Note 35. Polarization, Factions, the Demise of Speaker Kevin McCarthy, and Election of Speaker Mike Johnson

With a Concluding Comment on Congressional Parties as Cartels

Jan 13, 2019

Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) election as speaker of the House and removal from that office nine months later raises questions about the nature of the speaker’s power, whether McCarthy has weakened the institution of the speakership, and how Republican factional politics fits with descriptions of House policy making as highly centralized and its parties as deeply polarized. In January 2023, it took 15 ballots, more than in any speaker election since 1859, for McCarthy to acquire his 216-vote majority, with six Republicans voting present on the final vote, to win election. The following October, Republican Matt Gaetz (FL) took the lead in sponsoring a resolution to vacate the office of speaker. He acquired the support of five other Republicans who, along Democrats dismayed with their treatment under McCarthy, voted to force McCarthy to give up the speakership. This made McCarthy the first speaker to be deposed by a vote of the House. He served just 270 days in the office.

A preview: McCarthy’s concessions to the renegade Republicans to win the speakership made him a weaker speaker than recent speakers. McCarthy’s reputation as a leader suffered and he committed to taking steps in the current Congress that limit his discretion. Nevertheless, few of the speaker’s formal powers as leader of the House and leader of the majority party were compromised. Rather, even the most important concession—the appointment of archconservatives to the Rules Committee—represented how the speaker uses his power rather without reducing the formal power itself. The necessity of making concessions to the renegades surely foreshadowed a year in Congress that proved difficult for McCarthy to govern. He continued to make concessions to the right wing of his party in the hope of passing appropriations bills and avoid a government shutdown. These concessions never satisfied Gaetz and his compatriots and frustrated Democrats, which led to his demise.

Essential Background

Over the last half century, policy making in Congress has become more centralized in top party leaders. This is most obvious in the House, where the speaker benefits from powers granted by both House and party rules, has become the director of the legislative process. In both houses, policy making has become remarkably centralized. That is, the legislative agenda, political strategies, and key features of major policies are set by party leaders. Most major policies is set through negotiations conducted by top party leaders and administration officials and often is enacted through omnibus bills written under the supervision of top leaders and their staffs. Policy is not set unilaterally, with many details left to committees and their staffs, but negotiations and building winning coalitions is centered on party leaders. That is the reason House Republican radicals made such an issue of how new Speaker Kevin McCarthy would use his power in the 118th Congress.

The centralization of policy making was a profound change from the policy-making process typical of the mid-20th century Congress, sometimes called the “textbook Congress.” The textbook era was characterized by strong committees and committee chairmen (nearly all were men) and by weak parties and central leaders. The process was labeled “decentralized” because a great deal of deference was given to the work of committees, which wrote and reviewed the details of most legislation and nearly always won majority support in the full House and Senate. Chairmen dominated their committees so that each house appeared to be run by two dozen or so leaders of powerful committees. Top party leaders—the speaker of the House and the Senate majority leader—scheduled legislation for floor consideration, but, with some important exceptions, they did not play a significant role in setting the committee agendas or designing the content of legislation. Instead, they supported and facilitated the efforts of the committee chairmen and became involved whenever their assistance in rounding up votes, timing floor consideration, or structuring the floor agenda might prove useful.

Three strong political forces provide the foundation for today’s centralized policy making in Congress: Deep polarization of the parties, relentless competition for majority control of the House and Senate, and, in that mix of polarized parties fighting for control, factional politics. These forces led legislators to transform the policy-making process.

Partisan Polarization

Since the 1970s, the parties have drifted apart (Figure 35-1). The Democrats have become more uniformly liberal; the Republicans have become more uniformly conservative. The process of polarization had many elements, including these developments:

· Southern states changed from being a one-party Democratic region to being largely dominated by Republicans. Starting in the 1970s, mostly conservative Democrats were replaced by conservative Republicans, which made the Democrats in Congress more uniformly liberal and the Republicans in Congress more uniformly conservative. Southerners Trent Lott (R-MS) and Newt Gingrich (R-GA) were elected to Congress in the 1970s; Dick Armey and Tom DeLay, both Texans, were elected in the 1980s.

· Moderate Republicans, mostly from the East and Midwest, were replaced by liberal Democrats, further reducing the number of members willing to work with the other party. In the Senate alone, Republicans lost many legislators over the 1970s and 1980s who would be considered quite moderate today, among them John Sherman Cooper (KY), Jacob Javits (NY), Mark Hatfield (OR), Bob Packwood (OR), Charles Percy (IL), Hugh Scott (PA), Richard Schweiker (PA), and Lowell Weicker (CT).

· As regional realignment of partisanship continued, the number of cross-pressured legislators—Republicans from liberal states and districts and Democrats from conservative states and districts—declined to a very low number, sharply reducing the number of legislators with an incentive to participate in bipartisan coalitions.

· Political elites, most notably congressional Republicans, took stronger, more ideological positions and provided more strongly ideological cues to the electorate. Gingrich emerged as a leader and chief strategist for the movement in the 1980s. He became party whip in 1989 and speaker in 1995. Armey and DeLay were his majority leader and whip.

· Political activists and wealthy donors, first on the Republican side, recruited more ideological candidates for office and mobilized support for them.

· The creation of cable television, talk radio, and eventually the internet and social media provided financially viable ways for narrowcasting to target political audiences .

The net effect was to move the Republicans farther to the right than Democrats moved to the left (Figure 35-1).

On that foundation, Trump arrived on the scene and quickly radicalized elements of the Republican party. Trump added a heavy dose of conservative populism—with a strong anti-establishment theme—and mobilized voters to his party who were attracted to him and his rhetoric, generating a wave of Republican officeholders, including many members of the House party, who accepted his leadership and political tactics.

Contested Majority Control

The partisan polarization is deepened by the competition for majority control of Congress, which has intensified in recent decades. In the period between 1959 and 1980, Democrats enjoyed large majorities in both houses, and neither party considered a change of majority control of Congress a realistic possibility. In 1980 Republicans won a majority in the Senate, while Republican Ronald Reagan won the White House. Since then, majority control has flipped five times in the House and seven times in the Senate, the House and Senate were controlled by different parties in eight of 20 Congresses, and the typical size of the majority party shrank (see Figure 35-2).

With partisan control so uncertain, congressional parties intensified their efforts to win the next election, often at the expense of serious legislating. “Message politics” about the parties began to take priority over policy making. Leaders promised and delivered upgraded public relations and campaign efforts. Party staffs grew by leaps and bounds, greatly increasing leaders’ ability to monitor and coordinate policy making. Leadership PACs raised and distributed more money and, to bolster candidate recruitment and support activities, the parties’ campaign committees expanded their staffs and started assigning “dues” to members based on their ability to pay.

Factions and Party Size

Party factions are integral to the story. For a party’s dominant faction, controlling the party is a tool for controlling the House when the party was in the majority. Centralization—with the speaker orchestrating the legislative process—serves the interests of the dominant faction. In the 1960s and 1970s, House liberals organized under the Democratic Study Group championed the cause of stronger (and liberal) leadership. They insisted on using the speaker’s powers in their interest and were instrumental to giving the speaker greater influence over committees, including appointments to the Rules Committee. Since then, the Progressive Caucus and Congressional Black Caucus have pushed the party in a liberal direction.

In the 1980s, Republican Newt Gingrich formed the Conservative Opportunity Society to push his party to less compromising legislative strategies and more media-oriented party operations. After his election as speaker in the 1990s, Gingrich asserted even stronger control of committees and the House agenda, sharply reduced the independence and resources of committee and subcommittee chairs, and beefed up leadership staff. In the new century, the Tea Party and eventually the Freedom Caucus organized to pressure their party, when in the majority, to change House rules to empower their members and to demand that party leaders adopt more radical strategies. The effect of factions since the 1980s was to deepen partisan polarization and more strongly centralize policy making.

It is in that context that we must view McCarthy’s struggle with the more radical Freedom Caucus members. Differences over policy priorities, legislative strategies, and willingness to compromise can divide members of a party even when differences in policy preferences among fellow partisans are small and the parties are deeply polarized. Motivated in part by outside conservative forces, the House Freedom Caucus (HFC), formed in 2015, has demanded that House Republicans pursue more radical strategies and be less willing to compromise with Democrats. Republicans, they insist, must be willing to refuse spending authority for government agencies and deny increases in the debt limit to force Democrats to accept major cuts in federal social, health, and retirement programs. In recent Congresses, HFC has had 40-50 members—about 20 percent of all House Republicans.

The influence of the HFC, like any faction, depends on numbers. John Boehner (R-OH) received only 216 of 241 Republican votes to reelect him speaker in January 2015, with 25 Republicans, mostly Freedom Caucus members, voting for someone else to register their protest. With only 188 Democrats at the time, Boehner still won reelection. Nevertheless, the opposition of a larger contingent of HFC legislators to Boehner’s negotiations with Democrats on spending and debt limit bills produced an impasse and motivated Boehner to resign the speakership in October 2015.

In 2023, with only 222 Republicans and 212 Democrats, the 20 renegade Republicans who initially voted against McCarthy’s election as speaker could deny McCarthy election and demand concessions. The small margin empowered even fewer radicals, the most radical HFC members, to gain concessions from the speaker in how he would exercise his power for the 118th Congress.

McCarthy’s Concessions

Much of the commentary on Kevin McCarthy’s concessions to party renegades in January 2022 might lead us to conclude that the era of strong speakers and centralized policy making in the House came to an end. That view is off target. The Freedom Caucus renegades did not ask that the speaker’s key powers be taken away—the “right of recognition without appeal,” the power to appoint members to the Rules or Select Intelligence committees, or the ability of the Rules Committee to write special rules to structure floor decision making. Moreover, they did not rally behind an alternative candidate who promised to hand important powers back to House or party committees. Instead, they wanted to influence how those powers were to be exercised. To be sure, many of them did not trust McCarthy and wanted commitments from him on how he would use his powers, but they did not seek to limit those powers by changing House or party rules in a meaningful way—well, with one exception. They wanted those powers used in more radical ways for the party. That’s important. The challenge was to the Republican speaker; the McCarthy’s replacement had the full array of powers enjoyed by McCarthy’s predecessors.

The Rules Package

Republicans’ “reforms” in 2023 came in two stages: (1) The rules package McCarthy recommended and other promises offered to renegades on January 1 and (2) additional concessions made to the renegades as voting on the speakership proceeded January 3-6.

The January 1 package was negotiated in mostly private discussions between McCarthy and his colleagues before the start of the 118th Congress. The package was “finalized” so late—just two days before the House was scheduled to convene—because McCarthy struggled to gain approval from the HFC members. Many of the rules changes were ideas that had been percolating among Republicans for some time, but they also included provisions that were reported to be concessions made to the renegades who threatened to vote against McCarthy if their demands were not met. The major elements of the January 1 package are listed in Table 35-1, with the concessions to holdouts that were reported to have been made in the last week indicated in italics.

Along with the announcement of his rules package, McCarthy held a conference call with his party and sent a letter to his conference entitled “Restoring the People's House and Ending Business as Usual” in which he noted other commitments. The most publicized commitment was McCarthy’s plan to modify the House rule that made a resolution to vacate the speakership a privileged matter when endorsed by a party caucus or conference, thereby making it impossible for a single member or small group of members to force a vote to oust the speaker. McCarthy, under pressure from the renegades, offered to support a change the requirement to just five legislators. He also promised to that all segments of the party would be well-represented on committees and would not have the Rules Committee waive the House rule that requires that the text of a bill be available for 72 hours before its consideration on the floor.

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Table 35-1. McCarthy’s January 1 Rules Package (Selected)

Parliamentary Procedure

-Ends proxy voting

-Restores the Holman Rule, allowing amendments to reduce the salary of specific federal employees or target a specific program

-Authorizes the speaker to reduce vote times to two minutes in the House to ensure efficient voting

-Uses “Calendar Wednesday,” which allows committee chairs to bring reported bills directly to the House floor for consideration under an open amendment process, and requires the same 72-hour notice that is required on all other measures is provided

-Ensures that nothing prevents Members from using gender-specific language in committee or on the House floor

-Single subject rule: Prohibits members from introducing bills or joint resolutions after Feb. 1 without including a statement for the Congressional Record designating a single subject of the legislation (

-Amendment germaneness: Prohibits the Rules Committee from waiving points of order against amendments that violate the House’s germaneness rule and creates a new rule requiring the House to vote on any motions to waive germaneness for an amendment after up to 20 minutes of debate

-Establishes rules for considering various bills Republicans plan to taken up early in the Congress

Committee System

-Establishes a Select Committee on the Strategic Competition Between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party

-Modifies the charter of the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic to focus its investigative work on the origin of the virus

-Requires House committees to establish oversight plans detailing how they will hold the Biden Administration accountable

-Centralizes investigations of the Biden administration: Establishes the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government to investigate the full extent of the Biden Administration’s assault on the constitutional rights of American citizens

-Prohibits remote committee hearings and markups, but allows only non-government witnesses to participate in hearings remotely, meaning government officials must testify in person

-Requires the speaker to establish a bipartisan task force to review House ethics rules and regulations and submit a report on recommended improvement

Budget Process and Fiscal Policy

-Reinstate the CUTGO rule, requiring mandatory spending increases to be offset by a corresponding cut in mandatory spending and eliminating the budget gimmicks caused by Democrat PAYGO

-Eliminate the Gephardt Rule, preventing the House from automatically suspending the debt limit upon passage of a budget resolution

-Restore the spending reduction account in all appropriations bills so that any reductions in spending are not simply spent elsewhere

-Require the Congressional Budget Office to provide analysis on the inflationary impact of legislation.

-Reimpose a three-fifths supermajority in the House to approve any increases in tax rates

-Requires the Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation to incorporate macroeconomic effects in their cost estimates for major legislation

-Restores two budget points of order — one that can be raised against amendments to appropriations bills that would result in a net increase in budget authority and another against budget reconciliation directives that would lead to a net increase in direct spending

-Creates a point of order against legislation that increases direct spending by more than $2.5 billion on net in any of the four decades after the official 10-year budget window

-Creates a point of order to prohibit appropriations increases over the previous fiscal year for any expenditures not written into an enacted authorizing law. If that point of order is raised and sustained, an amendment reducing the appropriation to the most recent enacted level would be consideredautomatically adopted

House Administration

-Eliminates the rule providing for collective bargaining rights for House employees

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Additional Concessions

McCarthy’s proposal on the motion to vacate did not satisfy the holdouts, nine of whom issued a letter in which they restated their demand that the party do away with its rule on the motion to vacate and return to the old House rule permits that any single member could offer the motion. Moreover, there is no doubt that, beyond specific issues concerning the exercise of the speaker’s power, at least some of renegades simply did not trust McCarthy, who had been a part of the leadership for 14 years, to come through on his commitments or to lead the party achieve conservative policy objectives.

Voting on the speakership began on January 3, 2023, the first day of the new Congress, without enough Republican commitments to McCarthy for him to win the speakership on the House floor. In fact, a 15-vote, 4-day marathon on the election of the speaker began. In the first votes, 20 Republicans, from the most conservative wing of the party, were unwilling to vote for McCarthy. Intense, private negotiations continued until January 6, when McCarthy held another party conference call to outline another set of concessions. Late that evening, after more discussions, all but six Republicans voted for McCarthy, with those six voting present, allowing McCarthy to be elected.

Many of the concessions made to gain the support of 14 of the 20 original objectors became known and are listed in Table 35-2. I collected this list from numerous media reports and do not cite the sources here.

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Table 35-2. Selected McCarthy’s Post-January 3 Concessions, with Notations about the Nature of the Concession

Issues

-(Speaker’s control of agenda) Promises House votes on congressional terms limits, balanced budget constitutional amendment, border security

-(Speaker’s control of agenda) Promises separate votes on earmarks in appropriations bills

Parliamentary Procedure

-(Speaker’s control of the agenda) Promises to allow more floor amendments

-Allows a single member to sponsor a privileged resolution to vacate the speakership

-(Policy promise) Making passage of appropriations and debt limit bills conditional on deep spending cuts in mandatory programs (Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid)

-(Policy promise) Allowing amendments to appropriations bills

Committee System

-(Steering committee action) Promises three seats on Rules Committee and some number of seats on Appropriations for conservatives

-Promises support to get one or more of the archconservatives desired subcommittee chairmanships

Budget Process and Fiscal Policy

-(Policy promise) Provides that the House will pass a budget the balances the budget within ten years; sets spending caps at fiscal 2022 levels

-(Policy promise) Promises to bring 12 appropriations bills to the floor separately

Elections

-Barring McCarthy’s leadership PAC from involvement in open Republican primaries

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The most important concession appeared to be a promise to appoint three conservatives—by which everyone understood to be HFC or similar members—to the Rules Committee. The Rules Committee has long had a 2-to-1-plus-1 party ratio (9 majority party members, 4 minority party members). The commitment to appoint three archconservatives among the 9 majority party members would use three of the additional Republican slots. Since Democrats were expected to oppose most motions backed by the Republican leadership, the three archconservatives (plus the Democrats) could block their own party leadership’s plans, giving the conservatives bargaining leverage with the speaker on the committee’s efforts to structure special rules that govern how major legislation is considered on the floor. At the time, the archconservatives wanted more opportunities for their wing of the party to offer and get floor votes on their legislation and amendments.

Was the Speakership Weakened by McCarthy’s Concessions?

At first glance, allowing a single member, such as a renegade Republican to offer a motion to vacate, conceding three Rules Committee seats to the archconservatives, and guaranteeing a more open amending process on the floor appear to have undermined the power of the House speaker. The Rules Committee and floor amendment concessions appear to weaken the speaker’s agenda-setting control, perhaps the speaker’s most important power. The ease of forcing a House vote on a resolution to vacate placed the speaker on a short leash with impatient and quite radical elements of his party. Perhaps most important, McCarthy’s willingness to give away so much to a few renegades made him appear weak and would set him up for more demands from the radicals during that Congress. In fact, the demands kept coming.

It is tempting to claim that McCarthy’s lack personal skills made him vulnerable to the wave of demands from his party’s renegades. In fact, we cannot be sure that any candidate for the speakership who was acceptable to 95 percent of House Republicans would have been acceptable to the far-right renegades. After all, the renegades created serious problems for the leaders who preceded McCarthy—Speakers Boehner and Ryan—both of whom left office early in response to intra-party conflict. Moreover, if some of the concessions had not been made, the issues would not have evaporated. How to structure the agenda, how to gain leverage with the Democratic Senate and president on government spending and other issues, how to give renegades opportunities for votes on their proposals, and other issues would still have to be addressed during the Congress. Thus, a case can be made, as McCarthy argued, that addressing some of the issues at the start of the Congress would smooth the way for party action later. Of course, McCarthy ultimately could not keep a small handful of his party colleagues in the fold.

The nature of the concessions bears a closer look. A common thread of many of the concessions to the renegades, like the Rules appointments, is the use of the speaker’s powers rather than the powers themselves. The renegades did not demand the speaker be stripped of his control over party appointments to the Rules Committee or of his extra votes on the party’s steering committee, which makes other committee assignments. While the HFC had proposed just months earlier that committee chairs be selected by their committees rather than by the party steering committee, which is chaired by the speaker (or minority leader), the process of naming committee chairs was left untouched. The speaker’s right of recognition without appeal—allowing him to recognize members to make motions on the floor without challenge—was not questioned. No other fundamental power of the modern speaker’s powers was challenged or changed. Instead, McCarthy promised to use his powers in a manner that enhanced the visibility and voice of the HFC faction.

The Resolution to Vacate

Two inevitable challenges—the debt ceiling and appropriations bills—confronted Congress in 2023 that forced McCarthy to make strategic choices that generated strong negative reactions among far-right Republicans. The first was the necessity of raising or setting aside the debt ceiling, which was going to be reached in June. Republicans had long insisted that spending cuts accompany debt ceiling legislation and were once again refusing to move on the legislation without a commitment from the Democratic president and Senate to accept budget cuts. President Biden agreed to spending cuts for fiscal year 2024 and to limit spending increases for fiscal year 2025 in exchange for McCarthy’s support to suspend the debt limit until January 2025—after the end of the president’s first term and after the end of the 118th Congress. The debt ceiling bill passed both houses with bipartisan majorities, although most of the January renegades and many other conservatives voted against it.

House and Senate majorities seemed to believe that the passage of the bill and the accompanying agreement on spending levels established a bipartisan truce on appropriations bills for the remainder of the Congress. Objectors like Gaetz did not see it the same way. They soon insisted on deeper spending cuts as a condition for supporting the spending bills, which led McCarthy to direct Republican appropriators to more deeply cut the pending spending bills. However, differences within the party, some generated by somewhat more moderate Republicans, and the opposition of Democrats slowed House action, creating a necessity to pass a continuing resolution (CR) before October 1. McCarthy tried several times to gain a House majority for continuing resolutions that cut spending, but the Gaetz and a few others decided to oppose al continuing resolutions because, they insisted, regular appropriations bills with deep cuts were the only way to guarantee the outcome they desired. Eventually, McCarthy gave up on mustering a House majority with just Republican votes and offered a “clean” CR that attracted a House majority with the aid of most Democrats.

Immediately after the CR was enacted, Gaetz forced the House to act on his resolution to vacate the speakership. Gaetz insisted that McCarthy violated promises to him by limiting spending cuts, using CRs and failing to gain action on the twelve regular appropriations bills, and, more generally, circumventing committees and using closed rules. At the time he moved consideration of his resolution, Gaetz and others may have thought the Democrats would sit out the vote on the resolution and the preliminary motion to table by voting “present” or simply not voting. By doing so, the Democrats would have allowed McCarthy’s supporters to greatly outnumber the renegades and kill the Gaetz resolution. Democrats, however, were in no mood to back up McCarthy, whose actions and rhetoric over several months only deepened their distrust and personal dislike of the speaker. Democrats voted with Gaetz and ten other Republicans to kill a motion to table the Gaetz resolution and pass the resolution. Gaetz and seven of the Republicans voted with the Democrats to approve the resolution to vacate. In the closely divided House, McCarthy was forced out with eight of the 221 Republicans voting to dump him from the speakership.

A week later, the Republicans nominated the second-ranking Republican, Majority Leader Steve Scalise (LA), by a vote of 113-99 over Jim Jordan, a leader of the renegades who founded the House Freedom Congress in 2015. The tightly contested race was unusual for a speakership nomination and left Scalise struggling to gain the support of about 20 Republicans, mostly Jordan supporters, whose votes were needed to win the speakership on the House floor, where Democrats would be voting for their own leader to be speaker. After a day of discussions failed to yield enough Republican votes to win a floor majority of 217, Scalise withdrew his candidacy.

The next day Republicans endorsed Jordan, 124-81 over Austin Scott, a little-known McCarthy backer. Jordan, however, was a founder for the HFC in 2105, an election denier, and rebel who had taken positions of spending bills, aid to Ukraine, and other issues that concerned Republicans on key committees, from the less conservative wing of the party, and who represented Democratic-leaning districts. Jordan took a long weekend to round up votes among disaffected Republicans, but lost the votes of 20 Republicans on the first ballot, 22 on the second ballot, and 25 on the third. In a conference meeting following the third ballot, Republicans voted 86-112 against keeping Jordan as the speaker nominee, which led them to choose Tom Emmer (R-MN), the third ranking party leader as whip, after five ballots. Emmer, however, spend about four hours gauging opposition to his election as speaker and discovered that he could not move enough 26 Republicans who indicated they would not support him on the floor to allow him to win a floor majority, leading him to withdraw his candidacy.

Another round of candidates—this time mostly Jordan-supporting members—left five seeking votes. Mike Johnson (R-LA), who took second to Emmer, easily won the nomination. Johnson had a voting record was nearly identical to Jordan’s, led efforts to challenge the 2020 presidential election result, but is far more personable than Jordan, did not alienate more traditional Republicans as much as Jordan. The result was that Republicans rallied behind him and unanimously supported his election as the 56th speaker of the House.

A Final Thought on Congressional Parties as Cartels

I noted that the partisan polarization, and the competition for majority control, encourage members of each party to expect that their leaders will be assertive and coordinate the legislative and public relations strategies of the party. McCarthy’s behavior and the promises of the legislators who sought to replace him reflected those expectations. For the most part, the 2023 conflicts among Republicans over the speakership reflected differences over how to use the party organization rather than to weaken the organization itself.

In fact, McCarthy’s concessions to the renegades in early 2023 did not produce the conditions conducive to a more committee-oriented, decentralized process that the HFC Republicans were demanding. Oddly, the HFC Republicans, while hoping to have more influence through their committee posts, insisted that the party and its leadership pursue strategies on the highest priority issues in a manner that maximized the leverage of the House majority over a Democratic Senate and president and required central coordination of that strategy. The deep partisan divisions and keen competition for majority control of Congress persist generate strong demands for well-coordinated strategies, which requires licensing central leaders to direct the legislative program and political strategies of their parties. The eventual election of Mike Johnson as speaker involved no more concessions that directly involved the powers of the speaker.

Nevertheless, for some scholars, the 2023 speakership election calls into question the degree that congressional parties are effective cartels. The idea that parties are “legislative cartels” was articulated by Cox and McCubbins (1993) and later by Jenkins and Stewart (2013), who made the persuasive argument that members of a legislative party organize to control factors that affect their common electoral fate. The metaphor draws attention to cartels in the marketplace, where firms or governments can collaborate to control supply and thereby control price and profits. Perhaps the most important factors for legislative parties are majority control, the control of chamber and committee offices, and the agenda-setting power that comes with it. In the case of the House, positions such as the speakership, Rules Committee, and chairmanships of major committees combine to give the majority party considerable control of the legislative agenda. In the view of some observers, the renegade Republicans who challenged Speaker John Boehner in 2015, pestered Speaker Paul Ryan, and stood against Speaker McCarthy challenges that perspective. After all, McCarthy’s downfall with the use of a resolution to vacate in the full House represented an unwillingness of some members to accept their party’s choice of leader and, in fact, was an effort to bring the selection of a speaker outside of the majority party and to the full House.

My view is that the recent speakership spectacle shows the imperfect but very good fit of a cartel model as a metaphor for congressional parties. No cartel is invulnerable to breakage and cheating. In the economic realm, a cartel member has incentives to cheat and sell surreptitiously to maximize profits. Some leakage is inevitable even if the cartel does a reasonably good job of monitoring member behavior and recovering from episodes that threaten collective supply and price setting. House Republicans will undergo a period of recovery as the wounds of an internal battle heal and grudges fade. The Republicans have factional divides that will continue to spill onto the House floor, as both parties have experienced several times over the period since the 19th century when congressional parties began to behave as legislative cartels.

The 2023 speakership episode actually shows how strongly most Republicans were committed to resolving their differences within the party. Far fewer than half of the HFC members voted against McCarthy, just 25 of 221 Republicans voted against Jordan on his third ballot a week later, and just 26 indicated that they might not vote for Emmer. With secret ballots we cannot be certain about who was challenging the party choices at every stage, but it appears that about a fifth of the House Republican conference indicated a willingness to vote against McCarthy or one or more of the other three nominees. For his part, McCarthy worked hard in December to develop as much consensus as possible within the party about how to govern the House and supported the party’s nominees, surely with varying degrees of enthusiasm. The key point is that norms underpinning cartel-like behavior remain well established among the vast majority of Republicans. With the additional concessions, a large majority of Republicans voted for McCarthy and Jordan and Johnson, and indicated support for Scalise and Emmer before they withdrew. The cartel showed deep cracks, but it survived.

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