Do away with the speaker of the House, former Boehner adviser says
WASHINGTON — The key to making Congress work better might be to effectively get rid of the speaker of the House, according to a past aide to a former Republican who held that position.
“I honestly think it’s going to prove impossible in the long haul to effectively operate the House of Representatives with a speaker who requires the majority of the whole House,” said Michael Steel, who was a spokesman and adviser to former House Speaker John Boehner, an Ohio Republican.
“So what I would do is reduce the influence of the office of the speaker, make it kind of a figurehead ceremonial post, similar to the president pro tempore of the Senate … and then have the majority party leader essentially take over most of the functions that the speaker has today,” Steel said in an interview on the Yahoo News podcast “The Long Game.”
“I don’t know that it would even require a vote. It would be a change in practices,” Steel said. “You would basically move budget authority around, more than anything else. … A lot of the policymaking function and outreach functions that are currently in the speaker’s office, you just move those people and that budget into the majority leader’s office.”
Steel, now a managing partner at a Washington, D.C., public affairs firm, said that the constitutional requirement for a speaker to be approved by a majority of the whole House means that a small minority of the majority party can hold the person in the top job hostage by always dangling the threat over their head of holding a vote to remove them from the speakership.
When Republicans had the majority, the House Freedom Caucus used this tactic to extract concessions from Boehner in the summer of 2015, a few months before he retired.
By contrast, the Senate majority leader is not a constitutionally designated position, and, as a result, the vote for that job is taken only among the members of the majority party. So a senator must only receive majority support among their own party. In the House, the requirement that both parties must vote on the speaker means that the threshold is higher.
“If you have a majority of 234 members of your party … the majority of the House is 218,” Steel said. “234 minus 218, that number of members can hold your speakership hostage.
“Customs and practices have broken down, and people feel they get more incentive to have a really good Fox News hit, and the fundraising email that follows, and all that goes with it, [more] than they do working their way up the ranks, being an effective legislator, helping the team and supporting the speaker,” he said.
Steel said he has been “amazed” at the way current Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., has been able to minimize and contain challenges to her leadership among Democrats in the House.
Steel also said that the appropriations committees in the House and Senate should be abolished, and that the power of appropriating government funds should be dispersed into various committees in Congress. For example, if the Armed Services Committee conducts oversight of the military, then that committee should appropriate funds for the portions of defense spending that it is responsible for overseeing, he said.
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