David W. Rohde
Michigan State University
Newt Gingrich was certainly the most visible - and arguably the most potent - party leader in Congress in the last 30 years or more. My purpose in these comments is to assess briefly the impact of Gingrich on majority leadership in the House, and to place that impact in the larger context of party leadership in the late twentieth century. To aid in this assessment I will employ a theory of party leadership I developed about a decade ago that has become known as "conditional party government."1 The central claim of the theory is that the strength and power of party leadership is primarily dependent on how homogeneous the policy views are within the two parties (especially the majority), and on how far apart the policy views of the parties are. The greater the internal homogeneity within the parties, and the greater the divergence between them, the stronger will be the party leadership. In addition, the theory also recognizes a role for variations in the personalities and skills of individual leaders.
Conditional party government was developed to explain the developments in the House leadership from the 1960s through the 1980s. Until the 1970s, policy views in both parties were very heterogeneous. Analyses of roll call votes show that while the Democrats had more liberal views on average than the Republicans, positions in both parties stretched from the liberal end of the spectrum all the way to the conservative end. That is, there was considerable overlap between the policy positions of the Democratic and Republican parties.2 As a result, party leaders were weak. Members were reluctant to delegate strong powers that might be used to produce policy outcomes that were contrary to their wishes and those of their constituents. Beginning in the 1970s the internal heterogeneity of the parties began to decline. Consequently Democratic reformers sought to increase the powers of party leaders and to diminish correspondingly the powers of committees and their chairs because many of those chairs were senior southern conservatives with views contrary to those of most Democrats. During the 1980s, as the homogeneity of the parties increased, Democratic leaders became more aggressive in exploiting their increased powers to produce policy outcomes favorable to their party at the expense of the GOP minority. At the same time, the Republicans also strengthened the powers of their leaders in order to enhance their ability to compete with the Democrats.
This is the context within which Newt Gingrich became Speaker after the landslide victory of Republicans in the congressional elections of 1994. Because of the kinds of Republicans who were elected, the stage was set for a further expansion of the powers of the majority leadership. Analysis of roll call voting in the 104th and 105th congresses (1995-1998) shows that the policy positions of the respective parties were vastly different from the 1960s. The positions within both parties were very homogeneous, and the divergence between the parties was great. Overlap between Democrats and Republicans was virtually nonexistent.
Gingrich was ready and willing to take advantage of this situation. Within days of the election, and long before the newly elected members began to assemble in Washington, he began to assert unprecedented powers at the expense of traditional arrangements. (The timing demonstrates that the impetus for the changes rested with Gingrich and his leadership team, and not with the new class of "revolutionaries" elected in 1994.) Gingrich simply claimed the right to name the chairs of major committees, a right that the party's existing rules only gave him for a single committee (Rules). In making these appointments, moreover, he bypassed the most senior Republicans on three committees: Appropriations, Commerce, and Judiciary. It is important to note that all three of these committees were going to be central to the passage of the Republicans' major policy initiatives in the 104th Congress.
Gingrich instigated many other changes in House rules and practices, which all had the common theme of undermining the independent power of committees and their chairs and enhancing the power of the majority leadership. Three full committees were eliminated, and 106 (12 percent) of the previous Congress's subcommittee slots were eliminated. Task forces were used often to substitute for committees in the shaping of legislation. Gingrich personally designed a new committee assignment system for the GOP in which the party leader was given a dominant formal role. He also recognized that the Appropriations committee was going to be central to the party's agenda of reshaping the federal budget and in other areas, so he compelled the Republican members of Appropriations to sign a letter pledging to cut the budget as much as Gingrich wanted. The party also adopted a new House rule that enhanced the majority leader's control of Appropriations bills on the floor, at the expense of senior committee members.
These actions created the strongest majority party leadership in the House since at least the early 1900s. As noted above, while the homogeneity of policy preferences among House Republicans, and the divergence between the GOP and the Democrats was central to these developments, the personality and skills of leaders play a significant role, and Gingrich epitomized this aspect of the theory. Just as Democratic Speaker Tom Foley's reluctance to use the institutional powers available to him made him a weaker Speaker than he had to be, Gingrich's approach enhanced his power and facilitated its exercise. As Ronald Peters has argued, the Speaker saw himself as a transforming figure - an institution builder who wanted to change both the practices and the culture of the House.3 A team leader who spent a great deal of time and effort listening to and rallying his troops, Gingrich sought to persuade House Republicans to stick together in order to enhance their chances of passing their policy agenda and retaining their majority status. He also tried to compete with President Clinton in the effort to shape the public's perceptions of the competing parties, and the public's preferences about policy.
It is probable that the Gingrich speakership in the 104th Congress will be the high water mark of majority leadership power in the House. It is unlikely that the combination of conditions that existed in the wake of the 1994 elections will be matched in the future. First, there was a remarkable (albeit far from perfect) homogeneity of preferences within the House GOP, and that homogeneity was reinforced by circumstances. The party's new majority status, the fact that it had been 40 years since the last time the party had the majority, and the relatively narrow numerical margin over the Democrats, all induced GOP members to suppress policy disagreements and stand together against Clinton and the Democratic minority. Gingrich continually sought to reinforce this tendency when either party moderates or hard-line conservatives became dissatisfied. He argued that if they did not remain united, their ability to retain majority status would be undermined.
Second, there was an extraordinarily high level of trust in Gingrich among junior Republicans in the early part of the 104th Congress. Moreover, that group was inordinately large, with freshmen and sophomores constituting a majority of the party. Most of these junior members felt that they owed their majority status to the Speaker, and many of the freshmen believed that they also owed him their individual seats as well. In addition, the activist conservatives among the junior members believed at the outset that Gingrich was a kindred spirit who was ideologically committed to their goals of radical transformation of the federal government, although this belief waned as the 104th Congress developed. This context provided Gingrich with a bedrock of personal support in the party conference on which he could draw at times when internal disagreements developed and party homogeneity was in danger of fraying. Early in the Congress, as he instituted the organizational changes that shifted the balance of power away from the committees and toward the centralized leadership, there was simply no base on which those senior members who disagreed could build an opposition. The GOP conference was willing to trust Gingrich with a remarkable amount of power, and to support his views on its exercise in most instances.
Third, there was Gingrich himself. His attitudes and skills were an excellent match for the other circumstances in order to maximize the dominance of the majority leadership. He wanted power, he was willing to exercise it, and he exhibited significant skill in using it. A hesitant or more inept leader in the same context could not have built the power base or the range of institutional tools that Gingrich did. Of course things did not work out entirely as planned. After initially dominating the policy making during the first 100 days, Gingrich underestimated the personal and institutional capabilities of the president, and the ideological conservatives in the leadership and the conference did so to an even greater extent. The House Republicans lost the battle for public opinion during the government shutdown and ended the 104th Congress by largely capitulating to Clinton in the fight over the budget in order to maintain their majority. Subsequently Gingrich faced a conservative revolt, growing conflicts within the party over strategy and policy, and eventually the loss of his position as Speaker.
Majority Leadership after Gingrich
To say that the 104th Congress was probably the peak of majority leadership power is not the same as saying that subsequent leadership would be weak. Indeed, the first two years of the Hastert speakership offer us an excellent opportunity to assess the forces that shape leadership power. If it were true, as some believe, that a strong leadership is primarily the result of the skills and personality of the Speaker, then we would expect the transition to result in a much weaker leadership and to observe a reversion to the kind of committee-dominated policy process that existed before the 1980s. The House would operate much like it did during the time of Speaker Carl Albert, for example. If, on the other hand, the potency of the majority leadership is principally dependent on the patterns of policy preferences in the respective parties, then we would expect the majority leadership to be less dominant than in the 104th Congress, but still very strong. The House would be more like the speakership of Jim Wright. In the space I have remaining, I would like to offer some evidence that I think indicates that the latter characterization is a more accurate picture of the 106th Congress than the former.
The first thing to note is that the set of institutional arrangements that were adopted in the wake of the 1994 elections are largely intact. This includes the GOP rules for choosing committee chairs (which state explicitly that the chair "need not be the member with the longest consecutive service on the committee"), the six-year term limit on committee chairs, and the party's committee assignment system with the substantial weighted vote for the Speaker.
Second, despite the pledge by the new Republican leadership to return to the use of "regular order" in the conduct of the House's business, they retain the ability to bypass the usual committee consideration, and have demonstrated the willingness to do so when it is to their strategic advantage. Examples from the 106th Congress include sending an NRA-backed bill dealing with gun shows directly to the floor to avoid a lengthy debate in the Judiciary Committee, and bypassing Ways and Means with a bill to restrict the use of the Social Security surplus. Even more salient was Speaker Hastert's decision to send the HMO reform bill to the floor without decisions from either the Commerce or the Education and Workforce Committees.
Moreover, the Speaker still chooses the chair and the GOP members of the Rules Committee, and thus retains the ability to shape the terms of debate on the House floor. This includes both the use of the Rules Committee to shape the content of a bill that will go to the floor, and the ability to restrict the strategic options of those who oppose the majority party's desired policy outcome. For example, the 1999 banking reform bill had bipartisan support in both of the committees that considered it. When the bill reached the Rules Committee, the Republican leadership had Rules remove certain provisions from the bill, and then also block the consideration of those provisions as amendments on the floor. In addition, many other proposed amendments were refused floor consideration.
The Speaker is also able to use a variety of other powers to influence legislative outcomes, and Hastert has done so on numerous occasions. On the HMO legislation, the GOP leadership and a majority of Republicans opposed the bill that passed the House. Only eight percent of the majority-party conferees chosen by the Speaker had voted for the bill, even though more than 31 percent of all Republicans did so. Hastert, moreover, refused to appoint the two Republicans who were principal sponsors of the bill. In response, one of them said: "Is that stacking the deck, is that trying to subvert the will of the House, or what?" When the emergency appropriation bill was on the floor in March 1999, the time for voting expired with a majority against the bill. The time was extended while the leadership pressured enough Republicans to switch so that the bill passed. (It should be noted that Speaker Jim Wright had used this same tactic on a number of major bills, and the GOP members attacked him vigorously for unfair treatment and for violating the rules.) Later, when the conference report on this bill was being considered, three GOP House conferees voted for a benefit for the steel industry that was proposed by Senator Robert Byrd (D - W. Va.). The Speaker called the defectors into his office and forced two of them to switch their votes, which was sufficient to delete the provision from the bill.
Does this evidence mean that the majority party leadership is as powerful and dominant as it was under Speaker Gingrich? Certainly not. I think that it does indicate, however, that the corporate Republican leadership is stronger and more influential now than the majority leadership was until the 1980s, and it is stronger than would have seemed possible to congressional analysts before that time. As a consequence, the majority leadership is still able to employ a wide range of capabilities to adopt the kind of "unorthodox" processes analyzed by Barbara Sinclair in order to foster the success of their policy agenda.4 Newt Gingrich's speakership was part of a process extending over the past 40 years, during which the majority party's leadership assumed a more dominant position relative to the committee system. This process was rooted in electoral and membership changes. Legislative parties today are characterized by fairly broad internal agreement on policy and by intense policy disagreements with the opposite party. As long as that remains true, members of the majority will be willing to grant significant powers to their leadership to pursue their common political and policy goals.
1. David W. Rohde, Parties and Leaders in the Postreform House (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).
2. See John H. Aldrich, and David W. Rohde, "The Logic of Conditional Party Government: Revisiting the Electoral Connection," in Lawrence Dodd and Bruce Oppenheimer, eds., Congress Reconsidered, 7th ed. (Washington D.C.: CQ Press, forthcoming 2001).
3. See Ronald M. Peters, Jr., The American Speakership, 2d. ed. (Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), chapter 6.
4. Barbara Sinclair, Unorthodox Lawmaking, 2d. ed. (Washington: CQ Press, 2000).
