Opinion | One Real Step Toward Transforming Congress

Lawmakers return to Washington this week under a real threat that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene will force a vote on her motion to vacate the speaker and catapult the House of Representatives into leaderless limbo once again.

The puzzle here is not why Greene would want to oust Speaker Mike Johnson and throw the House into chaos; she’s frustrated that a Republican majority is not conceding to her hard-line positions, and she wants attention. The puzzle is why the House’s internal rules make this reckless threat so easy to fulfill.

There is a better way. The House should immediately vote to change its rules — not to eliminate the motion to vacate, but to defang it, and even turn it into something constructive. What would that look like? It would be almost exactly like the current motion to vacate, with one big exception: The resolution to depose the speaker must also name a replacement speaker to take over. With this change, a disgruntled majority faction would not be able to ally with the minority party to replace “something” with “nothing,” as Democrats and eight Republicans did last October when they agreed on ousting Kevin McCarthy but not on his successor.

The good news is making this fix is constitutionally quite simple because the House is in charge of its own rules and can vote to change them. Johnson has already said that he expects that the House will change the motion to vacate next year, when a new Congress gavels in following the 2024 election, but there’s no real reason lawmakers have to wait until the current session is over.

It’s also important to remember that the current approach hasn’t always been used; under Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the motion to vacate could only be made if a majority of one of the parties agreed to it. The ability of a single member of Congress to move to vacate was a product of the compromise that McCarthy made to secure the speakership in January 2023 in the face of resistance from conservative Republicans.

Under our proposal, a single member can still move to vacate the chair, but only if the resolution offered provides for an alternative speaker. That way the threshold for calling the speaker’s position into question is the same, but guardrails exist to ward off the abyss of a leaderless House. Indeed, Tennessee Rep. Tim Burchett, among the eight Republicans who voted to oust Speaker McCarthy last fall, recently suggested something similar: only removing Johnson if House Republicans can unanimously agree on his replacement.

In the face of opposition from some in the GOP, Democratic votes would likely be needed to approve a rule overhauling the motion to vacate. But Democrats should welcome a proposal to make the maneuver less poisonous. Not only would doing so be good for the House as an institution, but it might also lead to more Democratic policy priorities being adopted.

Greene is targeting Johnson because he agreed to advance bipartisan spending legislation and is considering taking up aid to Ukraine. With his position more secure, Johnson wouldn’t have to worry about being held hostage to his party’s far right.

Why does the House seem so dysfunctional under GOP rule? It ultimately stems from fundamental flaws baked into our two-party system.

Currently, House rules are oriented around a top-down, polarized two-party system, with a clear majority party and minority party. When Republicans have the majority, they get to pick the speaker, decide how the House works, what it passes and who is in charge. At least in theory.

But that’s not how it’s actually working right now. In practice, it’s a bipartisan coalition government in the House, particularly on important funding legislation (which is most of what Congress is doing). The actual governing coalition is most Democrats and a little less than half of Republicans, such as the 101 Republicans and 185 Democrats that came together to pass this year’s remaining spending bills. Even in previous years when House Republicans controlled the gavels, they frequently relied on Democratic votes to pass fiscal legislation. Democrats were often decisive even when Republicans had unified control of government in 2017-18 due to deep divisions within the GOP.

We sympathize a little with Greene’s confusion. It is certainly weird that the actual House governing majority (the Democrats plus Republicans who vote to pass the spending bills) continues to diverge from the procedural majority (the narrow Republican majority that selected the speaker). But it is even weirder that a tiny procedural minority (minority party Democrats plus a small number of rebellious Republicans) can throw the entire chamber into chaos.

Yet this is what happens when a multifaction coalition tries to operate under rules designed for a top-down, two-party coalition with clear majority and minority parties: confusion, frustration and chaos.

As reformers that advocate for changes to our electoral system that would foster the election of members of Congress from multiple parties, we are exploring ways to adapt the rules to make a multiparty Congress work. And a constructive motion to vacate is one such rule.

Most democracies in the world elect their legislatures using proportional systems that support the engagement of multiple parties, as opposed to the two-party system in the U.S. and the one-party governing majorities it generally produces. The rules most other democracies use to organize their legislatures work under coalition governments.

Multiparty coalitions take time to negotiate, with talks usually lasting a month or so. They can also fall apart over time, as new issues emerge or existing differences become hard to reconcile. In parliamentary democracies with no regularly scheduled elections, the breakdown of a governing coalition can trigger new elections, while a “caretaker government” keeps the status quo. In the United States, however, we have a presidential system with fixed elections. And House rules and precedent prevent the House from operating without a speaker. This can make an unresolved revolt especially paralyzing, even in the middle of a global crisis.

So, why not recognize the reality on Capitol Hill: We have a coalition government. The rules of the House should reflect that, and lawmakers can make that coalition less vulnerable by establishing a constructive motion to vacate.

This is not just a theoretical idea. A similar constructive vote of no confidence is used in many countries, including Germany and Spain. Germany put the rule into its post-World War II constitution due to its experience under the unstable Weimar Republic. Though bitter rivals, the Nazi Party and the Communist Party joined together in 1932 to pass a motion of no confidence that brought down the government; the new elections that followed then helped bring Hitler to power.

There is no one way to run the House. Throughout its history, the rules of the House have constantly evolved — sometimes placing more power in the hands of leadership, sometimes distributing it more broadly to committee leaders. Changing the House rules to adapt to the factions within the Republican Party is just another iteration in the centurieslong tradition of the House writing and rewriting its rules to adapt to America’s changing political realities.

Congress has enough trouble coming together to pass legislation without a rule that makes it possible for a single member to bring down the House. This simple, common-sense change to the motion to vacate can help avoid that kind of disaster in the future.