Blame the House, Not the Constitution, for the Speaker Mess
The chaos in Congress stems from its own arcane rules — rules it could easily change if it could just get its act together.
The people’s mess.
Photographer: Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesOn the surface, the gridlock caused by the Republican Party’s failure to elect a speaker of the House of Representatives looks like a dysfunction of our old-fashioned Constitution. But the fault doesn’t lie with that document. The House’s dysfunction today is the product of the evolution of the American party system and the House’s own rules.
Start with the Constitution’s text, which has almost nothing to say about the speaker of the House. Article I, Section 2, Clause 5 says that “the House of Representatives shall chuse [sic] their Speaker and other officers.” There is no further mention of the speaker until the 25th Amendment, which dates to the 1960s and assigns the speaker a role in receiving communications about a president’s temporary inability to perform his duties. Even the fact that the speaker is second in line for the presidency derives not from the Constitution itself but from a statute, the Presidential Succession Act of 1947.