US House Speaker’s Power Should Be ‘Slashed’ to Ease Time-Sensitive Selection - Legal Expert
20:39 GMT, 4 October 2023
The battle for the US House speakership has become such a high-stakes game because both Republicans and Democrats have helped accumulate enormous power in the speaker’s chair, a leading constitutional expert told Sputnik. They could avoid the endless debates and voting if they reversed that trend.
SputnikOn Tuesday, the US House of Representatives broke historical precedent and
vacated the office of speaker of the House, stripping US Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) of the third-most-powerful office in the United States.
Now, the House will have to
select a new speaker before it can proceed with other business, which includes passing the fiscal year 2024 budget that lawmakers recently gave themselves an additional 45 days to do. There is no clear alternative to McCarthy, who took 15 rounds of voting in January to achieve a majority.
Bruce Fein, a former US associate deputy attorney general and a leading constitutional scholar, told
Radio Sputnik’s Political Misfits on Wednesday that while McCarthy’s ouster was unprecedented, there had been several other attempts over the years to get rid of a House speaker with various degrees of success.
“I was involved myself in drafting a motion to vacate, [former US Rep.] John Boehner was the speaker. Now, John Boehner didn’t wait for the vote,” Fein said, noting that the Ohio Republican chose to resign first, on October 29, 2015. “He clearly resigned with the Sword of Damocles over his neck - same way that [former US President Richard] Nixon resigned rather than face an impeachment trial.”
“And in 1910, then-House Speaker Joe Cannon had his powers stripped. Now, it’s true they didn’t vacate the chair, but his powers were enormously scaled back,” Fein noted. “So, there have been revolts, but even two prior incidents doesn’t make a pattern, because you are spacing it out over 123 years. So it’s obvious this is unusual.”
“The Constitution does not require that the House speaker be a member of the House, so it could be anyone else,” Fein said.
4 October 2023, 06:19 GMT
On Tuesday, Vivek Ramaswamy, a candidate in the Republican presidential primary race, suggested that former US President Donald Trump should be chosen as speaker.
Fein noted that if Trump were to be found guilty of having participated in the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol, as he is presently accused in a federal criminal case, then he would be ineligible to hold any public office in the United States.
“There’s another element involved here that the press has underplayed in my judgment, and that is: the House speaker, traditionally, until Newt Gingrich was sworn in in 1995, was a relatively minor power in the House. The vast majority of authority was entrusted to the chairs of committees of Congress,” Fein explained. “The chairs and the committees, the Rules Committee, they decided the order of the proceedings, what amendments would be entertained, what bills would get to the floor, what hearings would be held.”
“Now that changed with what you would call the ‘Gingrich Revolution’ or ‘counter-revolution’ against the legislative branch,” Fein said. “When Gingrich came in, he migrated virtually all power to the speaker. The speaker appoints the committees, the committee chairs, he regulates what gets to the floor, how much time there is for debate, regulates and stipulates what the Rules Committee should do, and also gets the lion’s share of money in campaign fundraising to fund other members.”
“So that was a rule change. The other thing that Newt Gingrich did to strengthen his hand was that he slashed the budget of all the committees so they couldn’t hire anybody, they couldn’t retain talent that would establish what you might call a professional core of aides who could challenge leadership because they had expertise,” he explained, adding that with the change, most staff stayed “no more than a year or two, so they basically have no more institutional memory.”
4 October 2023, 16:58 GMT
Fein noted that ever since Gingrich, no speaker has ever surrendered back the power he accumulated in the speaker’s chair.
“And now we have a vacuum here, there’s no leadership now, the acting speaker has got no authority to do anything other than hold votes for the successor to McCarthy and I think it would be much easier to find a consensus candidate if the power of the speaker was slashed,” he said, noting how much the speaker conducts private negotiations with the Senate majority leader on key legislation, which they then give lawmakers just 24 hours on which to vote.
“The deliberative process has been totally compromised. And if that is done, it’ll make the choice of a successor much easier, because the stakes have become much lower,” Fein argued.
Fein noted that, contrary to popular perception, it was the Democrats who secured McCarthy’s fate, as they all voted to oust him and were only joined by a handful of Republicans sufficient to tip their narrow majority into a minority. Thus, the Democrats could also have a major role in selecting the new speaker.
“So it’s possible - and we saw this kind of coalition emerge in passing the [interim budget bill] 11th hour last Sunday, there you had more Democrats than Republicans voting for the bill. And it may well be that the Democrats will collaborate with Republicans and find a new speaker. It won’t be simply someone who’s solely selected out of the Republican ranks,” Fein said, noting that “if that’s the case, it’s going to be a long, long day until there’s a consensus.”
“It’s going to be chaotic for a while. I think this is going to hurt the Republicans, because it suggests that they really don’t know how to manage themselves, even though it was really the Democrats that threw McCarthy out, I think the public perception is the opposite. So the Republicans are going to have to scramble, which might cause them to compromise, because all that they really care about in the long run is staying in power and not losing to the Democrats in 2024.”