The Perils of Parliamentarism: A Decade of Dems in Disarray
List of Speakers of the United States House of Representatives (ex officio Chairs of the Executive Review Commission)
...-1989: Bruce Babbitt (Progressive-Arizona)
1989-1991: Robert F. Kennedy, Sr. (Democratic-Massachusetts)
'88 def. Tom Craddick (Republican-Texas), Bruce Babbitt (Progressive-Arizona), Pat Robertson (Christian Values-Virginia), Phyllis Schlafly (Eagle-Illinois), Paul Wellstone (Labor-Minnesota), Jesse Jackson (PUSH-Illinois), Bud Clark (Pacific People's-Oregon), independents
1991-1991: Theodore "Ted" Stevens (Democratic-Texas)
'90 (leadership election) def. Geraldine Ferraro (New York), Lane Evans (Illinois), Bill Clinton (Arkansas), Bob Casey Jr. (Pennsylvania)
'90 def. Bob Dornan (Republican-California), Carroll Campbell (Christian Democratic-Virginia), George McGovern (Progressive-Indiana), Jesse Jackson (United-Illinois), independents
'91 resigned / due to *Abscam
1991-1994: Lawton Chiles (Democratic-Florida) ✞
'91 (leadership election) def. Dennis Kucinich (Ohio)
'92 def. George Voinovich (Republican-Ohio), Carroll Campbell (Christian Democratic-South Carolina), George McGovern (Progressive-Indiana), Karen Silkwood (United-Texas), Jack Gargan (THRO-Florida)
'94 died of heart attack
1994-1995: Harris Wofford (Democratic-Michigan)
'94 (leadership election) deferred to next Congress
1995-1997: Elizabeth Holtzman (Democratic-New York)
'94 (leadership election) def. unopposed on 11th ballot
'94 def. Bob Smith (Republican-Massachusetts), Ben Carson (Christian Democratic-Minnesota), George McGovern (Progressive-Indiana), Samuel Bowles (United-Michigan)
'96 def. Ben Carson (Christian Democratic-Minnesota), Bob Smith (Republican-Massachusetts), Sam Katz (Progressive-Pennsylvania), Dick Lamm (Western-Colorado), Manning Marable (Liberation-Maryland)
1997-1998: John McCain (Democratic-Virginia)
'97 (leadership election) def. Elizabeth Holtzman (New York)
'98 resigned
1998-1998: Abner Mikva (Democratic-Illinois)
'98 (leadership election) deferred to primary
1998-1999: Troy Carter (Democratic-Louisiana)
'98 (primary) def. by Elizabeth Holtzman (New York), A. Mitch McConnell (Georgia), Bob Casey Jr. (Pennsylvania), John Bush (Oregon)
'98 (leadership election) elected by acclamation
1999-2001: James N. "Nick" Rowe (Republican-Texas)
'98 def. Troy Carter (Democratic-Louisiana), Sam Katz (Progressive-Pennsylvania)
2001-: Evan Bayh (Democratic-Indiana)
'00 def. James N. "Nick" Rowe (Republican-Texas), Louis Stokes (Human Rights-Ohio), Howard Dean (Progressive and Reform-Massachusetts), Elizabeth May (Ecological-Hawai'i)
Sam Rayburn's role-defining tenure as Speaker of the House lasted fourteen years. Some of his predecessors, the ones who established precedent for him to follow, served comparable spans; Henry Clay served for ten and a half years, and he had served loyally under Champ Clark (slightly over six years) and Henry Rainey (slightly under six years). Some of his successors, too, had time to make their mark and mold American government to their will - Rogers, Ford, Casey, and Unruh also got their threescore and ten in months. (Left unlisted is Lyndon Johnson, master of the House for almost a generation but only serving a single term - but what a term! - before being pensioned off to exile in the Senate in a fit of fiscal conservatism.) Why, then, were his successors of the 1990s so unable to follow his lead?
Babbitt needs no explanation, of course. His coalition of Progressives and Republicans had been built by a previous generation of statesmen, backslapping moderates like Ford and Percy and Baker. It was falling apart as a new generation of culture-warriors and fiscal hawks entered leadership, both in the Republican Party and in new political movements - and the Progressives, too, were increasingly seduced by Ralph Nader's Independent Public Interest Group (legally not, at that point, a party), which scratched their reformist itch. They didn't, fundamentally, have it in them to follow deregulation where it led, loosen their grip until they let go - they were busybodies at heart, Progressives born too late to join the fight for Temperance. (Their next leader, a longtime Notre Dame historian of the Progressive Movement itself, would only prove that.) And the Democrats took up the whole remainder of the political spectrum.
Kennedy, superficially, is another easy answer - he was simply too much of a dinosaur, first elected to Congress the year Johnson ascended the throne. Though he was only sixty-five leaving the office, two years younger than his successor, he was nevertheless seen as yesterday's man, his term as a mere extension of that of Casey before him and Rogers before him. That's how the narrative goes, at least, but there's more to it than that. Kennedy's tenure not only isolated him culturally from much of his caucus, it also isolated him politically; he was respected, certainly, for his principles, but his support for workfare in distressed areas, his concern about welfare leading to social decay, his vague but real Catholic uneasiness with abortion, and his opposition to intervention in Sierra Leone were all out of step with the party's zeitgeist.
His supporters still say that the real reason for his unpopularity within the party was something completely different; when the investigation of irregularities in the contracting process for Austin's Manor Airport turned up serious issues within the Texas Democratic Party, he pushed for the expulsion of several implicated members (including longtime Chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and thorn in Kennedy's side Charlie Wilson) and supported the indictment of Lieutenant Governor Barnes and Speaker Bullock, the two most powerful Democrats in Texas. This theory seems much more plausible in light of Kennedy's successor; as the incipient Big Names and Big Factional Interests battled, the victor was someone of Kennedy's generation, best known at the time for his shamelessness in angling for federal funding for his state - and known in retrospect for falling on his sword amid Senate hearings into Spanish bribery of American officials.
Then came Walkin' Lawton. It took years of effort to get the Florida Governor to leave Tallahassee for Washington, becoming a celebrity candidate in the 1990 election and helping stem the tide of Christian Democracy in the north and Caribbean Republican ethnic politics in the south. It took three months to make him Speaker - his reputation for integrity and outsider credentials made him look like a Southern Will Rogers Jr., and he stormed to selection over a token backbench Northerner. As Speaker, he pushed hard to improve government services on healthcare and education, protect the environment, and reform the tax system. He also worked hard to fight corruption and promote internal democracy, most notably by fighting to institute a national primary system for Democratic leadership. Many Democrats would regret the last - but Chiles, dead of a heart attack in 1994, would not live to.
Harris Wofford, Chairman of the Education Committee, succeeded Chiles as one last honor before his retirement - but even if he had been planning to run for re-election, his past in the World Federalist Party (albeit pre-LaRouche) made him too controversial to take the full position, and he is now best known as the first openly janusian ex-Speaker. In 1994, the same Democratic National Convention that ratified Chiles' primary reforms also elected his successor - and functioned as a sort of advertisement for primary reform, as the big names of the party stole the show with their pissing match over hegemony. Mario Cuomo, Al D'Amato, Bill Clinton, Dick Gephardt, Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell, all were powerful names within the party and every one of them had too many enemies to win the Speakership. So they put forward various stalking horses, scrolling through different proposed compromises until the northern-labor-reformist coalition was able to cut a deal with the Southern and Western machines. Liz Holtzman was widely regarded as a has-been, a Cuomo puppet, fundamentally weak - her nomination was in large part because nobody expected her to have her own vision, and half the party hated her for that.
It took only a month for them to hate her in her own right. The modernizers disliked her focus on urban politics, her willingness to countenance lots of social spending, and her ties to the New York City machine; the old-liners disliked her revival of the Kennedy spirit of anti-corruption measures, her liberalism, her support for judicial reforms and welfare-state centralization, and her willingness to break the 'old code' of internal deference within the party and collective responsibility outside it. They were willing to gnash their teeth until the Speaker vote - but 1996 saw the party lose a great deal of support, and their seemingly invulnerable majority came close to breaking. Something had to give - and when Ambassador Robb went up in smoke along with the newly-crowned Emperor Zera Yacob and Ethiopia dissolved into civil war, a coterie of hardline National Security Democrats led by the legendarily hawkish Larry McDonald announced that they would vote down Holtzman's Speakership unless she committed to increasing funding to the War Department.
Holtzman refused to blink, opening negotiations with the Progressives' new leader to form a coalition government - but that was a bridge too far for the Democratic machine, which hurriedly forced a conference vote and forced John McCain (verbally opposed to McDonald's intransigentes but aligned with all of their demands; rumor has it that he was the driving force behind their little rebellion, though McDonald would have needed little encouragement) through it. McCain ramped up intelligence operations across the world and pushed for a Soviet-American joint peacekeeping mission in Ethiopia; for his part, General Secretary Lebed saw Ethiopia as just the beginning, a taste of how Soviet-American alignment could bestride the world like a colossus and keep China and Europe in their place. As news trickled out of Islamist terror in Ethiopia - and copycat attacks across the Muslim world - the war was initially popular. But high troop losses and ever-less-frequent victories meant that sense of victory was quickly lost. Then, over the long hot summer of 1998, the New York Post reported allegations that American troops had not only trained local militias that had gone on to commit horrific acts of violence, but had themselves operated an archipelago of secret prisons throughout the Horn of Africa and on American bases throughout the region, not only torturing suspected rebels and terrorists but memorializing it in gleeful photographs. McCain, himself a veteran of the Papuan War, was personally disgusted - professionally, he understood that the buck stopped at the top, and he would have to fall on his sword.
Abner Mikva was not a foreign policy maven - he would not have been nominated if he had been. He was an expert in the Judiciary, one of the few to remain in the House rather than taking his skills to the Senate that claimed judicial advice and consent as one of its last real powers; more than that, he was well known as both one of the few principled anti-corruption liberals not to take his act to the Progressive Party and one of the last remaining people to take on the security state and win, with the Mikva Hearings dismantling the Bureau of Investigation's interference with the civil rights movement. Though he had personally opposed the intervention in Ethiopia, and knew the American people had come to as well, he pledged not to change course as an interim Speaker; instead, he worked with left-leaning Democrats like Mickey Leland and isolationist idiosynCrats like Walter Jones Jr. to have the war effort investigated and its excesses remediated and left policy to his lieutenants. The eyes of the world weren't on him, really - on March 9, 1998, less than two weeks after his ascent, the first national primary for the Democratic Party's House leadership began.
First came the caucus candidates; the Congressional Black Caucus put forward Troy Carter, the AFL-CIO endorsed Dick Gephardt for the second time and got a smattering of Steel Belters to back him, and Americans for Democratic Action got Dudley Dudley ten of her required twelve Congressional endorsements, the last two coming from her fellow Granite Staters. Bob Casey Jr. made a play, less because he really wanted to and more because he felt a vague obligation to use his family name to push for the causes he believed in rather than letting the opportunity pass; another dynast, Robert Kennedy Jr., ran to finish what his father started; the Reid machine gambled that John Bush of Oregon, the Easterner with Western credibility, would be able to make the case for resource nationalism and devolution. Then the other big players jumped in; Clinton's health and Gore's personal life intervened to keep them out, but Cuomo sent in Peter Deutsch as a fresh-faced seat-warmer, McConnell stepped in for a low-key campaign on behalf of Middle American moderates, Chuck Robb wanted to run as a friendlier McCain, and Dr. John Kitzhaber stepped in as an ambassador from Howard Dean's Massachusetts Miracle irrigated by tech billions. And Liz Holtzman wanted to take a second shot at the job. And with no provision for a second round of voting, when the actual vote was held on April 14, the best-performing candidate (Holtzman) narrowly failed to clear 25%, while the worst (Robb) only did 19% worse than that - remember, every candidate had to be endorsed by twelve of their colleagues, and could not have them all from the same state. The real decision, then, would be made in the interhouse Congressional Democratic Conference, which held half the voting power in the Democrats' formula; there, Holtzman would have to win more than 75% of the vote; Robb would have to win 94%; any compromise candidate not already on the list would have to win more than 100%.
Mikva's interim leadership dragged on for four months of daily balloting. First it looked like Holtzman would be able to cobble together a consensus on a similar coalition to her first term, but concerns over whether her first term was worth following up sunk that ship; McConnell was next down the line but too conservative and too unreconstructed a McCainite; Bush had a moment in the sun but was an empty suit in the end; Casey could never articulate why he was there and didn't really want to be anyway, not to mention his position on abortion; Gephardt or Kennedy or Kitzhaber would break the party in half. In the end, the first candidate to file was the first to win; Troy Carter won the nomination by acclamation.
And that was, in the end, how a decade of Democratic hegemony - and a century of Democratic dominance - came to an end. James N. Rowe, decorated Republican leader, appealed to millions of Americans who thought that McCain was more sinned against than sinning, that the Democrats had hung the armed services out to dry, that the Democrats had proven they were unwilling or unable to govern, that Rowe cut (for various reasons, many not stated out loud) a more Speakerly figure than the fresh-faced academic. The Christian Democrats, increasingly torn apart by internal doctrinal struggles and extra-parliamentary Evangelical disputes, were happy to accept a junior role in the coalition. The Progressives cannibalized the Democrats from the left. Many Democrats, frustrated by the transparent maneuvering of what had once been a backroom process or turned off by their candidates being dismissed, stayed home.
Two years later, Rowe - too conservative, too aggressive, too clearly sectional a candidate - lost the 2000 election to the Democratic nominee.
