Mickey Edwards, vice president of the Aspen Institute, was a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives from 1977 to 1992.

The House is presumed to be the government's most representative body, its members being freshly elected every two years. And yet when House rules are designed to effectively shut the representatives of millions of citizens out of the decisionmaking process, as Ryan and his fellow Republicans propose to do by following the Hastert rule, it is American democracy itself that suffers.

Democracy requires that rival views be debated and voted on. Tip O'Neill did that with Republican measures even if he opposed them.

It is one thing for a majority of the entire House to rule on legislative proposals but something entirely different for that decision to actually be made solely by a majority of the members of whichever political club is temporarily in charge. Given the current House makeup -- 247 Republicans and 188 Democrats -- following the Hastert rule will essentially render more than 130 million Americans unrepresented in any meaningful sense, the outcome of every debate predetermined.

Coupled with the all-too-common use of "closed rules," which prohibit amendments, even the opportunity to modify legislation will be foreclosed. Ryan has not promised a return to "regular order," the open debate and amendment process that essentially disappeared after that late 1980s, largely due to the high-level partisanship enforced by speakers of both parties.

During Tip O'Neill's 10-year speakership, floor consideration of major issues sometimes lasted for days, with multiple amendments offered by members of both parties and the outcome often in doubt. Even with O'Neill taking the floor to argue vigorously against one of my amendments, I won -- and took 51 of his Democrats along with me, including three Democratic chairmen who spoke for my amendment and against their leader's position. Consider that I was then a member of a small minority -- we had fewer Republicans in the House then than the number of Democratic members today -- and I was a senior member of the Republican leadership, a leader of the opposition to O'Neill's policies. Yet we in the minority could nonetheless offer our amendments, take on the speaker and beat him, something not likely to happen today. That was the Congress as it was supposed to be -- decisions by the whole House and a man who saw himself not merely as the leader of a party but as the constitutional officer charged with leading the whole House.

If Ryan truly means to bring a fresh perspective to the office of speaker, he should make clear that he will be speaker of the whole House, not merely the spokesman for his party. For nearly three decades, under both Republican and Democratic Party majorities, speakers have manipulated the House's rules to ensure that there will be few challenges to their own party's agenda.

But democracy requires an opportunity for rival viewpoints to be presented, debated and voted on. If he fails to insist on that procedure, Ryan will not be the breath of fresh air that many seem to desire, he'll merely be the latest in a long line of partisans -- every speaker for the past three decades -- claiming the title of speaker of the House of Representatives and functioning instead as merely another party spokesman.



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