Why Boehner Will (Probably) Keep His Job

There is an article in Politico making the rounds implying that John Boehner’s speakership might be in jeopardy. The logic is that conservative Republicans have gained enough sway to get their own way within the chamber and/or caucus. That was followed by a piece about how most Democrats won’t back such a coup, with one saying “I’d probably vote for Boehner [because] who the hell is going to replace him? [Ted] Yoho?” That suggests Congressional Democrats are wary of a Boehner replacement for ideological reasons. In this post, I want to give a little context on how Congressional parties change, and how Speakers actually get toppled.

The idea of a more ideological faction gaining power within a Congressional party, and the toppling of a Speaker, aren’t unprecedented — but they haven’t happened at the same time. If conservatives want more influence in the House, they should build more influence within their own caucus first. If they want to topple the Speaker, they’d need Boehner to centralize leadership in himself to the point that Democrats have an incentive to replace him, paired with a promise of more decentralized leadership that’s also ideologically tolerable to the minority party.

On the first point: liberal Democrats took over the Congressional Democratic caucus and changed how the House operated, eventually marginalizing southern conservative Democrats. That took a long time — and the resignation of a president — to accomplish. Starting with the 1958 election, liberal Democrats began getting elected while, in part, attacking the dominance of southern Democrats in the House. During this period, conservatives dictated policy outcomes and most avenues of policymaking, which badly bottlenecked what Democratic presidents could accomplish. Liberals kept gaining members relative to conservatives in the caucus, and with the Watergate election of 1974 they reached critical mass and effectively seized control of the caucus on most fronts. For instance, up until that point committee chairs were assigned by seniority — since southern Democrats had been there forever, they chaired all the committees and were a very real pain in the side of liberals. Once liberals flexed their muscle, chairs had to be elected by the caucus, meaning an insufficiently aligned chair could be replaced. There were a slew of other changes, so much so that the mid-1970s are called the reform period in Congress. One moral of this story: the tried-and-true way to change how Congress makes policy is to change how your own caucus operates, which requires a majority of like-minded people in the party. For conservatives in Congress today, it seems likely they need more time and more members to be truly effective on that front.

A second moral: chamber leadership is only as strong as the caucus/chamber allows it to be. If conservatives were powerful enough within the Republican party, they could force changes in how leadership operates. More importantly, since the reform period of the 1970s, both parties have become more unified and given their leadership more power to represent the rank and file (see this excellent article describing that process), at the expense of power for minority-party members (among others). Even if conservative Republicans are more conservative than “regular” Republicans, the two groups are still relatively close together. In the 1930s–1980s it was a regular occurrence for Republicans to be more liberal than their Democratic colleagues — that is definitively not the case today.

The fact of the matter is that ideological diversity is required to overthrow a Speaker on the House floor. There are no conservatives in the Democratic party (relative to the Republican party) and no liberals in the Republican party (relative to the Democratic party) in Congress today. The last time a Speaker was overthrown, there was a large amount of ideological diversity within both parties, and both the majority and minority were left out of policy decisions — both groups thought the Speaker was too heavy-handed and wanted a bigger say. The modern minority party, by contrast, has no part in governing the House anyway, so there’s no real reason it would support a change in speakership — nothing to gain power-wise, and plenty to lose ideologically.

That’s precisely why conservatives are forced to work within the old paradigms. There’s no ideological reason for Democrats to go along with people far to the right of even the most moderate Democratic caucus members, so any floor strategy involving Democrats is a nonstarter. So, barring the rare possibility that Democrats find an electoral incentive to work with conservatives to remove Boehner, that strategy is out. What’s left is that conservatives have to endure, and hope they can keep gaining power within their own caucus so they can eventually make the changes they want. 30–50 members of a 247-member caucus may be enough to embarrass your party on the floor, but it isn’t enough to force the party to change how it operates.