker, this was a we're just going to let the House of Representatives figure out the job kind of thing, right?
Nick Capodice: Yeah. It was. And for a first century or so as a nation, the job was pretty much like the one this guy had.
Archival: We don't name people in the chamber, but people must observe the rules. No, no order, order, order. I am simply and politely informing.
Nick Capodice: To prevent him from crashing into the studio in a rage like the Kool-Aid guy; his name is John Bercow. He's the [00:02:30] former speaker of the House of Commons in the UK. So the job is not outlined in any way in the Constitution. So all the powers of the speaker are created in the House rules by the House. And yes, the speaker's job was to keep order, sort of basic administrative stuff. You talk and then you talk. All questions and speeches were addressed to the speaker. Et cetera.
Hannah McCarthy: Now, that job does not sound like the second most powerful job in Washington, D.C..
Nick Capodice: No, it does not.
Hannah McCarthy: So [00:03:00] what changed?
Nick Capodice: Well, I'm going to say here, and I'll say it again. The powers of the speaker of the House are entirely decided by the House. They could change tomorrow if a majority of the House agreed. But initially, you know, right after we formed as a nation, the job waxed and waned slightly in terms of power for about a hundred years. But the big shift came from a self-identified Beelzebub.
Dan Cassino: The peak of power. The speaker of the House was under Speaker Joe Cannon. [00:03:30]
Hannah McCarthy: Oh Dan Cassino.
Nick Capodice: That's right. Hannah, I needed this broken down by a pro as fast as humanly possible. So I did call Dan Cassino, frequent guest of the show, professor of political science at Fairleigh Dickinson University and executive director of the FDU poll, which does polling on myriad relevant political things. But Hannah, they also just did one on whether people believe the Jersey devil, the flying Hooved monster that lives in the Pine Barrens, exists.
Hannah McCarthy: Does Dan believe the [00:04:00] Jersey devil exists?
Dan Cassino: The Jersey devil definitely does not exist. But you know what 18% of people in new Jersey think he does, and that's good enough for me.
Nick Capodice: But back to the first super powerful speaker, Joe Cannon. He started in politics as a proponent of Lincoln and a member of the Republican Party in 1858, and then became speaker of the House 50 years later.
Dan Cassino: In the early 20th century, around 1919 12, and then again up until 1923, on and off and under Joe Cannon. Joe [00:04:30] Cannon referred to himself as a czar. This was not like other people talking about him saying this guy is like a czar. He referred to himself as a czar. My favorite quote from Joe Cannon has him saying, end quote Behold, Mr. Cannon, the Beelzebub of Congress. Gaze on this noble, manly form me, Beelzebub, me the czar, as in I am in charge of everything.
Hannah McCarthy: Oh, wow.
Nick Capodice: Right. Joe Cannon was saying, this is my house. But you can't just say I'm Beelzebub. You have to actually be in charge.
Dan Cassino: And [00:05:00] the reason Joe Cannon was in charge of everything is because Joe Cannon controlled the Rules Committee. Now. You and I have talked with the Rules Committee before, but the Rules Committee is the most important committee in the House of Representatives that nobody knows anything about.
Nick Capodice: By the way. Dan talks about this in our episode, how a Bill really Becomes a law. We got a link in the show notes.
Dan Cassino: But the Rules Committee does is it decides which bills are going to get to the floor and which amendments are going to be allowed to those bills. And if any talking is even going to be allowed those bills. Most of time they report out what's called a closed rule, meaning no [00:05:30] amendments, no talking, shut up and vote. But this is entirely up to the speaker, at least under Joe Cannon. He appointed everyone on the rules Committee, meaning he personally decided what bills were going to come up and what bills were going to die in early death without anyone ever seeing them.
Hannah McCarthy: For anyone who wants to know the importance of getting a bill out of committee and onto the floor for a vote. We never tire of stating that over 90% of proposed bills die in committee.
Nick Capodice: Thank you Hannah. And in terms of the Joe Cannon [00:06:00] situation, if, say, the entire Republican Party was in support of a bill, they all wanted it to be brought to the floor, they all wanted it to be passed. Joe Cannon, speaker of the House, could just say, nope, not bringing it to the floor for a vote, and there was nothing anyone could do.
Dan Cassino: This was so much power, and he caused so many people to be upset at him that once, while he and some of his allies were out of town, there was actually a revolt in Congress. Progressives on both Democratic and Republican Party got together and [00:06:30] passed a bill to try and limit the powers of the speaker by limiting the extent to which he could appoint members to the Rules Committee to create independent Rules Committee, so the speaker wouldn't be in charge of everything.
Nick Capodice: Joe Cannon lost complete control of the Rules Committee, and thus the role of the speaker of the House lost a lot of its power until the 1990s, when Newt Gingrich was part of the first Republican majority of the House in decades.
Archival: I hereby end 40 years of [00:07:00] Democratic rule of this House.
Nick Capodice: So a little committee talk. The steering committee is the one that decides who gets to be on the other committees. And until Gingrich, the most senior member of the majority party on any committee, was the head of that committee. Now you can listen to our episode on committees to see just how powerful they are. By the way, they're kind of everything.
Hannah McCarthy: All right. And just to recap, the Rules Committee is very powerful because they determine how a bill will be [00:07:30] voted on. And the steering committee is also quite powerful because they determine who exactly gets to be on all the other committees, including the aforementioned rules committee.
Nick Capodice: Absolutely. And I've got a little more Rules Committee stuff coming your way, Hannah. But first, back to Newt Gingrich, who made a move to give the speaker of the House cannon esque power.
Dan Cassino: So he got rid of the seniority rule. And so suddenly you not only have to be a senior member, but you have to be in good graces with [00:08:00] the steering committee. The Republican steering Committee, which is led by and mostly appointed by Newt Gingrich. So, again, he's not doing he's doing indirectly through the steering committee. Gingrich also reasserted a great deal of control over the Rules Committee, because the steering committee decides who gets a committee seat, including on the rules committee. So Gingrich is basically controlling who gets on the Rules Committee, albeit indirectly. So suddenly after Gingrich and Democrats, of course, when they took back power in the House, Representatives also followed these rules. The speaker suddenly gets all this extra power. [00:08:30] Now, there.
Nick Capodice: Are term limits of how long you can be the head of a committee. You can't do it for more than two terms. But surprise, surprise, that limit can be waived by. wanna hazard a guess?
Hannah McCarthy: I'm going to roll the dice here and say that it's probably speaker of the House.
Nick Capodice: Seven come 11 McCarthy.
Hannah McCarthy: Okay, so the power is starting to show here, but I want to get back to what you mentioned earlier about how the Rules Committee decides how a bill will be voted on or amendments that are going to [00:09:00] be added to it. Can you give me a for instance here?
Nick Capodice: Absolutely.
Dan Cassino: The speaker has power to the extent that he can control the committees that are actually looking at the bill. So farm bill first. The Agriculture Committee has to look at it. They report that bill out. Then after they report the bill out, then it's going to go to the Rules Committee. And the Rules Committee can decide. We don't want to hear that bill, which case? The bill is dead. Or they can decide we are going to hear the bill, but we're going to put in certain amendments. They'll be allowed or certain amendments that will not be allowed, or we'll just have a rule in there that says, this guy gets to give amendments and this guy doesn't. [00:09:30] We even could get wacky with the rules. My personal favorite is the king of the Hill rule. King of the Hill rule says we're going to have a whole bunch of amendments in which everyone gets the most votes, gets in the bill. You can do literally whatever you want. The one that gets people most upset about these rules, of course, is a self-executing rule that says that if the rule is passed, the bill itself is considered to have been passed.
Hannah McCarthy: Hold on. Can you run that by me again?
Nick Capodice: Yeah. Me too. When Dan said this to me, I must have had my head tilted like a golden retriever. [00:10:00] Nick.
Dan Cassino: Nick is looking at me like this doesn't make any sense. So here's the way it works. When a bill is reported out of the Rules Committee, the first thing that happens is the entire House has to vote on the rule to adopt the rule for that bill. Once they adopt the rule for the bill, then that bill gets calendared and the speaker of the House is going to add it, and we're going to vote at some point on that bill. What a self-executing rule does is it says if you vote for this rule, we believe we're just going to consider that you have voted for the underlying bill. So which [00:10:30] means the bill, the underlying bill that the rule is about gets passed, despite the fact that no one actually ever votes for the bill.
Hannah McCarthy: All right. Is Dan saying here that the Rules Committee can make it so that just them agreeing on the rules for a bill makes the bill pass without a vote of any kind? Like how how is that possible?
Nick Capodice: That's exactly it. And it's not common. Newt Gingrich did this 38 times during his tenure. Nancy Pelosi, [00:11:00] interestingly, she considered it to pass the Affordable Care Act, but she didn't do it in the end. This is a way to pass extremely controversial legislation without anyone taking the fall, because it never goes to the floor.
Dan Cassino: So no one can actually criticize me for voting for the bill because I, Representative Dan Casino, never vote for the bill. What's my what's the ad against me going to say? Dan Casino voted for a rule that stated that if the rule was passed, then the underlying bill would also be moved. [00:11:30] The heck is that?
Hannah McCarthy: You know, I think I'd still vote for Dan.
Nick Capodice: Oh, yeah, without a doubt. Well, we've got to take a quick break here, after which I'm going to talk a little bit about how the speaker is involved with fundraising, as well as an assessment of how much power the speaker has right now. Fall of 2023. Short version, not as much, but you're going to love the long version.
Hannah McCarthy: But before that break, just a reminder that Nick and I write a newsletter about the funny, depressing, trivial, and [00:12:00] sometimes even beautifully banal things that we discover when making this show. It's called extra credit. It is free. It comes out every two weeks, and you can sign up at our website, civics101podcast.org.
Hannah McCarthy: We're back. We're talking about the speaker of the House here on Civics 101. And Nick, you were going to talk about how the speaker is involved with fundraising. [00:12:30]
Dan Cassino: So speakers of the House in the modern era run leadership PACs.
Nick Capodice: Again, Dan Cassino, professor at Fairleigh Dickinson University and nonbeliever in the Jersey devil.
Dan Cassino: So we all know that PAC is a political action committee. The speaker of the House raised a lot of money on their own. Oftentimes. Imagine you're Nancy Pelosi, you are representing Berkeley. You have more money than you know what to do with because no one's even ever running against you. So you raise all this money. What are you going to do with it? The answer is you're going to give that money to other members of your party in order to buy their loyalty. [00:13:00]
Nick Capodice: Nancy Pelosi, by the way, Hannah is a very, very effective fund raiser since she entered leadership in the House in 2002. She has raised over $1 billion for the Democratic Party.
Hannah McCarthy: What?
Dan Cassino: In order to say, hey, look, I'm helping you get reelected. So maybe you want to vote for me and consider supporting me for speaker. The farther you are from the median of your party, the more you need to be giving people money in order to get them to vote for you. And Nancy Pelosi gave a lot of money. [00:13:30] What about Kevin McCarthy? Oh, Kevin McCarthy also has a huge leadership PAC. Kevin McCarthy, also, to those eight members who voted to oust him, those eight rebels who voted to oust him, he gave them $150,000 last year. Even the people who don't like him, he's still giving money to or was was giving money to. Now he's not the speaker anymore, but he still has that PAC. Of course.
Hannah McCarthy: Does the speaker have to be there all the time, like holding the gavel and saying, who can speak and all of that?
Dan Cassino: No, of course not. So the speaker speaker has other stuff [00:14:00] to do. All members of Congress, if you watch C-Span, the House representatives is almost always empty. The reason you won't notice that is because C-Span is not allowed to move its camera, so C-Span can't move its camera. The speaker of the House, once they pass the rules, then has to keep its camera just focused on the front. So you just see the guy who's speaking, you don't see that nobody's there. The speaker of the House is oftentimes not there because they have important fundraising to do, and they've got to meet with people. They've got lots of stuff to get done. So but there's nothing terribly important happening. The speaker of the House is not going to be there. Right. Speaker was going to [00:14:30] do other things, and they deputize other people in order to recognize speakers and all of the other technical nonsense that happens when you're watching C-Span.
Hannah McCarthy: All right. Real quick, who can do the job? Does the speaker have to be a member of the House of Representatives?
Nick Capodice: Now, there is some disagreement about this, but technically anyone can do it.
Dan Cassino: There is nothing in the rules that says a dog can't be speaker.
Archival: He's right! Ain't no rules in the dog can't play basketball.
Dan Cassino: We are [00:15:00] fully in Airbud territory. There's nothing that says you have to be a member of the House of Representatives to be speaker of the House. So we had people floating for a president. Donald Trump could be speaker of the House Airbud could be speaker of the House. Nick Capodice could be speaker of the House. They can elect anyone they want. It's actually a little bit like being elected to Pope, except you don't get to have a funny hat.
Hannah McCarthy: All right, Nick, just one last thing here. Let's examine the elephant that has been sitting there patiently in the corner for 20 minutes, twirling its trunk. What does Dan think is going on with what [00:15:30] I think is probably fair to call a debacle? Over the last month, when the House was unsuccessful to nominate a speaker.
Nick Capodice: Yeah, let's get to that. Dan started off by telling me what the power of the speaker is like when you have the full majority fully backing them.
Dan Cassino: So the speaker is one of the most powerful people in Washington. When the speaker has control of the House, they can do whatever they want. As long as that speaker has 218 votes on their side, they can say, up is [00:16:00] down, black and white. They can pass any bill they want whatsoever. There's no filibuster. There's no way for the minority to get any input whatsoever. As long as you control the Rules Committee, you have 218 votes. You can do all sorts of things. You can force the opposition into embarrassing votes. They don't want to take the rules committee. You can make them vote for things they don't want to vote for. Make them vote against things they don't want to vote against just to create embarrassing ads, which something happens all the time. You can use these exotic rules to make of all these crazy things happen where people are voting [00:16:30] for amendments that are never going to get in, or don't vote for amendments that are self-executing rules so you can pass bills that anyone actually voting for in the first place. You have absolute power like the Emperor. If you have 218 votes, if you don't have 218 votes, though, as we're seeing right now, you're out.
Nick Capodice: Now. Mike Johnson was indeed elected speaker with 220 votes. Every Republican voted for him. But the GOP majority in the House is so slim, so narrow. If only a handful of Republicans don't like anything [00:17:00] he does, we're going to be right back where we were last month.
Hannah McCarthy: But why is this happening right now Nick?
Nick Capodice: Dan told me it wasn't about the speaker, necessarily. He said it's about the strength of our political parties.
Dan Cassino: Political parties are so much weaker than they used to be. Political parties used to be very, very strong. I live in a state in new Jersey where we still have incredibly strong parties. What does that mean? In my district, the district next to mine, we had a member of our state assembly who was very popular. [00:17:30] Her constituents loved her. She'd been in office a long time. She upset the party and as a result, even though she was popular, even though she would certainly win any primary she was in, she gets kicked out of office by the party because she was embarrassing them. That's when you've got strong party control. The sort of convulsions we've had in the House of Representatives do not happen in a system with strong party control, because the in an ideal world, the speaker has levers of power to get people to play nice.
Nick Capodice: But over the last [00:18:00] 4050 years, we have slowly removed those levers of power. And what we see now is the end result that the speaker is not leading the party. The speaker is subject to the whims of the party. Now, state party power and thus state speakers of the House are still enormously powerful. Dan said that if a revolt like the one where Kevin McCarthy was ousted, if that happened in new Jersey?
Dan Cassino: They would have been gone. They would have been gone a long time ago. Right. The House, the the state [00:18:30] party, the county, the county party and the state party and the assembly leader, the equivalent of speaker of the House would have shut them down, and they would have either learned to play nice or they would have been out of office. And it doesn't matter how much the individual voters wanted them, they would have been gone. I know it sounds like we're making a mafia type threat and this is new Jersey, but it doesn't have to go that far. There's going to be relegated to ballot Siberia, or they're going to be gerrymandered into the district. Strong parties make sure that you have a strong speaker that can get stuff done. We've done [00:19:00] is reduce the power of the parties. Individual candidates now have so much more power than they did in the past. They can go on news, they can go on TV, they can raise money from constituents, raise money from all over the country. They don't need the speaker anymore. If they don't need the speaker, they don't need the party. That leverage is gone and we're all paying the price for it.
Anti Cassino Campaign: Over the last two years, Dan Cassino has done some pretty underhanded political wheeling and dealing. Cassino [00:19:30] approved a legislative rule that contained a provision where the House of Representatives then deemed a second piece of legislation as approved, without requiring a separate vote, because it was specified as such in the rule. You never vote for.
Dan Cassino: You just vote for the rule. And the speaker says, yeah, that's good enough.
Anti Cassino Campaign: Maybe Cassino should spend more time legislating and less time not believing in the new Jersey devil. Real Americans think it's time for a change. It's time we elect a member of Congress who's loyal, warm, and can sink three pointers with his [00:20:00] nose. Americans think it's time for air Bud, paid for by the Council for Americans who want more canine representation in Washington, D.C., for America Foundation.
Speaker2: That dog will hunt.
Speaker7: Mr. speaker.
Nick Capodice: That is our episode on the speaker of the House. This episode is made by me. Nick Capodice with you. Hannah McCarthy. Thank you. Christina Phillips is our senior producer. Rebecca Lavoie, our executive producer. Music in this episode by Scott Holmes. Origami. Reptile. Lobo, [00:20:30] loco Hollis, Nico, the new Fools, Martin Moses, Spring gang, ext. Bonfield, Francis. Wells, Dan. Casinos personal theme song is Electro Lab by Scott Gratton. And finally, my favorite zebrowska of the house, Chris Zabriskie. Civics 101 is a production of NHPR, New Hampshire Public Radio. Airports.