A Republican lesson in the glorious mess that is democracy

For a brief few days, congress became a debating chamber rather than the preening chamber Americans are used to.

Newly elected Speaker of the US House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy. Picture: AFP

Far from being an embarrassment, the four days it took Republicans to work out who would be the next Speaker of the US House of Representatives provided a glimpse into how parliaments should function.

For a brief few days, congress became a debating chamber rather than the preening chamber Americans are used to, where speeches are crafted for the nightly news and social media rather than in any genuine attempt to convince the other side. The congress no longer was a costly rubber stamp for the secret deliberations of political parties after 20 renegade Republicans demanded substantive changes to congressional rules before they would vote for Kevin McCarthy – and succeeded.

But the mainstream media was incandescent with condemnation, slamming the “chaos”, the “humiliation”, the “extremism”, where in fact there was none. Perhaps many prefer the governance model of the Chinese Communist Party or the old ruling Soviet party where there was no public infighting – and if there was, protagonists soon would be in prison.

The American people, who even might have learned a little about how their congress worked on the way, were the winners.

It took 15 rounds of voting last week before Republicans, with a slim majority of 222 seats in the 435-seat US lower house following their lacklustre performance in the midterm elections, elected Californian McCarthy, who finally clinched the top job in the wee hours of Saturday morning.

The backroom deals that usually precede parliamentary votes in the world’s democratic capitals, that hide the real political debate and make the outcomes a foregone conclusion, didn’t hold.

Republicans yelled at each other; some almost came to blows. Shockingly, Freedom Caucus ringleader Matt Gaetz of Florida even was caught speaking warmly to Democrats. For a fleeting moment half the congress became a chamber of individuals, as it was meant to be, rather than a taxpayer-funded battleground stage for two warring political factions.

Far from celebrating party discipline, George Washington, James Madison and other pioneers of the American experiment had warned against the dangers of all-powerful factions, which would ride roughshod over the spirit and letter of the US constitution. In 1787 in The Federalist Papers, Madison, later the fourth US president, railed against the “dangerous vice” of “overbearing majorities” that would kneecap members’ freedom to vote how they saw fit.

When parties controlled several branches of government – say, the White House and the congress – their intended separation would become a mere fiction. Taken to an extreme, thankfully not yet seen, the Democratic or Republican party – not the president or the individual members of congress, who simply would do as they were told – would decide on executive orders and legislation.

The loathing for Donald Trump across the political spectrum stemmed mainly from his personal popularity, a huge threat to the established political machinery in Washington. In any case, the 55 pages of rules approved by the new Republican majority are a dramatic improvement on the old ones, which had centralised power in the Speaker’s office. Under the new system members of congress will have at least 72 hours to consider new bills before being required to vote on them, and each bill will need to be related to a single subject.

This hardly seems revolutionary until one considers the norm under former Democrat speaker Nancy Pelosi. The last budget bill pushed through congress ran to 4155 pages and $US1.7 trillion ($2.4 trillion) and teemed with boondoggles and waste. Not a single member had a clue what they were voting for, just as the governing party leadership intended.

“To have read the entire bill, you would’ve needed to read 4+ pages per minute, without a single break, for 16 hours straight,” Republican congressman Dan Bishop tweeted at the time.

The law included $US525m to fix structural racism; $US200m for a gender equity fund, $US7.5m to understand the domestic radicalisation agenda, $US3m for bee-friendly highways, $US108m for environmental justice, $US8.6m for Pentagon gender adviser programs, and $US3.6m for a Michelle Obama Walking Trail in Georgia, to name just a handful of the hundreds of earmarks and political bribes that made Australia’s budget process appear a model of probity and restraint.

Further, individual members will be able to call for a spill vote to depose the Speaker, the way it had been from the 18th century until 2019, when Pelosi had changed the rules to make it much harder. A weakened Speaker or an empowerment of members and the citizens who voted for them?

Republicans also revived the Holman rule, in place for much of the time between 1876 to 1983, whereby the house could sack or alter the salary of specific bureaucrats, no doubt a concern for the small army of diversity and inclusion officers scattered throughout the vast US bureaucracy.

Last week the GOP revealed itself to be a more dynamic, flexible political party than the Democrats, for whom iron-clad uniformity remained the order of the day. Two hundred and twelve Democrat votes were furnished in every one of the 15 votes for Speaker, for the same candidate, day after day. Even the so-called Squad of far-left Democrats, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who talks the big talk outside the chamber, voted in lock-step with the party leadership for centrist Hakeem Jeffries, the party’s new house leader.

Rule changes don’t guarantee legislative success for Republicans, especially given the Senate remains Democrat-controlled. But they will slash the volume of new legislation, which can only be a good thing in a nation drowning in rules and regulations. As Roman historian Tacitus said, the more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the state.