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THEORY: Constitutional Provisions
The Framers of the Constitution were apparently relatively
unconcerned with who would lead the houses of Congress on the floor
(that is, who would manage legislation through each chamber on a
day-in/day-out basis). The Constitution only contains two references
to officers of each house of Congress, thus:
The House of Representatives shall choose their Speaker and other
Officers... [Article I, Section 2, clause 5a]
The Senate shall choose their other Officers [other than the
Vice President, the constitutional President of the Senate], and
also a President pro Tempore, in the Absence of the Vice
President, or when he shall exercise the Office of President of the
United States. [Article I, Section 3, clause 5]
The section first quoted (that relating to officers of the House of
Representatives) was reported out of the Committee on Detail of the
Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia on 6 August 1787 and adopted
by the Convention without comment or dissent on 9 August; this has led
to much speculation about just what kind of Speaker of the House the
Framers intended: a non-partisan Speaker on the British model? or a
Speaker who- like the same officer in the colonial assemblies and
nascent State Legislatures- openly wielded his gavel to the advantage
of the faction[s] which controlled the chamber and to the detriment of
his/their political enemies?? Some constitutional historians have
suggested that- as the Framers were familiar with the latter type and,
further, viewed the popularly elected House as the repository of the
"excited political passions of the People"- they intended an
overtly partisan Speakership; but other scholars- noting the attempts
to thwart faction in the Federal system the Framers were creating (seen
most clearly in the creation of the Electoral College system to elect
the President)- have argued that the Speaker was intended to be
non-partisan and to stay, more or less, "above the fray". It
is also quite possible that the Convention instinctively knew that a
given Speaker would be whatever the House of the particular Congress he
would be serving would want him to be (partisan or no) and left it at
that.
The section dealing with the officers of the Senate was, at least to
some extent, a somewhat different matter: the same Committee on Detail
that produced the section relating to officers of the House also
reported out a provision that the Senate, likewise, choose its
presiding and other officers and- just as with the similar House
provision in Art.I, Sec.2, cl.5- this, too, was adopted without comment
or dissent by the Convention on 9 August 1787. But then the Convention
itself threw the proverbial "spanner in the works" with its
debate over, and eventual adoption of, the Electoral College system of
electing the President (recounted elsewhere on this website): two men
would be voted for President by each Presidential Elector and,
ultimately, two men would be elected- a President and a Vice President;
the Vice President had to be given something to do and he was,
therefore, made constitutional "president of the Senate" by a
vote of the Convention on 7 September 1787. Now that the power of the
proposed Senate to choose its own presiding officer had been taken from
it, the section about Senate officers had to be reworked by the
Committee on Style which was, by then, working the document into a
final draft (the Convention would adjourn sine die on 17
September!) and what emerged was the present Art. I, Sec. 3, cl. 5,
in which the Senate was specifically authorized to choose- along with
its other (unstated) officers- a "President pro
Tempore" who would preside (or, in eventual practice,
authorize which Senator of the Majority party would preside) when the
Vice President was otherwise busy.
There has been some speculation among historians (though not nearly
as much as has been devoted to the Framers' intent re: the role of the
Speaker of the House) over the role intended for this President pro
Tempore: was he intended to be to the Senate what the Speaker was
to be to the House (whatever that was- see above)? for example,
when the Administration didn't need to have the Vice President present
in the Presiding Officer's chair for its own political purposes, would
the President pro Tempore- being one of the Senate's own- been
seen as one to guide legislation through the Senate on behalf of that
faction/Party which controlled it?? It is, of course, much more
probable that the Committee on Style merely recognized that- during
absence of the Vice President or a vacancy in that office-
someone should be designated, ahead of time, to preside (to
avoid nasty fights on the Senate floor over who should wield the gavel)
and then just left it at that.
PRACTICE: the House of Representatives
The earliest Speakers of the House were, in the main, non-partisan-
regardless of the intention of the Framers of the then-still new
Constitution: in part, this was due to the primitive state of national
Parties in this early period (essentially whatever "factions"
existed in the House during the early Congresses coalesced into more or
less loose coalitions of "Administration" [pro-policies of
the Washington Administration] and "Opposition" [against
those same policies] members) but it was also in part because those in
the House seem to have purposely opted- at least at first- to not have
the type of "factional" Speaker found in the lower houses of
the legislatures of their home States. Most of those serving in the
new Federal Government- in whatever capacity- honestly felt that they
were embarking on something new, something that could yet prove itself
to be above the petty politics of State and local governance: the
Speakers chosen during the first three Congresses, as well the manner
in which they exercised their authority as the House's presiding
officer, seem to show this.
There was no "leadership" as such in the earliest
Congresses: each bill introduced in the House had its "floor
manager" (pretty much the Congressman who introduced the
particular piece of legislation-- for example, James Madison of
Virginia was the person who drafted and then introduced the first
Amendments to the Constitution that eventually became what we Americans
call "the Bill of Rights" on the floor of the House of the
1st Congress; of course, those who supported his efforts clearly
approved of his actually doing this [while Madison's famous notes to
the Constitutional Convention of 1787 would not be published for nearly
fifty years, it must have been known- at least to some- that he had
taken these notes and he must have been seen as someone who could well
reconcile the Amendments being proposed- themselves based on Amendments
suggested in appendices to the Instruments of Ratification of the
Constitution added by the Ratifying Conventions of several States- to
the work of those who had attending the Constitutional Convention in
Philadelphia]) but there was, as yet, no "legislative
program" put forth by a stable working Majority or anything that
we, today, could call a "Party agenda". The leadership of
the political factions in the House favoring the goals of the
Washington Administration wasn't even a member that body (nor even in
the Senate): it was pretty much Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton
[!], acting on his own theory that this officer was the closest thing
Washington could have to a "prime minister" (while Washington
was clearly not above having Hamilton push the financial proposals of
the Administration- most notably, the creation of a Bank of the United
States, the General turned President was not about to let it be said
that he was not at the helm of his own Administration: Hamilton's idea
of a Cabinet officer as an American "Head of Government" was,
in the main, strongly rebuffed and, ever since Washington's tenure,
Presidents of the United States have been their own "prime
minister"!)
Partisanship, nevertheless, came to the Speaker's chair in the wake
of the development of the Federalist and "old" Republican
Parties as the 1796 Presidential Election loomed: when
pro-Administration Jonathan Dayton of New Jersey, hitherto more or less
non-partisanly presiding over the House of the 4th Congress- a House
controlled by the Opposition, cast two crucial votes which carried the
day for the Washington Administration trying to get funding in order to
begin to implement Jay's Treaty, any notion that the Speaker of the
House would always remain above politics ended once and for all.
Still, although Speakers would- from now on, except under extraordinary
circumstances- represent the Majority Party in the House, it would not
be until Henry Clay of Kentucky was Speaker during the early 19th
Century that a person holding that office would first begin to
aggressively push his Party's legislative program through the House; in
this sense, the Speakers, beginning with Clay, became- in effect- the
earliest form of "House Majority Leader". Throughout the
middle years of the 19th Century, this was to be an important part of
the Speaker's role, though how effective it was depended largely on how
big was the margin re: seats in the House for the Majority, as well as
how dynamic was the personality of the Speaker in the first place: the
ability of subsequent Speakers to emulate Clay tended to blow "hot
and cold" from Congress to Congress.
The late 19th Century would see the development of modern-style
House leadership: by the post-Reconstruction era, one can begin to see
a nascent "Minority Leader" emerging in the House- one almost
always identified with the Minority's losing candidate for Speaker (at
times, a former- and/or future- Speaker himself, had his Party been- or
would his Party yet be- the Majority), which only made sense given that
the Speaker of the House was still, at least in theory (where the
political landscape of the House membership did not permit this in
practice), de facto "Majority Leader". The succession
of Speakerships from those of Democrats John Carlisle and Charles Crisp
through that of Republicans Thomas (known as "Czar") Reed and
"Uncle Joe" Cannon- from 1883 through 1911 (a sequence
interrupted only by the somewhat less-imposing Speakership of
Republican David Henderson [1899-1903])- was the "furnace" in
which modern Congressional Leadership (in both houses, since
what was done in the House would eventually influence the Senate) was
to be forged.
Carlisle and Crisp, Reed and Cannon- while from different Parties
(as well as differing factions within those Parties)- shared a common
idea that the Speaker could be of his Party, yes, yet still- when
necessary- remain above it: but also that the Speaker should seek to
impose his own political vision upon the whole House, not merely be the
leader of his Party in that body, and that- if the Speaker had to, at
times, ride roughshod over Congressmen of his own Party to do so- then
so be it! The result was to make the Speaker of the House something
more than a mere functionary of the legislative process, turning him
into a national leader nearly as visible as the President of the United
States itself (a position a dynamic Speaker of recent times- a
"Tip" O'Neill or a Newt Gingrich- might still command,
particularly when the President was of the Party other than the
Majority in the House [as was the case with both men aforementioned]);
of course, it helped this cause that the Speaker was not, in any direct
way, tied to the Administration (as was the constitutional president of
the Senate, the Vice President) and, back in this period, also presided
over the only house of Congress directly elected by the People
(Senators were still chosen by State Legislatures in the late 19th
going into the early 20th Century).
With the Speaker- in the 1880's- now putting himself forth as
something other than a mere Party leader in the House, there was a need
for an actual Party floor leader- a true Majority Leader as an officer
separate from the Speaker. At first, this function was primarily
exercised by the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee (since
this was the committee which handled the bulk of the so-called
"Bills of Revenue" and, per Art. I, Sec. 7, cl. 1, this
was solely the bailiwick of the House, this was a very powerful
position) but, in 1899, Speaker Henderson specifically designated a
House Majority Leader (Sereno Payne) to act as his "agent" on
the House floor (allowing Henderson to publicly distance himself from
the Party leadership- when he felt it expedient to do so); the office
of Majority Leader, separate from that of the Speaker, has existed ever
since.
The Minority Leader, meanwhile, continued (as he almost always yet
continues) to be the losing candidate for the Speakership put forward
by the Minority Party but, at the same time as the Majority Leader
first emerged as a formal officer of the House, so did the Minority
Leader- this potential "Speaker-in-waiting", to this day, a
recognized officer of the House. Also in 1899, the Majority first
chose a "Whip" (a term already, by then, of long use in the
British Parliament, itself deriving from the term used to describe the
man whose job it was, during a foxhunt, to keep the hounds from
straying); the Minority followed suit toward the end of that same
Congress (the 56th). The job of these Whips- besides acting as floor
leader in the absence of their respective Party's leader- has
traditionally been to keep his or her Party's leader apprised of who
is- and who is not- toeing the Party line as a floor vote looms;
Majority Whips tend to be of the same faction within the Party as the
Majority Leader and Speaker (since it is the Majority that has the
power to push through their legislative agenda: thus, everybody must be
on- more or less- the same "page"), while Minority Whips are
often of a different faction of the Party than the Minority Leader
(which might explain why, although moving from Minority Leader to
Speaker if and when the Minority becomes the Majority seems at least
somewhat de riguer, moving from Minority Whip to Majority Leader
is not nearly so automatic [many Minority Whips have remained Whips
when their Party has become the Majority]).
During the 61st Congress, there was a revolt on the part of many
rank-and-file House Republicans against "Uncle Joe" Cannon,
the last of the so-called "czar" Speakers: in the ensuing
1910 Midterm Elections, the Democrats took control of the House and
Champ Clark (who was actually much more interested in pursuing the 1912
Democratic Presidential Nomination [in what proved to be a losing
cause]), who had been Minority Leader, became Speaker. But the real
power in the House was now exercised by the new Majority Leader, Oscar
W. Underwood, who also chaired the Ways and Means Committee (thus
merging that powerful House committee with the leadership post) and, by
extension, the Democrats' Committee on Committees (which was made up of
that Party's Ways and Means membership). Clark- though now Speaker-
had not chosen Underwood in the manner Henderson and Cannon had chosen
the Republican Payne: rather, Underwood was chosen Majority Leader by
the Party Caucus and Underwood himself used that fact of rank-and-file
support to assert his authority over Clark as the Democrats' true
leader in the House; Underwood's successor, Claude Kitchin, would
continue do the same thing during the remainder of Clark's Speakership.
Meanwhile, the House Republicans who had first turned on ex-Speaker
Cannon now finished the job, putting forth James Mann as their losing
candidate for Speaker in the new 62nd Congress and, thus, making him
Minority Leader. From now on, Democratic Leaders and Whips would be
chosen by that Party's Caucus, while Republican Leaders and Whips would
be chosen, first, by the Republicans' Committee on Committees
(their members of Ways and Means) and then, after 1923, by their
own Party's Conference (as the GOP titled its House party
"caucus"). The Majority Leader would, from now on, be viewed
as the principal "front-runner" for the Speakership should a
vacancy in that office, so long as his Party remained the Majority,
need to be filled; meanwhile, the Minority Leader would continue to be
viewed as his Party's "Speaker-in-waiting". All top
House officers- of both the Majority (including the Speaker) and
Minority- are, to this day, so chosen by the rank-and-file House
membership of each Party.
Frederick Gillett, who became Speaker with the Republicans having
regained control of the House as a result of the 1918 Midterm
Elections, tried to revert somewhat to the more "above the
fray" or "judicial" Speaker much more common prior to
the late 19th Century but he would turn out to be the last to do so.
His successor, Nicholas Longworth, re-established the Speaker as his
Party's true leader in the House- all while still keeping the office in
that position of visible national leadership it had held (except,
perhaps, during the Clark/Gillett era) since the beginning of the era
of the "czar" Speakers; though the efficacy of the
Speakership as a post of national leadership has since varied from
Congress to Congress- depending largely on the dynamism of the
political persona of a given Speaker (contrast, for example, the
dynamic Sam Rayburn with his successors, John McCormack and Carl
Albert), as well as (so noted earlier) whether or not the Majority
Party in the House is also the Party holding the White House- this
national leadership role of the Speaker of the House remains to this
day.
PRACTICE: the United States Senate
The Senate's experience with the evolution of its leadership was
somewhat different from that of the House. In the early days,
Senators- chosen by State Legislatures- were viewed (and, indeed,
viewed themselves) as "Ambassadors" to the Federal System
from a second level of Sovereignty within that very system; in
addition, unlike the House, where Party discipline was more easily
enforced through sheer numbers (the House was always larger in size
than the Senate) as well as rules which limited speeches and debate,
the Senate's laxer rules regarding length of speeches and its very
deliberative nature (as a quintessential "second chamber" of
a bicameral legislature) tended to promote individuality and made the
upper house that much less amenable to the whip of Party discipline (to
a certain extent, this is still true of the Senate today- even though
the People of the States, and not their legislators, have long elected
its members, thereby reducing the "ambassadorial" role).
In addition, there were no top echelon officers of the Senate who
could emulate the role of Speaker as Party leader in the House first
seen during the Speakerships of Henry Clay. Particularly after the
adoption of the 12th Amendment mandating that Presidential Electors
vote separately for President and Vice President in 1804, the Vice
President- though constitutional president of the Senate- was
politically tied to the governing Presidential Administration; there
was, thus, no way for the Vice President to assert a leadership role
from the presiding officer's chair, nor would the Senate- jealously
guarding its prerogatives under the Separation of Powers doctrine
(which it had already used to shoot down attempts by Presidents
Washington and Adams to use it as a kind of "advisory
council" a-la the Governor's Councils of Royal Provinces in
colonial days)- have allowed this to happen even had the 12th Amendment
never been ratified.
The President pro Tempore- being one of the Senate's own-
might have yet emerged as the Senate's version of the Speaker of the
House (thus becoming a kind of early "Senate Majority
Leader") but for the fact that the Senate took the provisions of
Art. I, Sec. 3, cl. 5 quite literally: for the first century under
the new Constitution, the Senators would only choose a President pro
Tempore when the Vice President was, indeed, literally absent; once
the Vice President returned to the chamber to take up the gavel, the
official service of the President pro Tempore was considered to
have ended. It is true that, as the 19th Century wore on, the same
person tended to be elected President pro Tempore in the course
of a given session of Congress whenever one was needed (one could argue
that the evolution of the office towards permanent status had already
begun); also, the office was made part of the succession to the
Presidency during a vacancy in the Vice Presidency- the theory being
that, in such a case, the President pro Tempore was "acting
President of the Senate" (the origin of the somewhat famous myths
and legends surrounding Senate President pro Tempore David Rice
Atchison allegedly napping through his "term" as "acting
President of the United States" because 4 March 1849 happened to
fall on a Sunday [stories later promoted by Senator Atchison himself],
the legal and constitutional hurdles to this story having any semblance
of validity notwithstanding) and, for a time in the mid-19th Century,
the President pro Tempore was even given power to name members
of Senate standing committees. But the very Latin name of his office-
Senate President "for the time being"- probably did not lend
the office much hope of ever having a leadership role.
By 1890, Vice Presidents were no longer regularly attending sessions
of the Senate to preside (though some would- well into the 20th
Century- continue to do so), the beginning of the practice of the Vice
President showing up only when a close vote might need a tie-breaker in
the Senate to bail the Administration out; in that year, the President
pro Tempore was made a permanent position by statute (the Senate
had long ceased electing a new President pro Tempore whenever
one was needed anyway: since the Senate- unlike the House- is a
continuing body, two-thirds of its membership returning to a new
Congress without having to have been re-elected, a Senator elected
President pro Tempore would be seen as the automatic person to
fill that office until either he ceased to serve in the Senate or a
successor was elected in his place). Since 1945, the President pro
Tempore has automatically been the senior-most Senator of the
Majority Party and his "election" by the Senate is more or
less perfunctory; as a result, the office has become more or less
ceremonial (the President pro Tempore simply designating, at the
start of each day, who shall preside in his stead [assuming the Vice
President isn't around to act as president of the Senate, of
course]).
With neither the Vice President of the United States nor the Senate
President pro Tempore able to assert leadership over the Senate,
the Senate was either rudderless or subject to the control of a
"cabal" surrounding a powerful Senator or two of the Majority
Party. The last such "cabal" was that of Senators William
Allison and Nelson Aldrich in the very late 19th into the early 20th
Century; when Allison died in 1908- followed by Aldrich's leaving the
Senate in 1911- that "cabal" lost its influence. Just after
Aldrich's retirement, both Parties formally named Party floor Leaders
for the first time; two years later, when their Party gained control of
the Senate, the Majority Democrats also named the first Senate Whip.
Two years after that, the Minority Republicans named their first Whip
and the Senate leadership organization was, by 1915, as complete as
that of the House.
In fact, the Senate leadership system essentially copied that of the
House and many of the same observations- noted above- regarding the
roles of Leaders and Whips, whether Majority or Minority, in the House
apply pretty much to these same officers in the Senate. The chief
difference is that the floor Leaders in the Senate- unlike those in the
House- are not "presiding officers-in-waiting" (although a
fair number of Senate Majority Leaders and Whips have become
their Party's nominee for Vice President: including Charles Curtis,
Charles McNary, Alben Barkley, Lyndon Johnson, Hubert Humphrey; Senate
leadership has not, by the way, proven to be a very good launching pad
from which to be President- Bob Dole, in 1996, was the only person
nominated for President after having run for that nomination while
still the Leader of his Party in the Senate; this does not augur well
for Tom Daschle, who has been mentioned as a potential Democratic
presidential candidate in 2004!)
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