Rep. Jim Jordan talks to reporters after dropping out of the race for Speaker of the House after he lost a secret ballot vote by members of the Republican conference on whether he should drop out of the race at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on Oct. 20.JONATHAN ERNST/Reuters
The past two weeks – which saw the U.S. House of Representatives in paralysis, a fruitless struggle to select a Speaker, the inability of Congress to press forward with a response to the violence in the Middle East or to provide funds for the war in Ukraine, plus the very ability of the United States government to pay its bills in peril – have exposed a remarkable and rare phenomenon in U.S. politics: The United States, which has maintained political stability for two centuries by generally operating with two major political parties, is now characterized by a three-party system.
There is the Democratic Party, which despite its fissures generally acts with unity and is solidly behind President Joe Biden. There is the Donald Trump party, which takes the form of a populist uprising against the established impulses and mellow temper of what was once the party of social calm and determined resistance to change. And there is the rump of the old GOP, aghast at the insurrectionary tendencies of the party.
All this was evident in the Republican rebellion against Speaker Kevin McCarthy of California, whose temperament may have been consistent with earlier, steady-state incarnations of the party but whose ambition and sense of opportunism made for an awkward, and in the end insufficient, alliance of convenience with the party rebels. It was evident in the emergence of Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio as a serious, but repeatedly unsuccessful, successor to Mr. McCarthy. And it is evident on the campaign hustings beyond the Capitol, where Mr. Trump has a commanding lead for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination – to the consternation and horror of traditional Republicans.
There have been precedents for this, all temporary and all dangerous to the parties involved. In 1860, with tensions that would lead to the Civil War boiling, the Democrats actually split formally into two parties: the regulars, who ran Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois for president, and the Southerners who ran Vice-President John C. Breckenridge of Kentucky. More than half a century later, in 1912, former Republican president Theodore Roosevelt bolted from his party and ran separately against his one-time protégé, incumbent President William Howard Taft, as the candidate of the Progressive Party, known as the Bull Moose Party.
In 1948, Southern Democrats bolted again, and Senator Strom Thurmond of South Carolina ran for president as the Dixiecrat candidate. And 20 years later, segregationist Governor George C. Wallace of Alabama left the Democratic Party and ran as the American Independent Party candidate for president. Each time except 1948, when Harry Truman prevailed, the divided party lost the presidential election.
Today’s Republicans aren’t on the verge of splitting into separate parties with duelling presidential nominees, but the fissures are as wide and perhaps as significant as they were in the four precedents, and the risks are as great. “When a party fractions like this,” Stanford historian David Kennedy said in an interview, “it seriously compromises its ability to win in the general election.”
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Historians and political scientists have long studied party unity as a prism through which to view U.S. politics. Sixty years ago, Williams College scholar James MacGregor Burns published The Deadlock of Democracy: Four-Party Politics in America, which argued that both major parties possessed separate congressional and presidential parties. In examining this characteristic of U.S. politics, Prof. Burns argued that “since each set of parties, congressional or presidential, is a coalition itself, action depends on the alignment of coalition with coalition.”
Though little recognized in U.S. politics, the alignment of coalitions that is so prominent in Canadian politics nonetheless is vital in the United States – and that is where this month’s breakdown is rooted.
In an essay published this week, Matt Glassman, a senior fellow at Georgetown University’s Government Affairs Institute, points out that congressional parties not only must “find a way to win a majority on the floor during the election of the Speaker, but also [need] to secure a party settlement that brings the various factions into an ongoing procedural coalition.”
Such a “procedural coalition” allows a speaker to keep the legislative chamber operating by permitting legislation to move to the floor and rules to be set – how long the debate should take, how many and which kinds of amendments can be offered by lawmakers – for the consideration of bills. This month’s impasse over the selection of the Speaker imperiled the regular order of the House and shined a light on another significant departure from U.S. political custom: the reversal of the temperament of the two houses of Congress.
“We usually think of the Senate as the place where the majority party struggles, fighting minority filibusters, suffering policy gridlock, and building painstaking compromises,” Mr. Glassman argued. “The House, by contrast, is generally dominated by the majority party, methodically moving in lockstep as leaders pass partisan policies, often with little visible internal dissent.” Now the opposite is true.
Effective Speakers are sometimes conciliators, sometimes tyrants. But in either case – whether a Republican such as Thomas Brackett Reed of Maine (twice the Speaker at the end of the 19th century) or a Democrat such as Nancy Pelosi of California (twice the Speaker in the 21st) – they possess the ability to make the House work with efficiency. The divisions within the House Republican Caucus today are so great that the House is not only inefficient, it isn’t even functional.