Thirty Years After the House GOP Takeover

Thirty years ago, Republicans won control of the House of Representatives. Many people have forgotten how extraordinary that outcome was. As of 1994, Republicans had not enjoyed a House majority in forty years. No member first elected as a Republican had ever served in the majority, and some of the younger members had not even been born the last time their party was in charge.

It is now time to clear away some myths about the 1994 Republican takeover and think soberly about the cycle of events that it set in motion. 

A Transformational Figure?

In that midterm year, Newt Gingrich was the minority whip and presumptive successor to the retiring minority leader, Bob Michel. He organized an event on the Capitol steps where Republican members and candidates signed the Contract with America. This manifesto listed specific measures that House Republicans promised to bring to the House floor if the voters gave them a majority. 

If you think that idea sounds like the “responsible party” school of political science, which idealizes parliamentary systems, you are correct. In 1980, Gingrich had organized a similar event, and floor speeches directly quoted scholars of that persuasion. The idea naturally appealed to Gingrich, whose doctoral dissertation focused on the Belgian parliament.

To the amazement of the political world, Republicans did get their majority, and Gingrich was quick to take credit. “I think I am a transformational figure,” he said. Though the Contract provided candidates with helpful talking points, his claims were overblown. Most Americans had never heard of the Contract at all. Moreover, the Republican gains extended far beyond the House. The GOP picked up senators, governors, and state legislators, none of whom had anything to do with the Contract.

One primary reason for the midterm victory involved the long-term voter movement toward the GOP, especially in the South. Aside from Carter’s narrow 1976 win, Republicans had won every presidential election since 1968. Nevertheless, GOP gains in the House were on pause during the 1980s. After winning a presidential race, a party tends not to gain House seats as long as it retains the White House. It took the 1992 Democratic presidential victory to give House Republicans their opportunity.

President Clinton’s first two years in office turbocharged that opportunity. He got Congress to enact a significant tax increase. It passed by a single vote in the House, which meant that every Democrat who supported it was vulnerable to the charge that she or he had cast the deciding vote. His convoluted health care plan was so unpopular that congressional Democrats did not even bring it to the floor. And remember the Somalia fiasco immortalized in the book and film Black Hawk Down? That also happened around this time.

House Democrats shared some responsibility for their downfall. In 1989, Speaker Jim Wright and Majority Whip Tony Coelho resigned in the wake of ethics accusations. Though neither ended up facing criminal charges, other lawmakers and staffers were not so lucky. Scandals at the House Bank and House Post Office led to felony convictions, including that of the powerful Dan Rostenkowski, who chaired the Ways and Means Committee. Lest anyone think that his imprisonment was the result of a GOP hit job, consider the prosecutor who put him away: a young U.S. attorney named Eric Holder, a Clinton appointee. (In time, Clinton pardoned Rostenkowski, and Holder became attorney general under President Obama.)

Publicity Stunts and Radical Agendas

After forty years of one-party rule, the House had bred a culture of corruption, which was now public knowledge. In these circumstances, Republicans would have had a great 1994 even if Newt Gingrich were still a history professor.

Still, Gingrich played a part. As head of an outside political committee, he made training tapes that gave Republican candidates a common vocabulary. By spearheading the Contract, he supplied the incoming majority with a ready-made agenda, which enabled it to get off to a fast start. Just as the signers had promised, the House brought all the Contract items up for a vote within the first 100 days. 

A Democratic myth is that the Contract was just a publicity stunt with no impact on policy. Though most of the bills the House passed during the 100 days did not become law, the Contract left its mark. President Clinton signed welfare reform legislation that was more conservative than it would have been if Republicans had not laid down their marker.

The Republicans’ balanced budget amendment fell short of the necessary two-thirds vote, but they eventually got something even better: an actual balanced budget. According to journalist Major Garrett: 

There is no shortage of evidence that the Republican majority drove Clinton to embrace the idea of a balanced budget. It is simply inconceivable that Clinton would have arrived at this policy object any other way.

On a range of issues, Garrett continued, the House GOP changed the terms of debate, establishing “a new set of center-right parameters inside which Clinton was forced to operate.”

Another Democratic myth is that the GOP agenda was radical. The items in the Contract had long been standard Republican fare, and polls indicated that they were within the mainstream of public opinion. Jonah Goldberg later wrote: 

Rep. Charlie Rangel said of the 1994 Republican platform: “Hitler wasn’t even talking about doing these things.” And though that is technically true—Hitler wasn’t talking about term limits for committee chairs or demanding an independent audit of Congress’s budget—the insinuation was a good deal more sinister.

Democratic attacks failed to prevent the House GOP from holding its majority in 1996, even as Clinton was coasting to reelection. Republicans had won two-year majorities in the 1946 and 1952 elections, but now it was retaining control for the first time since the 1920s. From this point forward, control of the House would be in play. This realization fundamentally changed congressional politics. Before 1994, the political community took Democratic majorities as a given, and individual members focused on constituency service or committee work. After the mid 1990s, both parties’ campaign strategies focused on attaining or defending majority status. Floor action was no longer just about legislating in the traditional sense, but also about “messaging”—teeing up votes for their impact on public opinion.

Under these conditions, a House majority has an incentive to curb the minority’s ability to offer amendments on the floor. The House considers bills under “special rules” that specify which amendments may come up. Under the Democratic majority in the 103rd Congress (1993–94), 44 percent of the rules were “open,” meaning members could offer any germane amendment. The Republican minority complained that the figure was too low and that Democrats were rigging the process. For a few years after winning control, the House GOP allowed open rules most of the time. But openness did not last. The percentage of open rules began to plummet after 2000, and the Democratic minority lodged the same complaints the Republicans made before 1994.

Since 2006, control has shifted back and forth, and the pattern has been the same: the majority dominates and the minority complains. There have been no fully open-amendment rules since the 114th Congress (2015-16). 

In the pre-Gingrich House, the presumed “permanent minority” status of Republicans gave them some protection against corruption. If you have no prospect of real power, crooked influence peddlers would figure that you were not worth bribing.

Since 1994, Republicans have either been in power or on the verge of power. Accordingly, they have been subject to the temptations, large and small, that had earlier entrapped so many Democrats. It should have been clear right from the start, when Gingrich agreed to a $4.5 million book advance from a publisher owned by Rupert Murdoch. It smelled bad, and widespread condemnation forced him to decline the advance. 

Other scandals would follow. The most egregious was Representative Duke Cunningham’s “bribe menu.” As a member of the Appropriations Committee, he literally priced the payoffs he would require for earmarks and contracts of various sizes. What landed him in the annals of “America’s Dumbest Criminals” is that he put it in writing on congressional stationery.

The Necessity of Limits on Legislative Power

Personal corruption was not the party’s only problem. Over time, the House Republicans’ focus shifted from crafting serious policy proposals to clinging to power for its own sake. They lobotomized the institution, slashing the ranks of policy experts working for committee staffs and support agencies. Instead of encouraging well-informed debate, the leadership demanded the passage of massive bills without alteration or deliberation.

In 2010, three Republican lawmakers reflected on what had become of their party:

“We lost our way when we were in the majority,” said a Virginian.

“I think what happened to the Republicans before was we had a majority of people who came here to do something and we atrophied into a majority of people who came here to be something,” said a member from Wisconsin.

“And we lost our ideas along the way,” a California colleague agreed.

“Yeah, we lost our ideas and we lost our core,” a Wisconsinite replied.

The dialogue appeared in a book titled Young Guns: A New Generation of Conservative Leaders. The members were future Majority Leader Eric Cantor (VA) and future Speakers Paul Ryan (WI) and Kevin McCarthy (CA). In the coming years, these “young guns” prematurely aged into old bulls and grappled with distrustful younger guns. And each would see his congressional career come to an unhappy end. Cantor lost his primary to a Tea Party challenger who cast him as a creature of the Washington swamp. Ryan retired at the tender age of forty-eight, frustrated with colleagues who saw him as insufficiently aggressive. And last year, McCarthy lost his job after a few insurgent members joined with Democrats to vacate the speakership.

Upon McCarthy’s unhappy departure, the House GOP cast about for a new leader, finally settling on Mike Johnson of Louisiana. Only in his fourth term, Johnson became the least-experienced speaker in 140 years. And within weeks, the insurgents were already complaining again. Chip Roy (R-TX) thundered on the House floor: “Anybody sitting in the complex, if you want to come down to the floor and come explain to me, one meaningful, significant thing the Republican majority has done.”

After thirty years, it is clear that Gingrich set unrealistic expectations for what legislative leaders can do. He encouraged colleagues to think of him as a revolutionary figure who could somehow overcome institutional constraints. In the real world, there are limits on what leaders can accomplish in the Madisonian system. And leaders have to deal with human nature and the demands of colleagues. As Edmund Burke wrote: 

In all bodies, those who will lead must also, in a considerable degree, follow. They must conform their propositions to the taste, talent, and disposition of those whom they wish to conduct: therefore, if an assembly is viciously or feebly composed in a very great part of it, nothing but such a supreme degree of virtue as very rarely appears in the world, and for that reason cannot enter into calculation, will prevent the men of talents disseminated through it from becoming only the expert instruments of absurd projects.

The person who assumes the speakership in January 2025 will not be a world-historic transformational leader. But that is okay: simple competence will do. Let’s hope that’s what the House majority wants.

Image by Gage Skidmore on Wikimedia Commons. Image resized.