How Party Majorities Should Govern

T he speaker of the House, like the leader of any majority caucus in a legislative body, has a good deal of say over what proposals get to the floor for a vote. That power may not be absolute — in the House, for example, a majority of the members can sign a discharge petition to force a vote — but it is often quite extensive.

Indeed, few of the powers of legislative caucus leaders are more important. In some ways, for example, it’s easier to get a bill passed — and much easier to get one defeated — by controlling what’s in the bill that’s up for a vote than by twisting arms once the bill is there.

But is there a principled way to decide what comes up for a vote and what doesn’t? That’s been a hot issue in recent critiques of Mike Johnson and, before him, Kevin McCarthy. Johnson, for example, was criticized by opponents of Ukraine aid for bringing to the floor a package that passed over the opposition of a majority of the narrowly divided Republican caucus. That triggered Marjorie Taylor Greene’s effort to vacate the speaker’s chair.

The best-known principle is the so-called Hastert rule, named for since-disgraced Bush-era Republican House speaker Dennis Hastert. Under the Hastert rule, the speaker won’t bring anything to the floor unless it has majority support within his or her own caucus. The rule wasn’t followed religiously even by Hastert, but it has been a general rule of thumb among Republican leaders.

There are three other possible approaches. At one end of the spectrum, we have what one might call the Henry Clay rule (less inspired by Clay’s specific principles than by his attitude toward House and Senate leadership): The speaker, representing the House as an institution, should bring to the floor any proposal that has majority support in the House. This approach doesn’t leave the majority meaningless or the speaker powerless — there are still many ways to ensure that the most favorable version of a bill is advanced, and that it includes a few of your own priorities — but it doesn’t envision the speakership as an instrument of partisan obstruction in its own right.

At the other end of the spectrum, there’s what we might call the Matt Gaetz rule: The speaker should prioritize only those proposals that can pass the House without the votes of the minority party. When the majority has a small margin, that means that even a few members of the majority can exercise a wide-ranging veto power, exemplified by the Gaetz-led motion to vacate the chair in which eight members of the House Republican caucus managed to fire a speaker who had the support of the other 210. Thus, if Johnson needs even a small number of Democratic defectors to get a bill passed, he stands accused of being a member of the “uniparty” for passing a bill that “relied on Democratic votes.”

Finally, there’s the Joe Cannon rule. The discharge petition was introduced as part of a revolt against the dictatorial power of Cannon, the speaker from 1903 to 1911 at the apex of the power of the speakership. Cannon effectively took the position that he alone decided what reached the floor, and if anyone didn’t like it, the only answer was to either elect a new majority or choose a different speaker. One man ruled the roost.

Reviewing the options as a question of principle, one can see a case for each of these approaches — a case that will be emphasized in press coverage by people sympathetic to whichever cause is being advanced by the rule. The Clay approach is the most small-d democratic, ensuring that the will of the majority will always prevail. The Cannon approach is the only one in which the speaker need never violate his own conscience or best judgment. The Gaetz approach promotes party responsibility, because the voters will always know that electing a Republican majority ensures a Republican agenda, and only a Republican agenda. In Westminster-style parliamentary systems, for example, a government will typically fall if it has to rely on votes outside of its coalition to pass important proposals, or if a leader tries to push priorities opposed by a faction of his or her own coalition that could withdraw and deny the leader a majority. The Hastert rule, which is the least absolute of the four, aims to strike a balance in favor of responsible party governance, but without giving a small minority of the caucus (whether in leadership or at the edges) an outsized veto.

Some level of responsible party governance is important in order for voters to feel as if they have some stake in who wins elections. Voters understand, for example, that Republican leadership will resist broadly popular marginal limits on gun rights, and that Democratic leadership will resist broadly popular marginal limits on abortion rights. Without party distinctions as both a perception and a reality, support for democracy itself crumbles. In that sense, critics of “uniparty” governance have a point about their proper goal, if one that is regularly and wildly overstated in its diagnosis of reality. The two parties today actually differ more than they have at all but a very few points in our history. Moreover, the emphasis of the Gaetz approach turns partisanship into an end rather than a means for good government, and tends to strike normal voters as an excess of politics.

The Hastert rule’s balance between pure majoritarianism and party governance recommends it as the best of the four possible guides. But they are still all just guides. As with many political principles, they should be taken as a compass, not a straitjacket. There remains a role for the leader’s own prudent judgment, for which the leader is accountable to his or her caucus — a role that is thwarted by a Westminster-style practice of calling for votes to dissolve leadership after any given vote. And that judgment is fortified when it involves working across party lines to accord with majority sentiment — especially on matters of foreign affairs, where the party coalitions may not always align precisely with party principles, platforms, and voter appeals. In a domestic-policy debate, it is often a fair response to create partisan gridlock and let the voters resolve it at the next election. That is typically less plausible in a national-security debate where time is of the essence.

So, two cheers for the Hastert rule. It’s still the least-bad way to run a caucus. And it’s still not a foolproof guide that lets leadership off the hook for making the sorts of decisions for which societies elect leaders.