Wednesday, April 10, 2024 | 2 a.m.
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The Republican Party’s so-called majority that recently elected Speaker Mike Johnson after tossing former Speaker Kevin McCarthy to the winds is the latest evidence that it is incapable of governing the United States House of Representatives.
As is common knowledge by now, a substantial segment of the House Republican caucus left common sense and good judgment back home and showed up in Washington looking to pick a fight. The takeover of the party by right-wing, hostile forces that will not allow the building of a bipartisan consensus on something as critical as keeping the lights on in the federal government is the best evidence of their descent to the boundaries of anarchy.
But further evidence can be found in Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s decision to file a preliminary motion to oust Johnson from the chair.
The underlying “rule” that Johnson violated which prompted Greene to file the motion dates to the 1990s, when then-Speaker Dennis Hastert attempted to drive a dagger through the heart of bipartisan government by creating what became known as the Hastert Rule.
The Hastert Rule, which is still in force today but has sometimes been ignored by previous speakers, forbids any Republican speaker from scheduling a floor vote on a bill that doesn’t have majority support within the GOP caucus.
It effectively kills the bipartisan consensus required to enact federal law, policy and programs. Johnson did not have as many Republicans as he needed to pass a bill and avoid a government shutdown, so when he called the bill, most of the votes to pass it came from Democrats. And that made Greene see red. The speaker’s decision to call the bill for a vote resulted in a 286-to-134 tally that averted a partial shutdown of the federal government and funded many programs considered essential to the welfare of the nation.
The Hastert Rule, which Johnson to his credit ignored, was engineered by Hastert and his majority whip, Rep. Tom DeLay, R-Texas, who served with Hastert as a two-man team running the House of Representatives in those days. DeLay would later be sentenced to three years in prison for money laundering and conspiracy.
That seems mild compared with Hastert’s demise. From my own experience sharing an office with Hastert when we both were newly elected to the Illinois House of Representatives, I can safely say that few legislators would have placed a bet on him becoming speaker of the U.S. House. He led a fairly undistinguished legislative life and assumed his district’s congressional seat when the incumbent died in office.
Hastert would even fail to make the leadership team in the Illinois House, but he would become the longest-serving Republican speaker of the U.S. House.
Hastert’s ascension to speaker is also mind-boggling since credit there goes to a scandal. Larry Flynt, publisher of Hustler magazine, revealed that the likely successor to Speaker Newt Gingrich in 1998, Rep. Bob Livingston of Louisiana, had four past liaisons with women while he was married, and the search was on for someone who had no such record.
The joke at the time was that Republicans caucused to select a new speaker and someone asked who in the room did not have an affair while in office, and Hastert’s was the only hand that went up. No truth to that story, but it does hint at just how unlikely a candidate Hastert was for the speaker’s job.
It’s no wonder that Greene didn’t mention the Hastert Rule by name but instead referred to it as “GOP precedent.” The rule that Hastert and DeLay cooked up to deny the Democratic Party access to full House consideration by failing to advance certain bills that didn’t have a majority of Republican caucus support would become associated with a speaker Republicans would just as soon forget.
Hastert was sentenced to 15 months in federal prison on a charge related to allegations he sexually abused high school wrestlers he coached. The federal judge who handed down the sentence said, “Nothing is more disturbing than having ‘serial child molester’ and speaker of the House in the same sentence.’ ”
Those who Hastert harmed did not come forth during most of his years in public office, so none of us who worked with him in his Illinois years as a legislator had a clue, nor apparently did his colleagues in the U.S. House until his past was revealed — sometime after he created his rule to deny Democratic legislation access to a full House hearing.
The disappearance of Hastert’s name in reference to the rule Greene cited as her reason calling for a new vote for speaker shows how desperate Republicans are to bury their past affiliation with a lawmaker no one wants to acknowledge these days as a former colleague.
It also shows how the appetite for power and the groupthink of a caucus can justify any means of subverting the democratic process if the true believers of the right declare it so. Hastert and DeLay are long gone from Congress, but to this day their work serves as a nefarious tool of the Freedom Caucus to challenge constitutional government and the norms of the lawmaking process. And it recently served the conniving interest of Greene, one of Donald Trump’s most loyal acolytes, to halt the work of the federal government.
Hastert’s history as a child molester will forever mark him as an outcast in his party and in his state, but he also took an early step in helping his Republican Party abandon norms of democratic government that would eventually lead to the likes of the despot Trump.
Bob Kustra is a columnist for the Idaho Statesman. He served two terms as Illinois lieutenant governor and 10 years as a state legislator and 15 years as the president of Boise State University.
