Opinion: The solution to the House speaker crisis

Opinion by John Avlon, CNN

(CNN) — “A house divided against itself cannot stand,” Abraham Lincoln said in 1858.

The House Republicans of 2023 seem determined to prove the value of the warning laid out by the first president from their party.

It is a self-inflicted wound. After empowering the radical right wing, Republicans cannot conjure up a stable governing coalition.

For all our polarization, this is not a “both sides” problem. Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi managed to have a successful record of significant and often bipartisan legislation with a similarly narrow Democratic margin in the House.

The problem predates Rep. Kevin McCarthy’s 269-day gauntlet of shame. Since the anti-Obama Tea Party revolution of 2010, every Republican speaker has ended up abandoning their post or being pushed out because they could not corral what former Republican House Speaker John Boehner called the “knuckle draggers” and “anarchists” in anything resembling a constructive direction.

Now, with Rep. Steve Scalise dropping out of the speaker’s race less than a day after securing a majority of votes for the nomination, Republicans are again at an impasse. It does not seem likely that any candidate could unite this fractious Republican caucus.

In the meantime, there is urgent business to be done on behalf of the American people. The Biden administration has proposed an eminently sensible package that would provide funding to Israel, Ukraine, Taiwan and the US southern border. But it cannot move forward unless Congress is functioning.

Some point to empowering the interim speaker, Rep. Patrick McHenry, as the Plan C solution. Perhaps.

But there is another way to redeem something positive from all this chaos. The obvious solution is for Republicans at some exhausted point in the near future to abandon those on the far right and put forward a GOP candidate who could win a handful of Democratic votes to become Speaker of the House.

Confession time: As an avowed centrist, friends and colleagues often accuse me of being an idealist intent on bringing Aaron Sorkin’s scripts to life in a Washington that is actually closer to “Game of Thrones.”

Fair enough. Cynicism passes for wisdom in Washington for a reason.

Nonetheless, this pathetic impasse provides the opportunity to open the door to a new way of governing. I am not proposing a bipartisan coalition governing Congress. Don’t get me wrong, that would be great. But it’s too much to expect the kind of coalition government Israel is embracing in the wake of the horrific Hamas terrorist attacks— or that England employed in the Second World War, bringing us Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

I’m suggesting something modest and more obvious: that at some point Republicans put forward a candidate who enough Democrats could support to jettison the disproportionate influence of the far right and gain a speaker who could actually unite the Congress based not an ideological agreement, but trust and mutual respect.

I know, what a concept.

Conservative Oklahoma Rep. Tom Cole is one name that seems to fit the bill. Nebraska centrist Rep. Don Bacon is another. Wisconsin Rep. Mike Gallagher is a Marine veteran who could be the choice of a new generation. Arkansas Rep. Steve Womack is another principled conservative who could get some cross-aisle support.

This is not mission impossible. This is not hopelessly naïve. In fact, it might be the most practical path forward.

After all, House Democratic Leader Rep. Hakeem Jeffries proposed just such a solution after McCarthy was defenestrated by his own party for the sin of keeping the government open. Some leading Republicans, like Alabama Rep. Mike Rogers, are now asking for Democrats to help them out of this ditch.

And for my friends who begrudge Democrats for not bailing out McCarthy, it’s worth pointing out — as former Rep. Liz Cheney did — that Democrats had little reason to be McCarthy‘s lifeline, especially given the fact that he refused to reach out to them to cut any kind of deal for bipartisan governance.

There is nothing in the rules of Congress that bars this kind of dealmaking, and the US Constitution doesn’t even require that the speaker be an elected representative. The only reason it feels impossible is the limits of moral imagination and the reflexive muscle memory of politics defined by negative partisanship. But when it comes time to avoid a default on our debt or end a government shutdown, precisely these kinds of bipartisan coalitions carry the day.

And so it has come to this. Republicans cannot corral a functioning majority. They cannot compromise with themselves or govern their own conference. Republican Texas Rep. Michael McCaul, chairman of the House Foreign Affairs committee, is frankly warning that this kind of division and dysfunction “emboldens our adversaries like Chairman Xi (who) talks about how democracy doesn’t work. Putin loves this, the Ayatollah loves this.”

It is time to demonstrate that democracy works and the center can, in fact, hold.

That will happen when a majority of Republicans put forward a candidate who a minority of Democrats can agree would be a trustworthy Republican speaker who wouldn’t be beholden to extreme demands. That would do a lot to break the hyper-partisan fever in our politics. It would show that we can, in fact, govern in the national interest as opposed to being driven by special interests.

Congress could actually lead by example ahead of a presidential election, showing that our elected representatives can still reason together, urging us all not to give up hope in deliberative democracy. Is this a long shot? Yes. But there’s no reason it cannot be done. It is always darkest before the dawn.

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