Republicans Can't Elect a Speaker Because They No Longer Do Policy

Without a policy agenda, there's no point in agreeing on a Speaker

The most common reaction to the Republicans’ inability to elect a Speaker (as of this writing, they have held 11 votes and the favored candidate, Kevin McCarthy, has lost every time while no other candidate has even come close to the requisite support) is bemusement. They are obviously being held hostage by the crazy wing of their party- the people opposing McCarthy have no agenda of their own and just want to throw bricks and bombs at the party Establishment.

What is missed in this analysis, however, is that in fact it is the NON-”crazy” wing of the party has no agenda either. Indeed, this crisis would not be happening if the non-crazies had an agenda.

Let’s walk through this with a little personal history. I first became interested in politics as a kid, at a time when Republicans actually had a ton of ideas. I didn’t actually read Heritage Foundation policy papers as a teenager, but I was aware of them- they showed up in the Congressional debates that I did watch and read, got referenced on CNN’s Crossfire and on The McLaughlin Group, the political TV shows I watched, and were featured in news stories that ran in the Los Angeles newspapers. So I knew about the Republican idea shop.

And while you might disagree with their content, Republicans had LOTS of ideas. They proposed privatizing a lot of state functions, including prisons and VA Hospitals. They wanted to turn public housing over to tenants through tenant ownership programs. They supported school vouchers, both as a way to supposedly introduce competition and make better schools available in the inner cities and also to make it possible for their religious constituents to send kids to religious schools at public expense. They proposed “enterprise zones”, which would lower tax rates in the most impoverished parts of the country to encourage the private sector to invest there. They floated “cap and trade” programs to regulate emissions and pollution. And, perhaps most infamously, they proposed the individual mandate in health care that later became a central feature of the Obamacare legislation.

Again, you don’t have to think any of this stuff was a good idea, or all of it was. But the point is, they had ideas. And a network of think tanks, including the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, employed smart young conservatives to do the research and put them out.

As a result, Republican platforms contained real policy proposals. Perhaps the best example of this was the Contract With America that Newt Gingrich ran on when the Republicans took over the House in 1994. The Contract contained 10 items that Gingrich promised to bring to a vote in a Republican led house, including balanced budget legislation, term limits, and binding Congress to the same laws that bind everyone else. When the Republicans won, much, though not all, of the Contract was passed.

In that environment, there was no doubt that Gingrich would become Speaker of the House if the Republicans won in 1994. The Republicans had signed onto the Contract, and needed a skilled floor leader to usher it through the chamber. When you want to pass stuff, you choose a skilled speaker. The Democrats chose Nancy Pelosi for much the same reasons.

But the Republican policy shop has atrophied. Yes, the Heritage Foundation still puts out publications, but they are often thinly veiled shots in the culture war, not serious policy papers. (For instance, right now, the leading headline on the Heritage website is an attack on philanthropic organizations for pushing diversity, equity, and inclusion programs in corporations, education, and government. That might be an interesting topic of discussion, but it isn’t a policy paper— there’s very little the government could or would ever do, consistent with the First Amendment, to prevent philanthropic organizations from advocating DEI.)

And the Republican platform? Well, in 2020, there wasn’t one— they just re-passed the 2016 one. Now, of course, one big reason for that is Donald Trump’s uninterest in policy. But it’s also because Republicans really don’t have any policies to advocate, beyond the old standby of tax cuts for the rich. So why put out a platform?

And lest you think this is just a facet of Trumpism (which would still explain a lot, given President Trump has a lot of influence even now in the party), look at Ron DeSantis, Trump’s most likely challenger in the 2024 presidential primary. Governor DeSantis has made a habit of latching onto every culture war issue the way a baby latches on to her mother’s breast. What are DeSantis’ big headline initiatives as Governor? Fighting youth gender transition, going after wokeness in schools, picking fights with Disney over its liberal politics, and putting migrants (who were found in Texas, as there is no international land border in his home state) onto buses and shipping them to Martha’s Vineyard. It’s a 0% policy and 100% Fox News agenda.

So the Republicans no longer do policy. To be clear, they ALWAYS had a culture war operation. George H. W. Bush spent the entire 1988 election talking about the Pledge of Allegiance (because his opponent had vetoed a bill requiring it to be said in schools on constitutional grounds), a meaningless “issue” with no policy component. Republicans have spent time talking about Wars on Christmas and Ground Zero Mosques. This has always been a part of their makeup. But in the past, the tail did not wag the dog- the point was to run on these fuzzy cultural issues to win election and then enact a policy agenda generated from their policy shop. Now, without a real policy shop, there is nothing left but the culture war.

And importantly, you don’t need a Speaker of the House to fight the culture war. Indeed, for some of the more extreme members of the House, it almost helps not to have one, because a Speaker would have the power to prevent clown show bills from getting to the floor and would be able to maintain some party discipline in moving forward an agenda.

Now, obviously, they will eventually choose a Speaker. But they will have to choose between a weak Republican Speaker who is chosen through some sort of an agreement that allows the crazy Republicans to bring that crazy onto the House floor (McCarthy has already made some of those concessions and may have to make more) or a Speaker who is chosen with the help of Democrats and who will basically not allow anything controversial at all to happen for the next two years.

But if they had a policy agenda, they would have a third choice- choose a skilled Speaker to move their policy agenda through the chamber. It’s the lack of a Republican policy shop that eliminates that good (from their perspective) choice and leaves them with the bad ones. And, of course, it’s bad for the country that one of its two major parties no longer even cares about public policy.