The Times, They Aren't A-Changing
The Democrats Current Leadership is Dooming the Future of the Party
Nancy Pelosi’s Biggest Problem
There are a lot of critiques of Nancy Pelosi online. “She’s too liberal” and “She’s too conservative” being the biggest two. But I’m going to contend that Nancy Pelosi’s biggest problem has absolutely nothing to do with her policy positions, and instead, her problem lies (sort of) with her age.
Now this is the part where anyone who read my piece last week are going roll their eyes, and think I’m just repeating myself. But I’m not. My complaint with Pelosi’s age here is that it shows a deepening problem for House Democrats: the House Democratic Leadership structure is way too rigid.
House Leadership structure is not a sexy topic, and it’s also incredibly confusing. There are lateral and vertical power structures and competing interests and roles that mean different things depending on who’s in power, but for our purposes there are 3 things to know.
The Speaker of the House is the most important job in the House of Representatives. They are technically elected by the whole house, but the real contest happens during the majority party’s nomination for Speaker. In other words, the majority party chooses, by vote, the speaker. The Speaker’s second in command is the Majority Leader, and the third in command is the majority whip. (If the party is in the minority, the Minority Leader is the leader of that party, and the Minority Whip is the second in command.
The House Leadership has tremendous control over the party and over congress. This power comes in two main ways: support for bills/amendments and committee appointments. A lot happens in the House of Representatives (or at least a lot is supposed to happen), and there are a lot of representatives to go around. So not every member is up to date on every issue. Thus, when party leadership endorses a bill, a lot of members of that party get on board, even if they haven’t read the bill. So members who want to turn their bills into law (which is most of them) don’t want to piss off their leadership. The same incentive applies to committee membership. Committees are basically segments of congress that focus on issue areas. If a member cares a lot about foreign policy, they’re gonna want to be on the foreign affairs committee, because then they’ll get to legislate and investigate the nation’s foreign affairs. And who get’s to decide who’s on which committee? The Leadership. Once again, if a member wants to impact issues you care about, don’t piss off the leadership.
Getting a spot on leadership makes you a lot more powerful. Like, a lot. If you want control over which bills get passed and who gets on which committee, you want to be on leadership.
This is a surprisingly good system. The party gets to self-govern, everyone in a party is willing to work together through their own self-interest, and it lets bills generally popular with the party’s constituents get support from members who either don’t have time to follow every issue, or are just lazy.
The issue today comes not from that system in general, but from the way in which the incentives it created are starting to break down. The way the system is supposed work is that a lot of members have bills they want to pass, and a lot of members are trying to be helpful to leadership in the hope of eventually being a part of it.
The first breakdown is not Nancy Pelosi’s fault. The historic gridlock in the Senate as a result of the Filibuster, and Republicans obstruction during the Obama and now Biden administration means that passing bills is less and less likely for house members.
However, that second part of the incentive structure, the part where members stay in line in hopes of joining leadership one day, well that has not been destroyed by the filibuster or by Republicans. That lies in a grave that Democrats dug themselves
Ambition Redirected, or Not
Politicians are, by nature, very ambitious people. They want to rise to power, and they want to wield more of it. The people in congress are the apex of this trope. They have risen through state legislatures, or the business world, or through grass roots organizations to become some of the most powerful people in the country. And they don’t want to stop there. They aren’t, by nature, good team players.
The leadership structure is supposed to, in part, solve this problem, to wield ambition into policy making by creating opportunities to grow in power (getting into leadership/chairing a committee) by working with the “team”. But somewhere around the dawn of the 21st century, this got all screwed up.
Since 2003, the top three Democrat Leadership positions have been occupied by the same three people. You read that right, for almost two decades the top leadership spots, the spots that are supposed to be up for grabs to incentivize going along with the team, haven’t changed.
Nancy Pelosi has held the top spot in Democratic Leadership for 18 years. Steny Hoyer, her number two, has been her number two for 18 years. And whenever Democrats have been in the majority for these past 18, James Clyburn has held the number three spot as Majority Whip.
It is now clear to any member paying attention, and they all are, that opportunities to advance in the party are not through leadership. So where does that leave the party? Prone to infighting.
There’s a reason that this doesn’t happen to Republicans, and it’s not because they’re legislative savants. Republicans are much more beholden to their radical wing. So, if they get a Speaker who doesn’t buckle under right wing demands, they have an easier time getting rid of them. Republicans also don’t stay in government as long. Republican politicians are happy to get in and out, and the revolving door between Washington and the Corporate World means that leaving Congress after a stint in leadership provides opportunities to enrich oneself on corporate boards and cable tv. That’s why in only six years, Republicans had three Speakers of the House. Clearly that isn’t a great system either, and Republicans have lost several crucial votes because the leadership wasn’t as strong as it needed to be.
But the Republican and Democratic party don’t operate with the same motives in governance. The Republican Electorate is comfortable with a party that doesn’t have legislative victories, so a lacking leadership doesn’t matter. But Democrats need to produce meaningful relief and laws to their constituents to get elected, and that will not happen if the caucus does not get along.
The Civil War Was Delayed, Not Avoided
It seems like a long time ago now, but in the weeks following the election, before the talk of Dominion voting machines, dozens of rebuked court cases, and a riot at the capital building, there was a lot of talk about the coming “Democratic Civil War”.
There was a real concern that the next congress would be marked by Democratic infighting. Abigail Spanberger famously blew up at her more liberal colleagues on a Democratic Caucus phone call, and “democratic socialist” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and centrist Conor Lamb were publicly sniping at each other in interviews. There was a belief that the party couldn’t hold together without the unifying oppositional figure of Donald Trump.
Of course, Donald Trump hasn’t gone away, and radical figures like Marjorie Taylor Greene and anti-Trump Republicans like Liz Cheney have created more infighting for the Republican Caucus than anyone saw coming. But the problem for the Democrats has not gone away.
When ambitious figures like AOC or Conor Lamb don’t see a reason to stick with the team, they attack members of it. There is already talk of AOC running for Chuck Schumer’s New York Senate Seat, and the people who refused to vote for Pelosi as speaker were moderate members, including Conor Lamb and Abigail Spanberger.
Until the Democratic party can figure out how to change incentive structures for their members, the party will not be able to hold itself together, no matter how radical the Republican party becomes.