NRPLUS MEMBER ARTICLE {A} second protracted intra-Republican battle in a single year to choose a speaker of the House illustrates six things about the current situation of the party.
First, the size of the majority matters. House Republicans are still paying the price for the very narrow majority they won in 2022. That 222–213 majority is currently 221–212 due to one vacancy on each side; those will be filled by special elections for a Democratic seat in Rhode Island on November 7, and a Republican seat in Utah on November 21. Thus, Republicans can control the House with a 217-vote party-line majority only when five or fewer members of the caucus break ranks, and that will drop to four between November 7 and 21 (assuming those special elections play to type). Everything that is happening now would have been avoidable if the party had won another ten seats, or even another seven.
Second, procedural rules matter. House Republicans have sabotaged their own effectiveness with their own chosen procedural rules, which effectively make it impossible to choose a speaker without doing one of two things: either finding a candidate acceptable to at least 98 percent of the conference, or worse, choosing a speaker who is indebted to Democratic votes for the office. The rules would not be a problem if the party was animated by a spirit of teamwork toward a common goal, but the losers of intra-conference votes have been determined to carry their quarrels with the winners to the House floor.
Third, a spirit of common purpose matters. Republicans remain divided on fundamental questions about the party’s identity and strategy — who it represents, what it seeks to accomplish, and how it intends to get there. It’s harder to get everyone on the same page when they can’t even agree on what book they’re using.
Fourth, leaders matter. The Republican Party remains effectively leaderless. Donald Trump is still the most powerful and prominent figure in the party, and many elected officials fear to cross him. If Trump endorses in a crowded primary, he can carry his candidate to victory, even when that candidate is an obvious dead loser in a general election. If he stands squarely against a Republican, he can do a lot of damage, to the point that a foursquare statement by Trump against a particular speaker candidate would be the kiss of death. (This doesn’t work in the Senate, where Trump has failed to dislodge Mitch McConnell, and it doesn’t work against incumbent governors such as Brian Kemp who have their own statewide power base.) But Trump can’t actually whip House Republicans into line, even when he tries. He was conspicuously ineffective in rallying support for Kevin McCarthy in January, and Jim Jordan’s support only declined after receiving Trump’s backing. In short, Trump has the sort of power within the party that we associate with the leader of an influential faction, rather than the sort of power we associate with an unquestioned leader who can enforce discipline.
Fifth, two can play at every game. Eight Republicans deposed Kevin McCarthy over the objections of 210 of their colleagues. Those eight were composed of six MAGA Republican “burn it all down” types, one Tea Party–era Republican (Ken Buck), and one loose cannon (Nancy Mace). When Jordan came up for a vote, Matt Gaetz and the others in the group (other than Buck) demanded party unity behind Jordan, calculating that their willingness to hold out would not be matched by the more moderate and establishment types at the other end of the caucus. They counted wrong, as twice as many members opposed Jordan as opposed McCarthy in the initial vote. That exploded the notion that one faction could simply dictate terms to the others — each of whom answers to their own electorate — and be rewarded for doing so.
Sixth, public perception matters. Undoubtedly, the dynamics of resentment toward Gaetz and his tactics, as well as inside-the-Beltway grudges of the sort that also worked against McCarthy and Steve Scalise, helped sink Jordan. But so did concern that having Jim Jordan as the public face of the party would repel swing voters. Jordan is well-suited to the role of a dogged investigator in committee hearings, but make him the speaker, and you get a lot of news cycles about the sex scandal on his watch as an assistant wrestling coach at Ohio State, or about Jordan’s ties to Donald Trump’s 2020 election lies and the leadup to January 6.
All of these factors were also at play in the very first selection of a Republican speaker of the House in 1860.
Disarray, Acrimony, and Insurrection
The House of Representatives has always been where American democracy appears in its least-decorous form, full of populism, demagogy, and rancor. Votes to choose the speaker became politically charged after Henry Clay turned the job into a powerful position of party leadership and control of the committees and the House floor in the 1810s. An early protracted battle for the speakership, in 1839, turned on whether New Jersey’s Whig governor William Pennington had improperly declared the Whigs winners of all six of the state’s congressional seats. The House ended up seating only one of the Whigs and leaving the five seats vacant, allowing the Democrats to retain a narrow majority and elect a speaker. The House ultimately concluded that, absent fraudulent votes, the Democrats had won the vacant seats. (At least the corruption of New Jersey politics is a reliable constant).
Sectional tensions over slavery began to seriously weaken the two parties — the Democrats and the Whigs — after the Mexican War added a vast expanse of western territory to the country in 1846–48. The new House that met in 1849 had no majority, with 112 Democrats, 105 Whigs, and twelve Free Soilers. With a slavery-friendly “Cotton Whig” as the party’s choice for speaker, the Free Soilers wouldn’t join a coalition, while some in each party dissented from their own party choice. After 62 ballots over three weeks and threats of secession, the exhausted House agreed to change the procedural rule and let the speaker be chosen by a plurality. The Democrat, Howell Cobb of Georgia, became the speaker with 102 out of 221 votes. Regarded at the time as a moderate, Cobb would go on to be one of the drafters of the Confederate Constitution.
The Republican Party was formed during the midterm elections in 1854, when the passage of the Kansas-Nebraska Act made apparent that the Whig Party was no longer an effective vehicle to stop the Democratic agenda. Kansas-Nebraska blew up prior bipartisan, North–South legislative compromises in order to expand opportunities for slavery to spread into the westward territories. Outrage at the bill led to massive losses for Democrats in the North, but the resulting “anti-Nebraska” majority was divided among Republicans, vestigial Whigs, Free Soilers, Know-Nothings (from the anti-immigrant American Party), and anti-Nebraska Democrats. The new Congress, meeting in late 1855, fought for two months and 133 ballots to choose from a slate that began with 21 speaker candidates. Once again, the House finally yielded to allowing a plurality to pick the speaker, and settled on Nathaniel Banks of Massachusetts, a Know-Nothing who had previously been a Democrat and would later become a Republican and Union Army general. Banks came five votes shy of a majority, with 103 votes out of 214.
Democrats recaptured a House majority in the presidential election year of 1856, but largely at the expense of the Know-Nothings, who dropped off to 14 members while the Republican caucus doubled in size. James Buchanan’s handling of the Lecompton Constitution (a pro-slavery Kansas constitution ratified by glaringly fraudulent means) led to another wave of losses for Democrats in the North in the 1858 midterms — but not quite a Republican majority.
In accord with the 19th-century practice of nearly a yearlong delay between elections and sessions of Congress, the new House was to meet on December 5, 1859. Republicans entered with 113 of the 238 members, seven short of a majority. The balance of power was held by an assortment of Whigs, Know-Nothings, “Anti-Lecompton” Democrats, independents, and members of the so-called “Opposition Party,” composed essentially of pro-slavery Southern Whigs who had abandoned the party label.
Extremism, Violence, and Banned Books
Republicans thought they had settled on a moderate, temperate, and respected 36-year-old anti-slavery Ohio Republican, John Sherman. Sherman came from an influential family: His father had sat on the Ohio supreme court, and after the elder Sherman’s death, John’s older brother William Tecumseh Sherman was raised by family friend Thomas Ewing, who served as a senator and in the cabinets of both Whig presidents. While his brother was then known mainly in Army circles and in San Francisco, John Sherman had made his name in the House as an investigator, traveling to Kansas to report on the territory’s partisan violence.
Violence hung even more menacingly in the air when the new House met, just three days after the hanging of John Brown for a Virginia rebellion that attempted to arm and incite a slave revolt. Southerners were shocked and alarmed not only by Brown’s raid but by significant Northern sympathy for a man many abolitionists now treated as a holy martyr for the cause. Republicans, looking ahead to the 1860 presidential contest, scrambled to disassociate themselves from Brown. Leading figures in the party, such as William Seward and Abraham Lincoln, went out of their way to denounce Brown’s methods.
A book-banning complicated this effort. In 1857, a North Carolinian named Hinton Rowan Helper published a book called The Impending Crisis of the South: How to Meet It, arguing against slavery not on basis of immorality toward the slaves, but on the grounds that slavery was economically inefficient, holding back the South and harming the free white laborers of the region. This was not a new argument, but it gained force because it was made by a white Southerner and fortified with reams of statistical data.
Unable to find a publisher at home, Helper had to publish his book in New York, where it was publicized by Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. Southern states responded by criminalizing the circulation of the book. Republicans, who frequently charged that the Slave Power was a threat to free speech, pounced. The party bankrolled an abridged compendium of the book, with 100,000 copies to be circulated in the northern swing states of New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Illinois. The compendium’s circulation was endorsed by a letter dated March 9, 1859, bearing the names of 68 Republican members of the House. Politicians being politicians, many of them hadn’t read the book and thought they were taking a stand against book-banning and endorsing Helper’s general critique of slavery rather than all of his specific arguments.
Those arguments, even as abridged in the compendium to remove the most offending passages, were incendiary, with headings such as “The North must seize the Riches of the South,” “The North too Scrupulous — the Theory that John Brown Practised,” and “Revolution — Peacefully if we can, Violently if we must.” The book effectively recommended a slave rebellion. This, and the references to Brown (who was already notorious for shedding blood in Kansas) landed quite differently after Brown’s rebellion in October 1859.
Sherman’s Retreat
One of the Republican signatories was John Sherman, who began the balloting with 66 votes, followed by 43 for the next Republican aspirant. Democrats seized upon the chance to tie Sherman to insurrection. Immediately after the first vote, John B. Clark of Missouri introduced a resolution condemning the Helper book and stating that “no member of this House who has endorsed and recommended it, or the compend from it, is fit to be Speaker of this House.” Virginia Democrat Shelton Leake asked if Republicans would select as their speaker a man who, “while I am here in the discharge of my duties, is stimulating my Negroes at home to apply the torch to my dwelling and the knife to the throats of my children.” Democrats denounced Sherman as “insurrectionary” and a “traitor.”
Tensions ran high. Nearly everyone came armed to the House floor. The governor of South Carolina told one of the state’s House members that he could “have a regiment in or near Washington in the shortest possible time” to stop Sherman. Republicans were itching to get moving because Sherman was backing the demand of John Covode, a Pennsylvania Republican, to launch an impeachment probe centered around charges that the aging Democratic president, James Buchanan, had engaged in suspicious uses of money possibly including the rigging of his election in 1856. Conspiracy theories were running wild everywhere, from Democrats hot to tie Seward to John Brown’s revolt to Lincoln strongly implying that Buchanan had improperly influenced the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott decision.
The Republican Party then had no leader, with no current or former president and the Democrats controlling the Senate and the White House. The Democrats, for their part, had an unpopular president respected by nobody.
Sherman didn’t help his own case. He foreswore the intention of “any interference whatever” in slavery in the South. He issued denials: “I do not recollect signing the paper referred to; but I presume, from my name appearing in the printed list, that I did sign it. . . . I have never read Mr. Helper’s book, or the compendium founded upon it. I never have seen a copy of either.” The anti-slavery Northern press and public urged Republicans to stay strong behind Sherman, but the swing members they needed wouldn’t budge.
Sherman got as close as within four votes, but this time, every effort to get agreement to choose a speaker by plurality was rebuffed: The South would not stand for Sherman, and it would rather have no speaker. After 35 ballots, Sherman withdrew. A majority of the House finally voted on February 1, 1860 — on the 44th ballot, nearly two months after convening — for a less polarizing candidate. Ironically, the man they chose as a “moderate” substitute was William Pennington, whose role in the bare-knuckles partisan battle over New Jersey House seats in 1839 now seemed tame by comparison.
Sherman, denied a leadership position in the House, went on to a long and distinguished career in the Senate and two cabinet posts of his own. Pennington served just a single term, lost reelection in 1860, and died of an accidental morphine overdose two years later. The country came unglued in the interim. Sherman’s opponents would have to deal with his brother instead.