Resetting the House

The election of a new Republican speaker puts civility first in style of leadership.

The Monitor's View

After three weeks of trying, Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives rallied behind the selection of a new speaker, but not out of any consensus on policy matters. The majority party remains fragmented into factions and factions within factions. The GOP lawmakers appear instead to have been drawn together by a different gravitational force.

“I believe that they trust Mike Johnson,” Dusty Johnson, a Republican representative from South Dakota, told a British journalist yesterday. He recalled how, when he arrived in Congress as a new member four years ago, “Mike Johnson came to my office ... and talked to me about how important civility was in this place, how even when we disagree with our colleagues on the other side of the aisle, we should try to do it as people who have good faith and good intention with decency.”

The American experiment in democracy was designed by its founders to forge consensus from what the late Arizona Sen. John McCain called “this big, boisterous, brawling, intemperate, restless ... good and magnificent country.” Rules govern the legislative process, but the hard-knuckle work of fellow citizens governing together more often depends on softer currencies of humility and respect.

The most conspicuous example of such trust-building is the affection forged over decades between President Joe Biden and Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell during Mr. Biden’s time in that chamber. “There is a personal relationship that – transcends isn’t the right word – but that is different from their philosophical leanings,” Sen. Susan Collins of Maine observed earlier this year. “And my experience has been that personal relationships count in this setting.”

Mr. Johnson’s election to lead the narrowly divided House offers a new opportunity to test that observation. The Louisiana Republican and his leadership counterpart, Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, share almost nothing in common on major issues. As an outspoken skeptic of the 2020 election results, Mr. Johnson starts with a deficit of trust across the aisle. Yet the two leaders may find a ready adhesive in shared values. Both speak in tones of civility. Marshall Jones, the Democrat who ran against Mr. Johnson in his race for Congress in 2016, described his former opponent as “a good listener” in an interview with the Louisiana Illuminator yesterday.
In his last speech in the Senate in 2017, Mr. McCain spoke of democracy’s “principled mindset.” It hinges on “humility, on our need to cooperate, on our dependence on each other to learn how to trust each other again and by so doing better serve the people who elected us.”
After three weeks and three false starts, the House has a new leader. Mr. Johnson is not the policy moderate Democrats hoped would emerge. But his hand on the gavel may signal a renewal of warmth that Washington needs.