Matt Gaetz Is Half Right
The House leadership model is obsolete. But Gaetz is part of the problem.
In January, when GOP insurgents in the House first sharpened their swords against Kevin McCarthy, their goal was to weaken his power. They wanted a speaker with less control over committee assignments, and committees with real authority to hold hearings, mark up bills, and bring them to the floor; they made him agree to that pesky “motion to vacate,” allowing one member to call for a vote on removing him. “In the modern House, we’ve strayed far from [a] Member-driven process, and Regular Order is rarely followed,” argued the hard-right House Freedom Caucus, in a late 2022 letter from the group’s chair, Representative Scott Perry.
In ousting McCarthy from the speakership last week, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida and several Freedom Caucus members still clamored for regular order, a legislative process in which bills are deliberated on committees with input from various members before getting to the floor. But Gaetz and company were madder about something else—that the speaker they had purposefully weakened at the beginning of the year had gone ahead and compromised with Democrats to pass a spending bill.
What Gaetz and his cohort don’t seem to realize is that by heightening partisan divides over unwinnable fights on the debt ceiling and government spending, they are undermining the conditions necessary for a more decentralized, and functional, Congress.
The Freedom Caucus has a point: The House speakership, in its current form, is too powerful. More committee autonomy could make for a better, more productive Congress—and might at least temporarily placate the rebels on the right. The challenge is that a more open process demands a far less polarized party system than we have today, one that’s not zero-sum, in which members seek out difficult compromises and operate on a system of trust and good faith. In a polarized Congress, a more open system just creates more opportunities for individual bad-faith actors to derail the legislative process.
The Freedom Caucus’s critique, whether confused, disingenuous, or both, prompts a valid question: Should the House of Representatives reform its structure to make the speaker less powerful? Clearly, the GOP insurgents’ attempt to do so is not going well, if a small minority in one party can still regularly threaten to shut down the government or force the United States to default on its debt. Other models exist. State legislatures vary in the amount of authority they grant their leaders; at times, some have worked out bipartisan power-sharing arrangements.
The House of Representatives itself has organized and reorganized many different ways across American history. In 1789, the constitutionally mandated speaker of the House began as a mere moderator among the original 65 members. But as committees expanded and fought over floor time, a stronger speaker became necessary to manage legislative traffic. In 1890, the Republican Thomas B. Reed centralized the speaker’s power under “Reed Rules,” earning him the nickname “Czar Reed.” Joseph Cannon, Republican of Illinois, ran the House with near-dictatorial powers, prompting an uprising from progressive insurgents within his own party in 1910. In the aftermath, the House returned to a more decentralized model. Committees, structured by seniority, assumed more independent authority, diminishing the speaker’s legislative control.
Soon enough, the pendulum swung back the other way. When Southern Democrats came to dominate the committees, stifling crucial civil-rights legislation, liberal reformers led the cry for change. The new generation of liberal Democrats elected to Congress in 1974, under the shadow of Watergate, reshaped the chamber’s power dynamics again, disempowering conservative Democratic committee chairs and inching authority back toward the speaker to enforce a stronger party line. That, of course, infuriated Republicans.
In 1995, Newt Gingrich became the first GOP speaker in 40 years, leading his party back into power by nationalizing the congressional election around a “Contract With America,” a 10-point plan of poll-tested promises to limit the size and secrecy of government, reduce taxes, and shrink the social safety net. To ensure swift partisan action, Gingrich reduced the legislative discretion of the committees and slashed their budgets. Committee staff numbers fell by a third.
The decades-long trajectory ever since has been one-directional: Leaders of both parties have chosen strong speakers to help them maintain caucus order, manage the party’s agenda, aggressively fundraise—and ultimately keep the gavel. A strong speaker—one who deploys restrictive floor procedures and limits opportunities for rank-and-file members to participate—can control the agenda to make her party look more cohesive and powerful. She can bring up popular legislation designed to help her party win future elections, and sideline divisive legislation that would make for difficult votes. She can force the opposition to take divisive unpopular votes instead.
This escalating partisan warfare, reinforced by a powerful House speaker, has in turn led to the rise of anti-system actors such as Gaetz. Under a strong speaker, members of the opposition fume, radicalize, and plot revenge until they can regain power to inflict partisan punishment. Such retribution requires a strong speaker of their own.
Republicans have faced the same recurring dilemma for three decades. When they’re in the minority, they condemn runaway federal spending as a Democratic Party threat to the American people. But in the majority, they have to reckon with the fact that individual government programs are popular, and that shutting down the government is not. Sooner or later, funding the government means compromising with the Democrats. The compromising infuriates hard-line conservatives, who rail against the dictatorial powers of the speaker who made the deal. They demand a more bottom-up process. But mostly, they just keep causing chaos. (Democrats do not have this problem because they fundamentally want to fund the government. Whatever challenges Nancy Pelosi had as speaker, the most far-left Democrats agreed on that much.)
Is there an alternative to these endless cycles of upheaval? A sustainable long-term solution would be for the House to embrace the Freedom Caucus’s vision for a more open, decentralized, committee-centered Congress. But under the current levels of partisan animosity and distrust, no rational members would venture into this uncertain territory. Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has proposed a bipartisan coalition to marginalize the far right. Obviously, this is unlikely. Any Republicans who went along with it would soon be primaried out of existence. Our current electoral system rewards confrontation, not compromise.
The best long-term solution might be the hardest of all: shifting from the restrictive two-party system to a multiparty democracy that more accurately reflects the wide spectrum of Americans’ beliefs. A multiparty system would allow more fluid coalitions to form, including within the broad political center. Moderate Republicans could team up with factions on the left without fearing for their support back home, and more extreme caucuses would be sidelined. New alliances would allow a more decentralized, committee-oriented Congress to actually function, producing legislation with broad buy-in. The speaker could assume a less central role.
We can bring back more ideological diversity by transitioning to larger congressional districts with multiple winners per district, elected through a system that allocates legislative seats based on the proportion of the vote that a party receives. Alternatively, fusion voting, in which multiple parties can endorse the same candidate, could support multiparty choices for single-winner districts. (I have co-founded cross-partisan organizations to advocate for proportional representation and fusion voting.)
The chaos in Congress might seem indicative of a failing democracy. But perhaps the latest Capitol Hill collapse is a sign: Our current House structure is obsolete. This is the hidden gift that Matt Gaetz and the Freedom Caucus have offered.