Heather Cox Richardson:
From CAFE and The Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Now & Then. I’m Heather Cox Richardson.
Joanne Freeman:
And I’m Joanne Freeman.
Heather Cox Richardson:
To start today, we have exciting news. We’re going to be having another Now & Then live taping, and for the first time in Now & Then history, we’re bringing along a guest, our friend, Professor Carol Anderson from Emory. She’s absolutely terrific. She works on race and voting and on the Second Amendment and we’re really excited to be inviting her to the show.
Joanne Freeman:
We’re really excited to have her and it’s going to be live, folks. So tune into CAFE or Heather’s Facebook page on Thursday, October 21st, at 6:30 PM Eastern Time, Thursday, October 21st, at 6:30 PM Eastern time. We’ll also release the audio version as an episode of Now & Then. To RSVP for this upcoming great live episode or to just keep in touch with what’s going on with the show, go to cafe.com/live.
Heather Cox Richardson:
And I just got a sneak in, Carrol live, it’s going to be great. It’s just going to be great. And we’ll get a chance to discuss Carol’s new book called The Second: Race and Guns in a Fatally Unequal America, a terrific new book, and talk about the legacy of the Second Amendment, on the inequities we see in America today and talk about voting and talk about the political landscape and just generally talk about life. We really hope you can join us.
Joanne Freeman:
But before that, today, we want to talk to you about a topic that, as always, will make perfect sense considering what’s in the news and that is speakers of the House. Now obviously, this is prompted by what’s going on now in the House, with Nancy Pelosi and the infrastructure bill and all of the debate about when it should be debated and if it should be debated and how it’s linked with the debt ceiling or isn’t linked with the debt ceiling and it’s ongoing day after day after day with little tweaks and what’s going on in the news. Part of this story has to do with the speaker herself and a bigger question, which is, what is the speaker traditionally supposed to do or not supposed to do? What kind of power does that position have now and how has that changed over time?
It’s a really interesting story, because the speaker of the House, in a sense, is a hyper national position. It’s a person who is elected by the elected and it has a certain degree of power, but that’s shifted over time. And those shifts, in one way or another, had a lot to do with the state of political parties in America and that, in turn, has a lot to do with the State of America itself. So what we want to look at today is a couple standout speakers, why they stood out and what that can tell us about the larger story about the power of speakers and how they shape American politics.
Heather Cox Richardson:
So when we first thought about doing this, just thinking about the images you have of speakers, Pelosi really jumps out and we’re going to want to come back to her, but you can’t really understand why she’s important until you understand the history of the speaker of the House. And for that, I think we have to start with the Constitution. And Joanne, am I correct that the constitution doesn’t even talk about what the speaker of the House is supposed to do?
Joanne Freeman:
No, the Constitution simply says that the House will choose its speaker. In that sense, you know, the House is a fully independent body because the Senate is chaired by the Vice President, but the House, an opposition to that, is entirely independent with its own leader chosen from within its body.
Heather Cox Richardson:
And I love the fact that the Constitution doesn’t spell out very much. It’s really a blueprint for a government rather than giving very close instructions. And that actually may come back to bite us in about a half an hour when we talk about what might happen going forward with the speaker of the House. So when they first start, the speaker of the House just oversees Congress, right?
Joanne Freeman:
Right, the speaker presides over what’s going on in the House.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Trivia, trivia, trivia, do you know who the first speaker was?
Joanne Freeman:
Francis Muhlenberg.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Oh, my God, you know that.
Joanne Freeman:
God. He also had a brother in politics. I can’t remember his first name. You’ve-
Heather Cox Richardson:
Right. I remember. Everybody remembers that, Joanne.
Joanne Freeman:
The other Muhlenberg.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Exactly. What is their dog’s name?
Joanne Freeman:
Don’t even. But yes, the speaker was pretty much a straightforward office. The speaker presided over the House, helped to settle points of order, decided who would speak on the floor, appointed members of committees. But generally speaking, the speaker was assumed to be above partisanship and certainly above party. The founding folk did not assume that political parties were a good thing, but rather something to be avoided, something that was a sign of a government in crisis and distress. So in the creation of the Constitution, there was never an assumption that there would be two organized parties and a speaker that would have something to do with those parties.
Heather Cox Richardson:
So the speaker originally is really just a presiding officer, somebody to go ahead and make sure somebody is in charge.
Joanne Freeman:
Correct. And in that sense initially, it isn’t really quite a political office. It becomes a political office over time.
Heather Cox Richardson:
So the first major speaker and the one that we tend to point to when we talk about the development of the concept of a speaker of the House is … Take it away, Joanne.
Joanne Freeman:
Henry Clay. In a sense, during his life, he was bigger than life and he remains that way. He’s this huge character who was, really you could say, the first really strong speaker of the House. He had a lot of personal power as speaker. He had a lot of influence along those lines. He is that the first to have stepped down from the speaker’s chair and got down onto the floor to discuss policy, but he did that during his tenure as speaker of the House. So he’s someone who had a huge influence and who was particularly skilled with using his tools at his disposal to get things done efficiently.
Heather Cox Richardson:
So he one of the things I love about Henry Clay is that he actually is elected speaker on his very first day in the House and he was 12 years old, right?
Joanne Freeman:
Maybe not 12. Consider that, that gave me pause even in preparing for this show. I was like, “Wow, he really like just came. He had just entered the House and was made the speaker,” which partly shows you some of what we’re saying here. It was not considered to be this heavy-duty political position yet.
Heather Cox Richardson:
And yet, he was very young, he obviously represents a new constituency. These are people who are interested in going to war with Britain which is eventually going to lead to the war of 1812 and they’re known as the War Hawks. And they clearly have an idea of going ahead and using the House of Representatives as a way to push principles of their party, as opposed to governing in general over the country. And even before he becomes speaker, they go ahead and they put in place some new rules that give the speaker a great deal of power. So even before Clay becomes speaker of the House, Congress goes ahead and eliminates the ability of other congresspeople to continue to talk, to slow things down and keep things from happening simply by talking.
And that’s a policy that Henry Clay is going to solidify into the House. The Senate never gets that. So the Senate still has what we now call the filibuster. You can’t shut up a senator just by calling the previous question.
Joanne Freeman:
And the Senate has always been famous for that, as the land of oratory where you can speak as long as your lungs can carry you.
Heather Cox Richardson:
So what Clay does then is he ushers in a new era in Congress where it’s actively going to push the policies of one or another party.
Joanne Freeman:
And as an example of how this works, because as we’re going to see throughout today’s episode, a speaker can do lots of obstructing in the course of stopping others from obstructing things and the previous question, which you just mentioned Heather, is a great example. The way that works is if people are debating a bill, someone can say, “I call the previous question,” and what that basically means is, “I think we need to call a vote on this now.” Generally, speaking before this point, that would happen, the question would be called. If people wanted to have that bill pass, the debate would continue on.
However, in time, and Clay is part of the reason for this switch, the previous question becomes a way to end debate, so that when you say, I call the previous question,” you’re not going to have debate after that point. You’re basically saying, “Now there shall be a vote.” And that became a really powerful obstruction tool very often for the minority party in the House for a very long time. And Clay certainly wasn’t shy about using it that way.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Well, so just one thing I want to point out there is when you call the previous question, there isn’t actually a previous question which is one of the things that always drives me nuts about that.
Joanne Freeman:
It’s the bill. The previous question is the bill that’s up for debate.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Right. It’s always driven me bananas that when somebody says, “I’m going to call the previous question,” you’re always digging around going, “What was the previous question?” And it’s like there actually isn’t a previous question. It’s just going back to having a vote or stopping discussion.” So Clay goes ahead and he manages to use the speakership to push the agenda for his party. What else do we need to know about Clay?
Joanne Freeman:
Well, I suppose it would be useful to know some of the ways in which as a speaker, he didn’t use conflict, but he use real skill with parliamentary tools to get his way. And a great example of this, it’s sneaky. I want to call it dirty politics, except in some ways, it’s just politics, but a great example of what a speaker can do takes place during debate over the Missouri Compromise of 1820. So the House passes the conditional admission of Missouri as a state. And at a late hour, John Randolph stands up, passes a motion. He wants to reconsider that vote. He wants to contest it.
Clay, as speaker, says to Randolph, “You know what? It’s a really late hour. Why don’t we continue this tomorrow?” And Randolph agrees. Next day comes and Clay says to Randolph, “We have to do some morning business first and then we’ll turn to what you were discussing yesterday.” During the morning business, Clay signs the bill as it was passed. And when Randolph, John Randolph of Roanoke, stands up and begins to rant about what he sees happening, in that renting time, the bill has been brought to the Senate and the Senate signs on to it.
Joanne Freeman:
And so what had been discussed and passed the day before it’s passed and John Randolph of Roanoke, who is not a shy character, he’s pretty eccentric and pretty aggressive, he’s totally just taken in by this swishing around of things by the speaker.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Well, that sounds sneaky.
Joanne Freeman:
It is sneaky.
Heather Cox Richardson:
It’s one way to put it.
Joanne Freeman:
It is sneaky.
Heather Cox Richardson:
So he’s also known as a gambler, which I think shows in the way he behaves. And it’s funny because I always tell my students that there was a move afoot a number of years ago to change the name of Mount Clay in the Presidential Range in New Hampshire because everybody thinks it refers to this clay in the soil. I’m just like, “No, no, no, no, that was named for Henry Clay and you all have to go out into the world and defend Henry Clay’s right to have a mountain named after himself, even though he never became president.” Because what he does with the power that he assumes is, first of all, leads the country into the war of 1812. But then, he pushes this idea that the government should promote economic growth.
And that concept of the government being used to promote economic growth is one that becomes the animating factor of the Whig Party, and of course, is one of the things that drives Abraham Lincoln.
Joanne Freeman:
And it has a name even, right? It’s known as the American System, Henry Clay’s American System, which is all about higher tariffs and investing in infrastructure, and even later on in his career, a national bank.
Heather Cox Richardson:
So Lincoln goes on after Clay’s death to say, “Henry Clay is dead. His long and eventful life is closed. Our country is prosperous and powerful but couldn’t have been quite all it has been and is and is to be without Henry Clay. Such a man the times have demanded and such in the providence of God was given us, but he is gone. Let us strive to deserve, as far as mortals may, the continued care of divine providence, trusting that in future national emergencies, he will not fail to provide us the instruments of safety and security.” And that speaks I think to your earlier point about how Clay in many ways simply reflects the times in which he came up. He’s using the government or he’s using the speakership to go ahead and enable him to put things through, but he’s really a representative of his time.
Joanne Freeman:
Right and that’s particularly true, given that at the time that he speaker, the United States is still relatively young. There are not fully organized entrenched political parties yet. There are still all kinds of precedents being formed. I’m going to add one point though before we move on. I think it’s important considering we’re talking about people with strong personalities and strong agendas. Clay was known at the time as the great compromiser because that was one of his skills as well. He’s an outgoing guy. He’s a congenial guy. He also happens to be a duelist. But in addition to all of that, he was someone who was really skilled at getting people into some kind of a compromise. He was known for that personally as well as politically. And as we’re going to see, that matters a lot too.
Heather Cox Richardson:
He’s great compromiser, but he’s also pulling the kind of stuff he pulled on Randolph.
Joanne Freeman:
Yes. Oh, yeah. That’s why I mentioned the compromising because that’s a good side of the sneaky stuff.
Heather Cox Richardson:
But the speakership is such an interesting position after Clay has had it because it becomes the place for people who are extraordinarily skilled at compromise, at knifing people and at assuming power to take the country in a certain direction.
Joanne Freeman:
I think that’s true, but I think also … We can see if we end up agreeing on this, but I think the most successful speakers in addition to being people who like to deploy power are people with really big personalities, who can have a certain amount of personal authority that way.
Heather Cox Richardson:
That’s exactly right, the big personalities and actually the person to whom you were alluding is Thomas Brackett Reed. He’s a Republican. He comes from the state of Maine and he served as the speaker of the House of Representatives from 1889 to 1891 and then again from 1895 to 1899. And the reason that those dates matter is because those are the dates when the big business Republicans were in the White House. And so he’s going to work really closely first with Benjamin Harrison and then with William McKinley to push their big business agenda. And I know those are names that a lot of people haven’t heard and don’t think a lot about, but they’re incredibly important.
Thanks to Thomas Reed. They changed really the entire way America operates. So Reed is frustrated by the situation in Congress after Democrats return in the wake of the Civil War and he’s frustrated that he can’t seem to get anything through. So his real claim to fame as a speaker is going ahead and using the rules in such a way that he can basically jam through his agenda. And that agenda after the election of Benjamin Harrison in 1888, he couldn’t take office in 1889, is to go ahead and guarantee that the Republican Party stays in power forever.
Joanne Freeman:
I want to read a quote though that shows what Heather is describing here, what you’re talking about here, Heather, isn’t just, “I’m going to do things that help my party.” It’s really blatant. This is a quote from Reed, “The best system is to have one party govern and the other party watch. And on general principles, I think it would be better for us to govern and for the Democrats to watch.” That’s what he’s really pushing for and he’s doing a variety of things and really literally changing the rules, so that a political party, the party in power, can push through what it wants to do.
Heather Cox Richardson:
And I just have to add to that, he was a very big man with a baby face. And he was really funny. He was vicious but hilariously funny, so that even people who hated them are like, “Oh, my God, he’s so funny.”
Joanne Freeman:
I just can’t resist this one line, because in researching for this episode, it just made me smile because it’s funny and painful at the same time, noting two particular members of Congress in the House that he did not like. He said about them that they quote, “Never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum total of human knowledge.”
Heather Cox Richardson:
I remember that. That’s-
Joanne Freeman:
That’s an excellent quote.
Heather Cox Richardson:
So he got away with a lot of things like that, but the piece that you’re talking about that he changes the rules is actually a really big deal because of the way it plays out. And that’s that, when read took the speakership, you could only have a house debate move forward if there was a quorum and that is the minimum number of members on the floor needed to conduct business, that is half the members of the House plus one. And at the time that he took office, you decided how many people were in Congress by those who answered to their names when you did a roll call vote.
So if you, as a member of Congress, didn’t like what was going on, you simply wouldn’t answer the roll. So you’d be sitting in your seat, but you wouldn’t answer the roll, and therefore, you would deprive the House of a quorum. So especially members of the minority party and in 1889 when Reed is first speaker, the Democrats are furious because Benjamin Harrison has been elected with a minority of the popular vote and there’s been something squirrely going on in the Electoral College in that year, so they’re already mad. And they’re mad about the fact that the Republican stopped them from doing anything they wanted to do during the previous term, during Grover Cleveland’s term.
And so when Benjamin Harrison takes office and Reed steps up as the speaker of the House, they’re prepared to be difficult, but then Reed starts right off smashing stuff through. And right before he becomes speaker, about nine months before we become speaker, Reed is furious by this and he actually writes an article titled Rules of the House of Representatives in which he notes that in the previous Congress, the House only voted on 8% of the bills, because of this, as he said, disappearing quorum. But he believed that this put way too much power in the hands of the minority. So he called for changing the way that the House did business.
As he said, “If the majority do not govern the minority well and if the tyranny of the majority is hard, the tyranny of the minority is simply unendurable. The rules then ought to be changed so as to facilitate the action of the majority.” This proposition is so simple that it is a wonder there could be any discussion about it. And yet, recently in the House, there was much said in debate about the rights of the minority and that the rules of the House, instead of being merely business regulations, a mere systematization of labor, were a charter of privileges for those whose arguments were too weak to convince the House.
Joanne Freeman:
Now I want to note here some of the changes that he’s making and the first one affects precisely what you, Heather, were mentioning a moment ago which has to do with this practice of people from the opposition party being in the House not responding when their name is called and thus being marked absent. They’re not included as part of the quorum, and thus, you don’t have enough people to have a vote. So the first thing he does and it’s noted at the time and it earns him a nickname, he says, “You know what? If you’re in the room, you’re here. No more of this. I’m not answering to my name and so I’m not here and you can’t have a quorum. So if you’re in the room, I’m counting you as here.”
And this has a great impact to it. It’s in the press and people are yelling about it and it earns him the nickname Czar Reed or Dictator Reed, that he’s coming down with these tyrannical policies. Some of the other thing, he does, he makes the number needed for a quorum in the House less, he gives the speaker permission to deny recognition to members who are making motions just to waste time, he enables the speaker to refer legislation to committees without asking for a vote of the House, and in a way, this helps to explain how some of this is happening, the rule committee of the House is given a lot more authority.
Joanne Freeman:
And together, these changes, plus all of the other changes he makes, become known as Reed’s Rules and he really is known as Czar Reed for this precise reason. He’s changing the rules dramatically to enable the majority party to do what it wants in Congress and he’s doing this at a time when parties are being modernized and organized in a way that they hadn’t been before. So again, just like Clay, he’s a man who’s doing something very powerful at the moment when that power can really have an impact.
Heather Cox Richardson:
And it does have an impact. He does things like put William McKinley at the head of the Ways and Means Committee, which is an enormously powerful committee and they’re going to go ahead and rework the tariff really to help big business. But that illustrates the problem with as far as Reid goes and that is he infuriates even members of his own party by essentially turning the Republican Party in Congress into working along with Benjamin Harrison, into a group that is designed solely to keep itself in power. And I love this moment because they pass a lot of stuff he complained the previous Congresses didn’t.
He certainly passes a lot of stuff, but it’s all stuff that’s designed to help the big business Republicans who are now funding the Republican Party and to guarantee they stay in power for all time. So in fact, it’s under Czar Reed that we get the admission of six new western states designed to go ahead and return Republican majorities to the Senate and also to pack the Electoral College. It’s under Reed that we’re going to get all kinds of different pieces of legislation that are designed to go ahead and make sure that the Republican Party stays in power.
So we have Clay going ahead and modernizing the speakership to make it reflect a moment when the Congress had to go ahead and be able to bring order and to actually move forward and do stuff and to work in general for the country. And then, we have Reed coming in and saying, “Wait a minute. I can use these rules in such a way that I can go ahead and push my own agenda forward. So in that sense, I think too he reflects the moment in which he is speaker. He also reflects I think the kind of people who were rising in politics in that era. We got to Clay being very clearly a pre-Civil War politician. We got read being a late 19th century Republican and that brings us forward to the guy we both thought of when we talked about doing this. We both instantly said, “Oh, yeah, right, powerful speakers.”
Joanne Freeman:
Tip O’Neill, how can you talk about powerful speakers without talking about Tip O’Neill? And I suppose because he’s in the modern era, you and I, Heather, have been talking about Clay being a big personality and Reed being a big personality, but given that O’Neill is in “our times”, that big personality I think is easier for us to see.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Well, he certainly dominated the news while he was speaker of the House. He served for five complete consecutive congresses, which is … I think he’s the only speaker who had done that. He served from 1977 to 1987, the early years of the Reagan administration, coming off the end of the Carter administration. He was there a really long time and he was just so good in front of the cameras. And of course, he and Reagan had a friendly relationship aside from politics. So there was also like of, I don’t want to say romance about that, but this idea that you have these two extraordinarily different men politically who came from similar backgrounds and could still be friends after the day’s sparring got over.
Joanne Freeman:
But in a way, that relationship just epitomizes his politics, right? His technique. Because the most distinctive thing about him in a way was that unlike Reid who is entrenching party politics, O’Neill is someone who maneuvers really well within party politics of both parties. He’s someone who can wheel and deal and negotiate and he’s collegial and he brings people together and he reminds people of the institution’s history, their own history, what they want. He brings a personal dimension to politics that allows people to work together in a way that’s good for the institution of Congress and that ultimately allows compromises to happen.
That’s right, but back to your point, I think that reflects the time as well as the person. So he’s absolutely a coalition builder and he comes from, of course, the Boston Irish scene and always talked about how all politics is local. There’s this old saying about how he once made the mistake of not asking someone for their vote and she called them out on it. And ever after that, he would always make it a point to ask people to vote for him because people like to be asked, just he said. So partly, it’s his personality, but partly, I think it is the New Deal Coalition. He comes up the ranks during The Depression.
Heather Cox Richardson:
He graduates from college in 1936 and he sees the government in a very new deal way, the idea that the federal government should take care of people the same way that machine politics in cities used to take care of people. And that was about wheeling and dealing and building coalitions and making sure that everybody got their potholes filled. And when that comes head up against the Reagan era, when the whole idea, as Reagan talks about in his first inaugural, that in our present crisis, the government is not the solution to the problem, the government is the problem, that just doesn’t make any sense to somebody like Tip. That’s not the world he look came from.
Joanne Freeman:
Politically, ideologically in every other way, that wouldn’t make sense to him. I also think that part of that assumption about government being there to help people plays well with who he appeared to be said. You said, Heather, he shows well in front of the camera. He did. He seemed like this collegial big guy who is “one of us” and speaks as we would speak and understands what we understand. And when you look at some of his conversations, certainly as he gave them during his time as speaker, you can hear that in him. You can hear the fact that he’s appealing to the shared humanity of who he’s talking to.
The example I want to mention, I’ll mention it not because it’s necessarily very important, but again and thinking about this episode, it stood out to me because it sounded so much like him and it sounded so much not like what you would hear today. And this is O’Neill talking about his first conversation with President Jimmy Carter. And O’Neill says, “Our first conversation, he told me how he had handled the Georgia legislature by going over their heads directly to the people. I said, ‘Hey, wait a minute. You have 289 guys up there, the House Democrats, who know their districts pretty well. They ran against the administration and they wouldn’t hesitate to run against you.’ He said, ‘Oh, really.'”
What I love about that is, “Hey, wait a minute. You’ve got 289 guys up there.” It’s institutional, but it’s human, but it’s aggressive, but it’s not closing doors.
Heather Cox Richardson:
But the institutional part you’re pulling out really matters because he sees the government as an institution designed to help people. And if you’re not part of that insider game, you don’t get that. So you can see how President Jimmy Carter might not have seen that coming as he did from a state where he had had to work around the people that were already in the legislature and go directly to the people and had done so very successfully. And of course, that didn’t translate well to Washington when he tried to translate it there. But the other great O’Neill quotation I think is when he talks about working with Reagan.
And it’s really important to remember that O’Neill’s version of the government that’s designed to be this institution that goes ahead and helps ordinary Americans, as I say, I think the machine politics side of that really matters because that’s what O’Neill is coming from, that Boston feel. His ideology is dead set against that of Reagan’s, which is designed to destroy all that, designed to be an outsider and get rid of the government and go ahead and slash regulation, slash taxes and make sure that individuals are able to accumulate money as they wish and run their businesses the way they wish. And they are really diametrically opposed.
And what does O’Neill say? He says, “We’re going to cooperate with the president. It’s America first and party second. We’re going to give them enough rope. They can either …” So this is so O’Neill, “They can use it either to herd cattle or make a mistake. It’s no utopia out there. Let the Republicans keep all the promises they made. They’ve got to deliver. Let them sail the ship. We’re going to see how they operate.” But of course, what he wasn’t prepared for was the rhetoric that the Reagan administration also brought with it that enabled them to do things like triple the debt and still talk about fiscal conservatism. But that idea that this is the gridiron, if you will, “This is where we’re going to fight out ideas and we’re ultimately going to take it before the American people,” that is so a product of the period from 1933 to 1981. The idea that what we’re really going to do is we’re going to decide what this institution should do for the people and we’re all playing here on equal terms. It’s a wonderful moment.
Joanne Freeman:
And that’s Congress at its best. It’s always been a place that is rough, and that has conflict and that has ugly moments and that brings us to the cusp of crisis and occasionally beyond, that’s always true. But when it is functioning at its best, it’s an institution that’s grounded on a procedure-based way of proceeding that creates even ground for all of the players on that field.
Heather Cox Richardson:
So then there’s that fabulous moment where speaker O’Neill runs up against a new representative from Georgia, Newt Gingrich, young guy, 39 years old in May of 1984. Gingrich and his fellow Republicans from the caucus he had developed, The Conservative Opportunity Society, they called themselves, did this like tag-team denunciation of democratic foreign policy in the period after Vietnam. And they not only singled out one of Tip O’Neill’s close friends, his political ally, Edward Boland, who served as the chair of the House Intelligence Committee, they did it after most of the legislators had gone home. And they did it for C-SPAN. It was sneaky and it was …
I just hear it and I think Czar Reed, right? That’s exactly the sort of thing that Czar Reed would do, but C-SPAN had just begun to broadcast congressional business in 1979 and O’Neill believed correctly that Gingrich had pulled the stunt for the TV cameras to give the impression that the Democrats weren’t even bothering to defend themselves. And he actually … First of all, he ordered C-SPAN to go ahead and make sure that if the Republicans ever pulled that stunt again, that they would show the empty seats in the chamber and show that they were pulling this, thinking the people would actually be watching it, which is interesting, that whole idea that used to be really cool to be able to watch Congress, and now, if you’re backstage at C-SPAN, you know that they have six cameras on everything and there’s some guy asleep going like, “I can’t believe I’m filming empty seats.”
But O’Neill was so mad he actually left the speaker’s chair and he walked down to the podium to get in Gingrich’s face and tell him that what he had done was completely inappropriate. And what O’Neill says, he says and he goes-
Tip O’Neill (archival):
My personal opinion is this, you deliberately stood on that well before an emptied House and challenged these people and you challenged their Americanism and it’s the lowest thing that I’ve ever seen in my 32 years in Congress.
Heather Cox Richardson:
And every time I think of that, I think about what O’Neill would have said about someone nowadays.
Joanne Freeman:
Oh, boy.
Heather Cox Richardson:
You know exactly where I’m going. Jim Jordan, the representative from Ohio, when he browbeats people who are testifying in congressional hearings and he is simply trying to get a soundbite to circulate on right-wing media, Tip O’Neill would have dragged him out by his hair.
Joanne Freeman:
One of the things that I love about that anecdote, in addition to the fact that once again it places it at a definite point in time, is that when he later discussed that incident, one of the things he said was, “Attacking another member when he’s not there to respond, while pretending that the House was in session is a gross violation of our code of behavior.” What I love about that is, you could have said that in 1830. You could have said that in 1840. It’s a long standing rule in both Houses. Again, that has to do with fair treatment, that has to do with people being able to fight on even ground. You don’t insult people when they’re not there to defend themselves. It’s just not done.
And you can see over congressional history, when someone does that, they’re always reprimanded. So again, here is O’Neill, pointing to the institution and how the institution is supposed to work and saying, “Not only is that dirty, but it’s dirty even in institutional contexts.”
Heather Cox Richardson:
And he’s a great example of somebody who is extraordinarily good at what he does, but the moment was changing and I don’t think he could see that the rules of the House were changing. I don’t mean that literally the rules of the House, the rules of American politics were changing. And his version, both of government and of the way that people were supposed to conduct themselves, had changed a lot. It would not be long, of course, before we would have a member of the House of Representatives telling a president or screaming at a president during a State of the Union address, “You lie.” The old days of courtesy are long gone.
Joanne Freeman:
Courtesy and institutional respect. Well, so this has moved us-
Heather Cox Richardson:
And that brings us quite naturally-
Joanne Freeman:
I know. I was trying to think of a smooth segue. There are no smooth segues into modern day politics.
Heather Cox Richardson:
Well, but if you think about it though, in a way, it is a smooth segue because now we’re dealing with Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House now. And she, of course, is of an era with Tip O’Neill. She’s 81 years old and she has been through this period of the polarization of Congress and recognizes a different set of circumstances than he does. And because of her own background, I think she, like O’Neill was and like Reed was and like Clay was, is uniquely positioned to represent this moment in American politics.
Joanne Freeman:
And one of the most obvious ways in which that is true, even before you get to her personality and her manner and her politics and how she works as speaker is the simple fact that she is a she, at a moment when women are increasingly and hopefully will continue to be increasingly present in politics of all kinds and particularly in Congress.
Heather Cox Richardson:
And she spoke about that when in fact in 2006 when the Democrats won 31 seats to take back the House, she became the first woman speaker of the House in American history. And in her first remarks, I remember these, in her first remarks after she became speaker, she talked about the historic nature of her election. She said-
Nancy Pelosi (archival):
This is an historic moment. It’s an historic moment for the Congress. It’s an historic moment for the women of America. It is a moment for which we have waited over 200 years. Never losing faith. We waited through the many years of struggle to achieve our rights, but women weren’t just waiting. Women were working, never losing faith. We work to redeem the promise of America, that all men and women are created equal. For our daughters and our granddaughters, today we have broken the marble ceiling. For our daughters and our granddaughters, now the sky is the limit. Anything is possible for them.
Joanne Freeman:
I remember seeing the photograph of her being sworn in on the front page of a newspaper and I was in a doctor’s office. And I turned to a complete stranger who’s a woman and showed it to her. And we both just sat there looking at each other and she then said very quietly, “Thank you for showing me that. It was a moment.”
Heather Cox Richardson:
It was a moment. And the other thing that I love about not only her representation of women, but the fact that she has been very vocal about the fact that what has really prepared her for this job is being a mother. She has five children, and in this moment of extraordinary polarization and the need to bring so many different constituencies together to get anything through Congress, she has been very articulate about the fact that it is her training as the mother of five children and grandmother of nine, I think it is, that has enabled her to go ahead and construct compromises that make everybody happy enough. And that skillset is again representative of the time, but I think it’s also representative of a new kind of voice in politics and a new kind of ways of building coalitions.
So you have people like Henry Clay gambling and drinking all night with people and you’ve got Czar Reed basically just bossing them around and you’ve got Tip O’Neill slapping them on the back and you’ve got Nancy Pelosi mothering them in a sense. I think she is very aware of the problems that mothers have in America nowadays, especially impoverished mothers. She, again at one point, said, “What took me from the kitchen to Congress was knowing that one in five children in America lives in poverty. I just can’t stand that.” So she’s taking the New Deal Coalition and saying, “Let’s not Just privileged working men in nuclear families. Let’s go ahead and help women and children.” And you can see how that is applicable to the work she does.
But I also think it made her uniquely positioned to gain headlines during the Trump administration because she didn’t explicitly call Trump a toddler, but she treated him like one. And anybody who has either been a child or a parent, it’s better to say all of us, recognized when she was doing that. People call that out at the time. At one point, when Trump walked out of a meeting with her because she wouldn’t give him money for his border wall, she turned to the reporters and she said-
Nancy Pelosi (archival):
I’m a mother of five grandmother of nine. I know a temper tantrum when I see one.
Heather Cox Richardson:
And, you know it just made his hair catch on fire to hear her talk like that and to act like that.
Joanne Freeman:
And particularly because it’s true, and whether he admits it or not, it was obviously true and hurt by her giving that name to it. And in a sense, there’s a gendered component to that which makes it even more powerful. I also just want to make the point that she’s a wonderful politician. She’s a very skilled politician who understands the need to work with different coalitions to bring people, if not together, at least to get them to go on a track that’s going to end up with some kind of a conclusion. There’s a quote from her just recently within the last week or two of the recording of this episode that I think is worth quoting particularly because of the last part of it. And she’s talking right now about infrastructure and what’s going to happen with the bill and the vote and how will it pass or will it pass or who’s doing what.
She says, “Let me tell you about negotiating. At the end, that’s when you really have to weigh in. You cannot tire, you cannot concede. This is the fun part.” That’s a politician speaking.
Heather Cox Richardson:
And the other thing that she’s got so brilliantly is timing. And this is one of the things it’s always interesting for people like us who are historians who understand the way Congress works, well, to the degree anybody can, I suppose, is people get all hot under the collar, “Why isn’t she doing this? Why isn’t she doing this? We need to replace her. We need to do this,” and then you sit there and you watch her extraordinary timing. And it’s actually key, I think, to the fact that she played such a role, first of all, in stopping George W. Bush from privatizing Social Security. Again, something that didn’t happen largely because of Nancy Pelosi and with getting through the Affordable Care Act, the Obamacare, both of which came down to her timing.
So with Social Security, after George W. Bush was reelected, in that winter, the winter of 2004 to 2005, Republicans had majorities in both Houses of Congress and I believe that they had a new lease on life. They thought they had this brand new opportunity to push through their version of what the government should do and key to that was replacing Social Security’s basic structure. So the signature piece of the New Deal Coalition from the 1930s is the Social Security Act which doesn’t just provide paychecks to disabled people and to elderly people, but actually provides unemployment insurance and aid to women and children and does a whole bunch of other things that are in that umbrella.
And they were going to get rid of that, replacing it with a program in which people would divert some of their income into accounts that were like 401k accounts essentially. And they didn’t really ever articulate how that was going to happen, but this was Bush’s big push. And of course, the Democrats were under great pressure to come out and oppose it and Pelosi refused to. She kept on saying, “We’re going to let this play out. We’re going to let this play out,” because she recognized that there was a huge problem with their argument and that if young people started diverting the money that otherwise would go into Social Security, there was not going to be money to give to the older people who were counting on Social Security and there was really no way around that for the Republicans.
And they recognized that either they were going to have to borrow or they were going to have to cut things for older people, there was not a way to square that circle. And rather than muddying the waters and getting into that and getting the Democrats in that fight, she stepped back. And lots of Democrats were like, “You got to step up. You got to say something.” And she was like, “No, anytime we do that, we’re going to start fighting and what we really need to do is nothing.” And one of my favorite comments she made as somebody was pestering her about, “What are we going to do? What are we going to do? What are you going to come up with something? When are you going to say something?” And she says, “Never. Is never good enough for you?”
And it worked because the Democrats refuse to get involved in the debate leaving the Republicans to fight amongst themselves and you will notice that Bush’s proposal to go ahead and privatize Social Security died, never came to a vote in either Houses of Congress.
Joanne Freeman:
Here’s what that makes me think in a more general sense, Congress as a whole relies on some kind of a balance between party politics, policies and institutional procedures, all of those things in one way or another are there, when it’s functioning. And as I mentioned before, for it to be a credible institution, there needs to be a sense that there’s an even playing field. Regardless of majority or minority party, people have to believe that the institution itself is enabling politics to happen in some sense and that there are ways to come back and refute things if you don’t like the way things are going.
What the speaker faces is the challenge of that balance, is helping to maintain that balance, party politics and policy and institutional procedures while also managing, in some ways, the party politics component of that. Nancy Pelosi, in this particular time, facing our particular political situation with all of the polarization that we’re facing, this is a challenging time to be speaker for any number of reasons.
Heather Cox Richardson:
What’s interesting about watching Pelosi is that she clearly enjoys what she’s doing. And this moment in our politics, when what is on the table, in front of the House of Representatives has been, continuing resolution to fund the government, a measure to raise the debt ceiling, a bipartisan infrastructure bill of about $1.2 trillion that initially at least some Republicans signed on to, a much larger infrastructure bill that does all kinds of brand new things to protect women and children as well and at least two voting rights act all at the same time, it’s like watching someone spin plates.
And when people throw up their hands and say, “This can’t be done,” I always think about what Pelosi said after the Democrats lost their 60-vote majority in the Senate, just as the vote for the Affordable Care Act came up and a lot of people thought that that was it, it wasn’t going to get through, and she said, “We’ll get the job done. I’m very confident. I’ve always been confident,” and she did. They managed to go ahead and get that bill through the House and to put the Affordable Care Act in place.
And when you think about Pelosi being able to pull off things like getting through the Affordable Care Act and everything she’s juggling right now, it’s worth remembering what representative Hakeem Jeffries said about her and he said, “When has Speaker Pelosi ever failed on a legislative initiative that she and a Democratic president strongly support? She didn’t even fail when she had Republican presidents including George Bush and most recently Donald Trump. So I think anybody who’s counting her out already in terms of getting through all these measures might be counting their eggs before they chicken, as you say.”
