The first step in saving America will be getting the attempted despot out of the White House.
For the second step, we’ll need to introduce or restore representative democracy and individual independence to the two chambers of the legislative branch.
Those chambers currently get ruled despotically by a lone Senate majority leader and a lone House speaker, neither currently popular or appealing or respected on a national level.
Mitch McConnell and Nancy Pelosi run those chambers singularly even though only one little state and one little congressional district elected them, just as one little state and district elected Tom Cotton and Rick Crawford, respectively and tragically.
The late U.S. senator Dale Bumpers loved to tell of the time he got wound up arguing on the Senate floor against commercializing federal battleground land. He so engaged unsuspecting senators that they actually came to a fluid, spontaneous decision not to pass as expected the legislation permitting the prostitution.
It was the only modern time Bumpers could recall when something organic happened based on live debate on the otherwise broadly scripted Senate floor.
I remember once reading that House Speaker Pelosi, knowing she had votes for passing a measure, “permitted” two centrist Arkansas Democrats—Mike Ross and Marion Berry—to vote against the measure.
Permitted? Were Arkansas voters asking for Pelosi’s permission when they voted for Ross and Berry?
Pelosi singularly controls the substance, form and time by which bills get brought to the House floor. McConnell does that in the Senate.
Arkansas will not again elect a Democratic House member until Pelosi either is no longer speaker or her autocratic control has been reduced by an introduction of real individual independence in the U.S. House of Representatives.
In 2018, Democratic congressional candidate Clarke Tucker stressed that, if elected, he’d vote against Pelosi’s re-election as speaker. No one much bought the idea that he’d have any effect with that vote or that electing him would represent real independence from Pelosi.
It is largely factual that to vote for any Democrat anywhere for the House is to install a bench-warmer on Team Pelosi, and that to vote for any Republican anywhere for the Senate is to install a bench-warmer on Team McConnell.
Strong-willed individuals still can show special influence, but usually only by the leave of these leaders.
To his credit—or discredit—Cotton, as a freshman, ventured out seemingly on his own to get Republican Senate colleagues to sign his letter undercutting American foreign policy. The letter presumed to inform Iran that its nuclear deal with the United States was such an inevitable goner when Republicans took over that they ought not to bother with the pointless Democratic president at the time.
McConnell no doubt knew from the beginning of the letter’s circulation and probably told Tom, “Sure, go ahead. What the hell?” And he could have stopped it if he wanted by telling GOP senators it would be bad for the party.
That’s because the party—and discipline thereto, facilitating a single message producing the most money and the best poll numbers in battleground races—matters more now than the country.
Changing this culture in the Senate would be a matter of center-leaning Democrats and Republicans leveraging power from the center and wresting the majority leader’s control that is based on precedent, custom and anemic submission, not any rule or law.
Just lately, we saw a dozen or more senators come together in bipartisan fashion with an interim and helpfully imperfect covid-relief financial package. They did so only to be made to endure Pelosi and McConnell taking over to gum it up—to prevent anything from coming to a vote until they got the proposal rewritten in their hyperpartisan and polarized, and polarizing, images.
The speaker’s power is actually a matter of written rule. A rule change would be required Amid the raging political malignancy of our day, neither side is willing unilaterally to permit spontaneity and individuality when it’s their turn to exercise autocratic power.
There is one other delightful prospect, though legally disputed and sadly remote. It’s that nothing in the rules requires the speaker to be a member of the House.
One moderate had the idea a few years ago to elect Colin Powell to be speaker.
What an inspiring idea, putting the House under the leadership of a highly respected and accomplished outside person of a delicious partisan vagueness.
Alas, there is a legal argument that other law permits only elected representatives on the House floor, and that Powell, as someone not elected from any House district, couldn’t serve.
That’s a far more legitimate and productive matter for litigation than anything Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani have filed.
Sadly, it’s clear that the Senate leader must be a senator, and that, if not McConnell right now, it would be Chuck Schumer, who has all the warmth and appeal of Pelosi.
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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame Email him at [email protected] Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.