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After a little more than three weeks, House Republicans have finally elected a speaker. He's Mike Johnson, first elected to the House in 2016 from a district in northwest Louisiana. He's almost unknown to the public, has a right-wing voting record and has been a supporter of Donald Trump.
How he does as speaker, whether he moves appropriations bills as promised, his skill negotiating with a Democratic president and Senate -- all this is obviously unknown.
The speakership is an odd political post, one of just two internal congressional offices mentioned in the Constitution. It was important to the framers, who remembered how in 1642, when King Charles I entered the House of Commons and demanded the arrest of five members, Speaker William Lenthall refused.
In Britain, the speaker operates as a neutral arbiter; the current speaker was a Labour member chosen for his perceived fairness by a Conservative majority. In this country, where political parties, though dreaded and denounced by the founders, came into operation almost immediately, speakers are partisan officials.
In 1855, it took the House two months and 133 ballots to elect a Know Nothing speaker (a former Democrat, he later became a Republican), and in 1859 nearly two months and 44 ballots to elect a Whig (who was defeated in his home district in 1860.)
The House's 22 speakerless days this month, by comparison, was brief, as were the four days and 15 ballots it took to elect McCarthy last January.
The norm of all party members supporting the speaker chosen by secret ballot in conference (the Republican term) or caucus (the Democratic term) grew up in the stabler partisan environment emerging from the Civil War. The speaker, in turn, tended to choose committee chairmen and manage the flow of legislation to and amendments on the floor through control of the Rules Committee.
Speakers' powers were whittled back in the 1910 revolt against Speaker Joseph Cannon; the progressive rebels, passed over for chairmanships for a dozen years, thought the fair way to allot them was by seniority, a system which by the 1950s weakened speakers and empowered anti-civil rights Southern Democrats.
In 1998, when Republicans lost rather than gained seats, a few holdouts said they wouldn't vote again for Newt Gingrich, and after a memorable four-year speakership, he retired.
Among Democrats, violations of the norm became more common as some members sought to set themselves apart from the party's liberal stands. But with the steely discipline exercised in her record 19 years as Democratic leader, Nancy Pelosi kept the numbers of norm violators down: 15 of 235 Democrats voted against her in 2019; just two of 222 Democrats did so in 2021.
No recent Republican leader had Pelosi's strengths. In 2013, House Freedom Caucus members, encouraged by freshman Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, imagined they could force non-funding of Obamacare on a Democratic president and Senate.
Last January, enough Republicans felt free to vote against the conference's clear choice, McCarthy, to deny him the speakership for 14 ballots. And in October, backbencher Matt Gaetz, with no non-personal discernible grievance, felt free to move to oust him as speaker, and with seven other Republicans and every Democrat, he did.
Evidently, this spectacle of disarray prompted second thoughts. Mike Johnson, with a serious but not angry demeanor and with few enemies accumulated in his three terms, won not just a majority in conference but also got assurance no one would vote against him on the floor.
So has the norm been restored? And what about the more important norm of accepting the outcome of presidential elections? In 2005, 32 House and Senate Democrats challenged George W. Bush's victory on frivolous grounds.
In 2016 and 2017, Democrats concocted and pursued the Russia collusion hoax, attempting to delegitimize Donald Trump's election and drive him from office. And on Jan. 6, 2021, after mobs pillaged the Capitol, 147 Senate and House Republicans voted against accepting states' electoral votes.
Apologies and confessions of error have been forthcoming from few, if any, hoax perpetrators or election deniers. Any chance they will?