With Republicans angrily splintered and facing a perilous fall election, House Speaker Dennis Hastert will make a little history Thursday as he becomes the longest-serving Republican speaker.
Hastert, with nearly 7 1/2 years in the leadership post, will oust another Illinoisan from the record books: former Rep. Joseph Cannon, whose 7-year, 5-month tenure ended in 1911. Democrat Sam Rayburn of Texas was the longest-serving speaker of the House with a 17-year run over three periods from 1940 to 1961.
But while Cannon, for whom one of the three primary House office buildings is named, was known for his profanity and a dictatorial style, Hastert has endured as the head of his party thanks to an affable, low-key manner and a concern for his GOP colleagues’ views.
“It’s been a significant speakership as well as a long one,” said Newt Gingrich, Hastert’s controversial and colorful predecessor. “As a personal friend, I’m just delighted for him that he’s going to go down in the history books. It’s a great achievement that he could lead and coordinate and nurture a Republican majority.”
An unusual path to power
Hastert’s unusual path to power came in the aftermath of President Bill Clinton’s impeachment. He was elected after Gingrich and former Louisiana Rep. Robert Livingston had stepped aside. Hastert was vaulted ahead of other Republicans in the leadership. It was his self-conscious public profile, along with the strong ties he had built up within the GOP, that put him second in the line of presidential succession.
But his have hardly been quiet times.
He served through the Sept. 11 attacks and pushed President Bush’s legislative agenda of tax cuts and national security measures. His successes have come despite leading a razor-thin majority supporting ideas anathema to the Democratic minority. The political and policy clashes forced Hastert to rely almost exclusively on Republican votes to move legislation.
“You have to ask yourself what would have happened if he hadn’t been there to step into the breach in December of 1998,” said former Rep. Bill Paxon (R-N.Y.), describing House Republicans in crisis after the departure of Gingrich, the shutdown of the government and the acid atmosphere of impeachment. “He brought the institution back from a moment of chaos.”
Today, Hastert is in the spotlight with a fractured Republican House at odds with the president and fearing for its future as a majority. Lawmakers are fighting each other over how much money the federal government should spend and whether lawmakers should earmark federal dollars for special projects at home.
Republican lawmakers also are in conflict with Bush over how to overhaul the nation’s immigration laws and are dispirited over the war in Iraq and its toll on voters at home.
An ethics cloud has dogged the party as Republicans watched one colleague go to prison for taking bribes and their majority leader, Tom DeLay of Texas, resign amid corruption allegations. Several other Republicans, as well as at least one Democrat, also are under investigation.
Most recently, Hastert has tangled with the administration, challenging the right of the executive branch to raid a Democratic congressman’s office during a criminal probe.
Shortcomings also cited
“I think history will treat the Hastert speakership very harshly,” said Thomas Mann, an expert on Congress at the Brookings Institution. “I can’t recall a period in which Congress as a whole and the House in particular has been so dysfunctional and has fallen so short of the framers’ intentions for the first branch.”
Mann and other congressional scholars complain that under Hastert there has been little to no oversight of the executive branch, a traditional function of Congress. They say he has marginalized committee chairmen and virtually shut down conference committees while dismissing the minority’s right to participate in the deliberative process.
“Too often he has acted as a lieutenant of the president,” said Norman Ornstein, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.
Still, Hastert has been willing to tell Bush when his ideas won’t fly. When the president proposed adding a prescription drug benefit to the Medicare program for seniors, he intended to use the benefit as an incentive to move senior citizens into managed care health plans.
“I don’t think you can do it humanely,” Hastert said he told Bush. “I don’t think you can do it politically. I don’t think it’s practical.”
Hastert also told Bush that “I don’t think you can pass a piece of legislation that takes an 80-year-old grandmother and says you have to give up your fee-for-service as you know it in order to get a drug piece on it.”
The frank words caught official Washington by surprise, but they also represented the feelings of many House Republicans complaining to Hastert about Bush’s proposal.
Similarly, Hastert signaled that Bush’s plans to overhaul Social Security were unpalatable to the majority of House Republicans. In an interview with the Tribune and in a private conversation with Bush, Hastert indicated that the plan might have problems.
“Now I have said to the president, I’ve said it to all of his advisers, and I’ve said to all of our folks, `Look it, you can’t jam change down the American people’s throat unless they perceive there really is a problem, that there’s something there that isn’t going to work 12 or 14 years from now, and it’s going to be a catastrophe when we reach that point,'” Hastert said.
Democrats say Hastert’s tenure will be best remembered for quietly putting in place an extremely conservative agenda without serving as a lightning rod for partisan anger.
“He does show the advantage of being boring–nobody yells at him,” said Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.). That assessment is largely shared by Hastert’s longtime friends, who say he endeared himself to fellow Republicans simply by lowering the decibel level after Gingrich’s tumultuous tenure.
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Hastert’s friends say the speaker loves his work but would have retired by now if the president hadn’t asked him to continue in office until 2008, when Bush’s term ends.
“He’s been a quiet speaker,” said John Feehery, executive vice president of the Motion Picture Association of America and a former aide to Hastert. “He speaks softly and leads a small majority. He’s someone who doesn’t really have his own personal agenda. He’s not like Newt, trying to remake the world. He’s just trying to run the House. And I think that sense of humility helps his longevity.”
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House speakers since 1900
David Henderson (R-Iowa), 1899-1903
Joseph Cannon (R-Ill.), 1903-11
James Beauchamp Clark (D-Mo.), 1911-19
Frederick Gillett (R-Mass.), 1919-25
Nicholas Longworth (R-Ohio), 1925-1931
John Garner (D-Texas) 1931-33
Henry Rainey (D-Ill.), 1933-34
Joseph Byrns (D-Tenn.), 1935-36
William Bankhead (D-Ala.), 1936-40
Sam Rayburn (D-Texas), 1940-47, 1949-53, 1955-61
Joseph Martin Jr. (R-Mass.), 1947-49, 1953-55
John McCormack (D-Mass.), 1962-1971
Carl Albert (D-Okla.), 1971-77
Thomas “Tip” O’Neill, Jr. (D-Mass.), 1977-87
James Wright Jr. (D-Texas), 1987-89
Thomas Foley (D-Wash.),1989-1995
Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), 1995-99
Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) 1999-
Source: Clerk of the House
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