The Speaker of the House - 10 January 1997

I've often wished that some American institutions which look like exact copies of English institutions hadn't adopted the same names. Take the word "cabinet". Mr Major has his Cabinet, President Clinton has his Cabinet. And they are, in each country, supposed together to run the government.

But the American system isn't a Cabinet system at all. Some presidents hold very few Cabinet meetings. The president's really important get-togethers are with his appointed cronies called chief of staff, economics advisor, appointment secretary. Men who have no title, unelected, unknown to the people but see the president just about every day. I've known American Cabinet officers who saw their president, if they were lucky, about once every two months.

I remember one. The first appointee to a new Cabinet department who was head of health, education and welfare. He'd been the governor of a big state. He'd run things his own way for eight years. He was a very competent, imaginative, hard-driving, old New-Dealer. After the first two months of the new president, he was a little upset not to have had the president consult him on the budget he'd planned for health, education and welfare.

Eventually he telephoned the president's appointment secretary, a misleadingly humble title; he's the man who decides who shall see the president on any subject, when, and why, and why not. Well, my Cabinet officer friend didn't even get to see the president. Asked what his business might be, he immediately named a figure, let's say $100 million as the cost of his department's proposed budget. The other end said, "I'll get back to you". A week or so later, the man got back. Not to worry, he said, they'd seen the submitted budget, were very grateful for it, but the budget director, who's not in the Cabinet, had cut it down from $100 millions to 15. Thanks all the same for your effort.

My friend was so hopping mad, "I thought I knew all about our system of government", he said, that he soon resigned from the administration and ran for the Senate. "Why did you do it?" I asked him, when I saw him down in Florida right after his victory. "Because" he said, "I wanted to be my own man and feel, for Pete's sake, I was having something to do with the government of this country".

The most revealing story, two stories, I know that show up the main difference between an English and an American Cabinet. First, an English prime minister, after a heated discussion in the Cabinet room between rival factions, says "it doesn't matter what we agree on so long as we are seen to agree".

The American story is of Abraham Lincoln. After a Cabinet discussion, in the middle of the Civil War, on introducing conscription, which Lincoln was for. As a formality, he went round the room. Mr. Stanton? Nay. Mr. Seward? Nay. Mr. Cameron? Nay. Mr. so and so? Nay. At the end, Lincoln said, "The ayes, Gentlemen, have it!" And so it was. And he pushed the bill through.

So what do you think has been this week in this country the absolutely top story in the papers, on the tube, at the parties, you might say, at the ball games? The election of a speaker. The Speaker of the House. If you live in a parliamentary country, you may be forgiven at once for saying, "So! Do tell!" Well, that's, for the past week or two, what we've been concerned about and anxious about. And all this concern and anxiety turns on what you understand by the meaning in the American system of "the Speaker of the House".

You might recall asking yourself, when President Reagan was shot and Vice President Bush was somewhere up in an airplane, why was the first White House urgent telephone call placed to the Speaker of the House? For the reason, which is always astonishing to people reading the American Constitution for the first time, that the man third in line for the presidency is not the Secretary of State or any Senator, but the most powerful person in either House, the Speaker of the House.

Over 200 years ago, he was named in the Constitution as one of two successors, after the Vice President. But by act of Congress 50 years ago, the Speaker, and no other, was declared to be third in line. The Speaker has about seven functions, or what a former Speaker called "dimensions of power". The least of these is the most in a parliamentary system which is presiding, keeping order, setting the priority of speakers at the meeting of the legislature.

In fact, in life, the Speaker here appears in his chair only very rarely and mostly on ceremonial occasions. In its everyday sittings, any number of members of the House sit in for the Speaker in this, his role as chairman. First, the Speaker, like every other member of the House, must be elected from his hometown district. He is elected Speaker by the whole House when there is, as there was this week, a new session of Congress. And short of some unforeseen catastrophe or a whopping scandal, he is always the leader of the majority party. The possibility that this might not happen was what had some of us on the rack early in the week.

As the leader of the majority, which, as now, may not be the party in the White House, he is, in effect, the leader of the opposition and his main power is to guide legislation, to say what bills shall come up and which won't and to rally for his party all the votes he can, one way or the other. Does this role sound familiar? It's that of a prime minister. And the Speaker of the House has thus, like a prime minister, much more power than any president in steering and shaping new laws or killing them.

In the next month or more, you're going to see many headlines in your papers like "President will slash defence spending" or "President to revise welfare reform bill". The president will not. He doesn't have the power to do anything that the headline writers say he will when it has to do with making laws. He can only propose laws. Congress will write them. He doesn't, for instance, possess one iota of a prime minister's power to write a budget and see it through. I recall one president, stretching his long legs and slumping his immense body in his big chair, just having watched on the telly the report of a British Chancellor and the budget he'd announced.

Old LBJ whined in envious disbelief. "He announces, announces! He doesn't even beg! He just tells 'em what they're gonna have to come up with!" So, to put it plainly, the Speaker's main power is to set the agenda of the Congress and to select the members of his own party on the many House committees and, since he's the majority man, to pick their chairmen. He also picks his people to serve on the all-powerful Rules Committee, which more or less sets up the powers of the others.

There was a time when the Speaker was the permanent chairman of the House Rules Committee. And one Speaker, Uncle Joe Cannon, was a very tough and commanding politician. He ran the House like a dictator, and in 1910, the whole Congress rose up against him in what was called the March Revolution. What they achieved was to unseat him as chairman of the Rules Committee. That's all.

The Speaker also represents both Houses on all ceremonial occasions. And any spare time, he's the chief administrative officer of the Congress, of both Houses, says who shall have offices where, oversees all the office buildings and the grounds. Do you wonder know that no Speaker that I can think of has ever run for president?

I do remember one Speaker, who for a moment thought of it, till his closest friend heard the rumour, went briskly into his pal's office and said, "Mr. Speaker! Mr. Speaker! What are you thinking of running for president and giving up all that power?" It was never a serious ambition.

So we come to last weekend and the sudden storm that blew up over the present Speaker, Mr Newt Gingrich, the architect of the Republican revolution when both Houses were captured after 48 years by the Republicans. Until Mr Gingrich made the capital error of closing down the government because the president wouldn't sign his budget bill, he was the most charismatic and effective of his party's leaders. But there came a time when the Democrats charged him with ethical offences and the sub-committee met.

The main offence was that Mr Gingrich, in his role as a history professor, which he's been and is, taught a television course at a college in his home state of Georgia, a course which was financed by a tax-exempt body. The Democrats charged that the course, though it was supposed to be a non-partisan course in American History, was actually designed as part of the Republican machinery to take control of Congress. Would it not be amazing if a dedicated party politician could deliver anywhere an absolutely objective, unbiased, non-partisan lecture on anything in American history?

Mr Gingrich has pleaded guilty to misinforming the sub-committee, says he should have questioned his tax lawyer more scrupulously about the limits of tax-exempt funds.

On Tuesday, before the House voted, Speaker Gingrich apologised, hoped he'd not brought shame to the House, promised to be a good boy in the future and it went to the vote. Of course, not a single Democrat voted for him, 216 Republicans for him, 9 defected. If four more had done so, the new Speaker would be the Democratic leader in the House. As it was, Mr Gingrich became the first Republican Speaker to be re-elected in consecutive terms since 1929.

Now all the pundits are launched on deep speculations about the future of Newt Gingrich. Will he be forever weakened? Can he revive the revolution? Will he be all the stronger and therefore, to the Democrats, even more offensive? All speculation, it seems to me, is as useless as making passes over a crystal ball. The fact is that unless that Ethics sub-committee has new and ultimately damning evidence, Speaker Gingrich will resume the mantle of his power.

The mantle may be a little shredded, but the power it hides is still remarkable. Indeed, unique.

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