Graves reflects on speaker fracas

Oct. 27—What has just transpired in Washington over the role of speaker of the House has never happened before; it's new to freshmen delegates and seasoned veterans like Rep. Sam Graves alike.

Having represented St. Joseph and northern Missouri in the U.S. House of Representatives since 2001, Graves, who serves as chairman of the House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure, had a particular reason to get a speaker voted in, as no bill regarding the nation's roads, bridges or the like can clear the chamber while the chair remains vacant.

To that end, Graves joined with most of his fellow Republicans to try to keep Former Speaker Kevin McCarthy in office, and when that vote failed, he supported Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Rep. Tom Emmer of Minnesota and Speaker Mike Johnson of Louisiana. Johnson managed to unify the GOP caucus on Wednesday. Now it's time to get back to work, but the prospect of this all happening again can't be ruled out.

"While it is a painful process to go through, it is part of our process," Graves said. "And, so, trying to say that it's not going to happen again, that's just not in the cards. Eventually, this will happen again. It may be two decades from now, or three decades from now. Or, it may be in six months."

The problem lies in how the chamber is divided. The November 2022 elections sent 212 Democrats and 222 Republicans to Washington, and since that time, each party has lost one delegate to resignations.

If all Democrats unify in opposition to what the GOP wants to do, as most often happens, no more than four Republicans can defect, assuming all members show up to vote. Scalise, Jordan and Emmer all failed to keep at least four Republicans from doing so. Graves said this is unfortunate, but part of how the chamber must do business.

"When you have a very narrow margin, it takes 217 or 218 votes to elect a speaker. When you have a very narrow margin, that allows for two or three people to hold something up. We finally came up with a candidate that everybody could agree upon, and that's what it ends up being is, you get that consensus candidate."

To review how we got here, Rep. Matt Gaetz of Florida pushed a resolution to vacate the speakership and fire then-Speaker McCarthy earlier in October. Gaetz obtained the support of enough Republicans to make that happen. All Democrats unified to support no one for the speakership other than their own caucus leader, Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York.

Their votes, plus the Gaetz bloc, proved decisive. This was the primary obstacle to any prospective speaker, until all Republicans unified behind Speaker Johnson on Wednesday.

Until this past January, no one member could advance a resolution to vacate the speakership. In negotiations that ended 15 rounds of votes back in January, McCarthy agreed to such a resolution becoming allowable within the official rules of the House of Representatives. This secured McCarthy's tenure as speaker, for a time.

The official rules now must be changed to keep a rogue resolution to vacate the speakership from happening again. Graves indicated he favors such an outcome. No one has yet proposed a mechanism by which a change to the rules might occur.

"It's something that we're looking at," he said. "We'd have to change the rules to do that, to make it so that one person can't move to vacate the (role of speaker). But it's something we're taking a look at. There hasn't been a proposal yet."

Marcus Clem can be reached at marcus.clem@newspressnow.com. Follow him on Twitter: @NPNowClem