The speaker of the house is often seen as a rather boring role, a glorified title for the majority leader, with no great acts or memorable political moves.
Functioning as the shift manager of the House, making sure the House works properly on the bills being presented to it while slightly advocating the ideology of their party and voters, a google search looking for the term “speaker of the house” yields no news articles written on major newspapers between 2015 and 2022.
Powerful, not sexy - what does the speaker actually do?
Day to day the speaker creates order from the chaos which haunts government structures and institutions, especially those who are made out of two rivalry groups.
Debate is structured on the House floor often advocating the speakers political agenda, while also following the strict rules of the House as they are written in the start of every new congress, usually as an edited version of the last House rules.
Rules pass with a simple majority, giving the majority party - if not torn apart from the inside - an easy pass to write the rules as they see fit for their own agenda.
That boring man in his boring suit makes sure his small part of government is well behaved and functioning, and under this veil of boredom hides an awesome power in appointing those who serve in the Rules Committee.
The House Committee on Rules or The Rules Committee holds the power to prevent and allow the types of possible amendments, maximum amount of amendments and length of debate. The committee can also simply rewrite or delete certain parts of the bill, (and remove the House’s ability to overturn said action with an amendment.).
The committee is mostly comprised of majority party members, out of the 13 members of the committee in recent Congresses, nine majority, four minority.
In choosing which members of the party will take part in the committee can the speaker influence the committee, a speaker might appoint more progressive members as a way to promise progressive bills have the best chance of turning into laws.
Disruptive and chaotic, what the hell happened with Kevin McCarthy?
In october third with 216 votes for his ousting and 210 votes for his keeping, Kevin McCurthy lost his role as speaker of the house leading to a complete government shutdown, simply put, the House has no power without the speaker.
A win for the democratic party?
One could think for a long time about the potential benefits the minority party in the house might get from a government shutdown, nevertheless the minority party will most likely always vote against the current speaker, it is better to have no speaker than have a republican speaker.
Assuming the minority party controls between a third and a half of the seats in the house, a handful of members from the majority party need nothing but a match, once a “Motion to Vacate” is proposed they could remove any speaker they don’t believe is advancing their agenda.
Matt Gaets, a pro trump republican did exactly that, one motion to vacate and eight republicans later, McCurthy was ousted.
It wasn’t always that easy.
Unable to win the speakership due to opposition from Matt Gaetz and other far right republicans, McCurthy bought their support on the condition that a single member of the House could start a motion to vacate the speaker, practically burying his own grave.
McCarthys bet was the Democrats and his fellow republicans would put the stability of government before partisan politics, making one thing very clear ; there those who wish to spread chaos a political agenda in the current american government, and well, it is unclear if the government is able to handle such threats to its continuous function.
Bibliography:
Chapter 50. Rules and Precedents of the House , govinfo.gov
Special Rule Process | House of Representatives Committee on Rules, rules.house.gov
House Committee on Rules , The Lugar Center.
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