On St. Patrick's Day in 1910, the United States House Of Representatives went to war with itself. The members stayed up all night arguing at top volume and high dudgeon on a single issue. That issue was the power that had accrued through the decades to the office of Speaker of the House. At that moment, the Speaker was "Uncle Joe" Cannon, a ruthless Republican from Illinois. Arrayed against him was an alliance of Democrats and a group of reform-minded Republican led by George Norris of Nebraska.

Norris was fiercely, almost fanatically, independent. Later, he would join the group of what Woodrow Wilson called "the small group of willful men" in the Senate who, led by Robert LaFollette of Wisconsin, used the filibuster to slow the country's slide into World War I. In 1910, however, Norris was just making his bones as a national legislator. He wanted the speaker's power to be curtailed. Specifically, he demanded that the rules of the House be changed so that the Speaker would no longer also chair the powerful House Rules Committee. Further, Norris and his allies wanted the Rules Committee to be expanded to 15 members and they wanted its composition to be grouped by states. All of this would dilute the power that had been leached to the Speaker's office and used with reckless arrogance by Cannon. Over his career, Cannon had been a power broker of fearsome determination. (In 1890, during a debate over a lard bill, Cannon was so loud and profane in his attacks on his fellow legislators that the House galleries were cleared so that the ladies would not be offended. Pretty soon, a literal brawl had broken out.) Once he became Speaker, Cannon became even more uncompromising. He broke committee chairmen and he assumed their power for himself. He became famous for observing that, "Sometimes in politics one must duel with skunks, but no one should be fool enough to allow skunks to choose the weapons."

By 1910, the House was restive and the country had had enough. Norris forced the issue and, after a three-day debate in the House, Cannon was removed from the Rules committee and his powers as speaker had been thoroughly curtailed. The episode ultimately won Norris a place as one of John F. Kennedy's Profiles In Courage. For his part, Cannon stayed in Congress, eventually rebuilt his reputation as a beloved elder statesman and ended up with one of the House office buildings named after him. The Speakership, however, adapted. By the time Sam Rayburn assumed the job and held it for 17 years, it once again was the fulcrum on which all power in the House was leveraged.

Because of the reforms forced by Norris in order to break Joe Cannon's despotism, the power of the Speakership became less institutional than a measure of the personal political skill of whoever held the job at the time. Persuasion became more important. Tip O'Neill was a terrific majority leader during the Watergate prosecution but, as the late Walter Karp pointed out, O'Neill and his allies undermined President Jimmy Carter, and they completely turtled during the early years of the Reagan administration, which is when that administration did most of its real damage. O'Neill's apologists will argue that he simply gave the Reaganauts "enough rope." Fine, except that the damage done in the process is still with us. A large part of the Contract With America that Newt Gingrich rode to his Speakership had to do with reforming the House but, because Gingrich is a megalomaniac who makes Bill O'Reilly look like Thomas Merton, very few of those reforms affected the office of the Speaker himself. After the collapse of Gingrich as a legislative leader and the resignation of heir-apparent Robert Livingston caused the installation of Dennis Hastert, the real power in the House drained to Majority Leader Tom DeLay, which was the point of installing Hastert in the first place. Nancy Pelosi was a great Speaker because she is a great politician. The power of the office now completely resides in the person who holds it. It is not ironclad, as it once was. It is smoke and mirrors.

Comes now Paul Ryan, the zombie-eyed granny-starver from the state of Wisconsin, who apparently will deign to become Speaker of the House, but only if the entire Republican caucus in the House supports him, and only if the more recalcitrant members of the caucus agree not to turn on him. This very much includes the 40 members of the so-called "Freedom Caucus," the prion-addled Patient Zeroes of movement conservatism, and the people who defenestrated John Boehner and also ended Kevin McCarthy's aspirations. So far, these folks seem reluctant to accept the conditions proposed by "Uncle Paul" Ryan.

Ryan's conditions include rules changes that would make it more difficult to overthrow a sitting speaker - a provision that Rep. Raul Labrador, R-Idaho, a leader of the Freedom Caucus, said is a "non-starter." "We have to remember everything in the House and everything in Congress is about checks and balances," Labrador said. "We have two houses of Congress for that reason. We have three branches of government for that reason, and one of the reasons that every board has the freedom to vacate (the chair)." And fellow Freedom Caucus member Rep. Mo Brooks said in addition to that concern, he takes issue with Ryan's track record on immigration. "Paul Ryan's support for amnesty and open borders, that is a significant factor," the Alabama Republican said.

Plainly, Paul Ryan wants to be granted the authority and prerogatives of a being powerful Speaker without having to earn them through the process of persuasion that became a requirement of the office beginning with the breaking of Joe Cannon. Now, having Paul Ryan two heartbeats from the presidency is a goddamn awful idea merely on its merits. But, beyond that, his demands seem to me to be based on a fundamental misreading of the current political landscape. For the past 30 years, through the deliberate development of the political identity that infected the party with the prion disease, no Republican politician ever will be allowed to be truly safe. The party handed the skunks the weapons, and the skunks learned how to use them. You're their huckleberry now, sport.

Update (3:56 PM): Top Commenter Michael Green catches me in a mistake I have made approximately 300 times in my life, due to my affection for Jimmy Breslin's Watergate book. Tip O'Neill was Majority Leader during Watergate, not Speaker. (However, the basic point of the post still rather stands; O'Neill was running the joint from his position because Carl Albert was slowly petrifying, much the way that DeLay ran the House under the ineffectual Hastert.) The shebeen regrets the error.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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