Is It Speaker Gingrich--or Prime Minister?

Newt Gingrich, former historian and future Speaker of the House, recently described himself as a “student of Walpole, Jefferson and Gladstone.” The Jefferson part is clear enough; but the other refer ences are intriguing--and more than a little unsettling. Robert Walpole, of course, was the 18th-Century English statesman considered the first prime minister of Britain. William Gladstone was the great 19th-Century Liberal reformer whose clashes with his Tory rival, Benjamin Disraeli, still echo loudly in the history books.

In November, 1879, Gladstone, then age 70 and a once-and-future prime minister, was a candidate for election to Parliament from the district of Midlothian, near Edinburgh. He betook himself aboard a train in London, proceeded north toward his constituents in Scotland--and made history. The “Midlothian campaign” marked the first time in British political experience that a party leader made a “national” electoral appeal.

Political etiquette had dictated that parliamentary candidates should communicate rather formally with their limited electorates, often in writing, and virtually never campaign outside their districts. But in 1879, Gladstone “stumped the country,” rousing audiences at train stations in Liverpool, Glasgow and other stops with his passionate oratory, redolent of high Victorian moralism.

Disraeli and Queen Victoria alike were disgusted at this vulgar display--a lamentable product, they sniffed, of the recent democratization of the electorate in the reform law of 1867. When the results came in, returning Gladstone as prime minister in a new Liberal government, Disraeli and the queen were not merely disgusted but also, in the measured words of a standard British history, “sincerely surprised--which shows how little the workings of a democratic electorate had yet come to be understood.”

Here, history offers to stunned and reeling American Democrats, a century and a quarter later, a rare opportunity to share the experience of fellow-feeling with both a monument of conservatism and a famous monarch.

As Gladstone was waging the Midlothian campaign, Woodrow Wilson, then a graduate student who, like Gingrich, would abandon academia for politics, published an appreciative essay, in which he declared, “I do not know of anyone among modern statesmen whose character is worthier of study and imitation than is Mr. Gladstone’s”--a sentiment Gingrich evidently shares. Admiration for Gladstone, and for the British parliamentary system in general, animated Wilson’s Ph.D thesis, published in 1885 as “Congressional Government” and still a classic diagnosis of the U.S. political system.

Ironically, given Wilson’s later career, “Congressional Government” analyzed the presidency only briefly. Its main concern was Congress--specifically, the House of Representatives. Even today--especially today--it makes for interesting reading. For it offers a stinging indictment of the House for its obscurantism, inefficiency and unaccountability. “Its complicated forms and diversified structure confuse the vision,” Wilson wrote. Its customs “baffle and perplex and astound the new member.” Bills were introduced in profusion, to no effect. “A bill committed (to committee) is a bill doomed,” said Wilson. “It crosses a parliamentary bridge of sighs to dim dungeons of silence whence it will never return.”

The House worked, Wilson mocked, on the principle of “disintegration,” fracturing power among 47 standing committees whose deliberations were largely cloistered from public view and where the special interests of the day could quietly work their will. “Power and strict accountability for its use are the essential constituents of good government,” Wilson wrote. Yet, “the more power is divided, the more irresponsible it becomes. It is, therefore, manifestly a radical defect in our federal system that it parcels out power and confuses responsibility as it does.”

“Nobody stands sponsor for the policy of the government,” Wilson complained. “A dozen men originate it; a dozen compromises twist and alter it; a dozen offices whose names are scarcely known outside of Washington put it into execution.” This deliberate unaccountability, said Wilson, was “the defect which interprets all the rest.” One odd result of this systematic splintering of power and responsibility, Wilson marveled, was “the extraordinary fact that the utterances of the Press have greater weight and are accorded greater credit, though the Press speaks entirely without authority, than the utterances of Congress, though Congress possesses all authority.” Remember, these comments were made in 1885, not 1994.

Observers in Wilson’s day had abundant reason to be exasperated with Congress--indeed, with government in general. A series of weak presidencies after the Civil War effectively devolved power to the House and Senate, where slender and unstable party majorities produced protracted deadlock. Reconstruction sputtered to an inconclusive end, depression racked the country in the 1870s, rapid urbanization, quickening industrialization and swelling immigration were all transforming the character of the country, yet the federal government wallowed and floundered in partisan paralysis.

But in the figure of the House Speaker, Wilson saw some hope. The Speaker, he wrote, was “a constitutional phenomenon of the first importance.” As a presiding officer, the Speaker had to be impartial. But as majority party leader, the Speaker potentially possessed the power of “an autocrat of the first magnitude.”

Four years after “Congressional Government” appeared, a Speaker arose who seized that potential and exercised it robustly: Republican Thomas B. Reed of Maine. A huge and caustic man with a restless impatience, Reed had chafed since his election to the House in 1876 at its preposterously cumbersome procedures--”like trying to run Niagara through a quill,” Reed said, in a characteristic flourish of the rhetorical lash that kept his adversaries cringing.

Elected Speaker in 1889, Reed almost single-handedly rewrote the House rules to strip the minority Democrats of power--especially the power to obstruct by dilatory motions and filibuster. Most notoriously, he changed the definition of a quorum from a count of members voting to members present, while frustrated Democrats, waving the old rule book, vainly denied they were legally present.

The new “Reed Rules” ended the minority’s ability to filibuster. Combined with Reed’s iron control over his own party--including his appointment of all committee chairs and committee members--the new rules earned their author the title “Czar Reed.”

Reed broke the legislative logjam of the preceding two decades, and unloosed a flood of legislation that won for his 51st Congress a lasting historical reputation as the first “Billion-Dollar Congress.” But however much his fellow Americans may have appreciated his legislative efficiency, they gagged on his fiscal profligacy, and turned Reed and his Republicans out of power at the next election. (They were back again in 1894, and controlled the House for the next decade and a half.)

The “Reed Rules” remained largely in place until egregiously misused by Reed’s uncouth protege, Rep. Joseph G. Cannon, sometimes known as “the Hayseed from Illinois” or, simply, “Foulmouth Joe.” In 1910, a coalition of Democrats and progressive Republicans clipped Cannon’s wings, taking away his power to appoint committee chairs and members, and denying him membership on the powerful Rules Committees, the principal loci of power in the House, in a reversion to the diffused, unwieldy system that had so agitated Wilson. For better or worse, we have essentially lived with that system ever since. No Speaker since 1919 has exercised the kind of power Reed and Cannon did--until today.

For Gingrich now proposes, like Reed a century ago, to streamline House procedures, effectively silence the minority’s voice and whip his own party into an obedient body that can govern effectively and legislate into being the much ballyhooed “Contract With America.” Like Reed, he may well earn the gratitude of his countrymen for resurrecting the moribund legislative branch, palsied for a generation by its own Byzantine procedures and accumulated deferences.

But make no mistake: Gingrich intends not only to revivify Congress but also to establish what Wilson called “congressional supremacy.” This concentration of power in the legislature, and especially in the Speaker, implies nothing less than making the American system into a de facto version of the British system of “party government.”

“The British system,” Wilson wrote, “is perfected party government. No effort is made in the Commons, such as is made in the House of Representatives, to give the minority a share in law-making. The responsibility for legislation is saddled upon the majority.”

This system may answer our demand for action in Washington--but it also implies a fundamental challenge to our constitutional traditions. It shifts to the Speaker the kind of powers of initiative wielded by the President. It elevates the legislative branch over the executive. Indeed, in its ambition to invest the voice of the nation in a single person who has not stood for national election, it arguably usurps the chief function of the President.

That such a system can be made to work is not in doubt--we have only to look to the British model. But it has never been the American system--and Reed’s and Cannon’s attempt to adopt these methods to the nation’s political habits did not end well.

Gingrich has already gone beyond Reed and Cannon, taking a leaf from Gladstone’s book. His own phenomenally energetic campaigning for House candidates in the recent elections is without precedent in U.S. history. It constituted a kind of American version of Gladstone’s Midlothian campaign--an attempt by a legislative leader to go outside the precincts of his legislative institution and appeal directly to the people to be granted the mantle of leadership.

And what of Walpole? Does Gingrich intend to emulate his other British idol and become the first U.S. prime minister?

Wilson modified his views on the proper balance between Congress and President when he ascended to the White House in 1913. The President, he then said, “is at liberty, both in law and in conscience, to be as big a man as he can.” For the health of our own constitutional system, sanctified in more than 200 years of trial and triumph, it is time for President Bill Clinton to be as big a man as he can and check the unprecedented usurpation of power that is afoot at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.*