Kevin McCarthy's bid in trouble
On the one hand, what we’re witnessing with the election of the Speaker of the House is extraordinary. It hasn’t happened like this in over 100 years. On the other hand, political impasses themselves are not extraordinary. They happen when people divide without enough power to force their way on others. One solution is to keep at it until you wear down the other side. Another, better approach is to find a third way that all can live with.
If there’s going to be sunshine after this awful storm in Congress, it may involve members of each party coming together to form a new, third, more moderate caucus.
If, for example, there were 222 Republicans and 213 Democrats in the house and 20 of the Republicans were blocking a new speaker, the vote would be 202 – 213 – 20, with no one getting the required 218 majority.
The Republicans could keep pounding away at their 20 blockers. Or the most moderate 125 Republicans and moderate 125 Democrats could get together, agree to ways of working in their new bi-partisan caucus, pick a speaker acceptable to all and break the impasse with their 250 votes.
Doing this requires re-setting the mission. Members of both parties seem to be putting their party or sub-party’s needs first. Their premise going in is that anything that helps the other party hurts them. As we’ve seen, they would rather shut down the government than give an inch to their enemies.
We see the same thing in some business matrix organizations. Some leaders put their functional team ahead of the overall team. As my colleague Joe Durrett puts in his 12 ways to make matrix organizations more effective, leaders have to care about the overall objectives and their individual groups’ objectives.
Businesses serve customers. Congress serves citizens. They can’t do that with a single-minded focus on hurting the other party. They need to bridge the divide and find a third way to work through their differences.
The obvious near-term advantage of this would be to allow Congress to get on with the business of governing.
Hopefully a more enduring advantage would be for these moderate members of Congress to establish a new forum and new way to discuss their differences on controversial issues and find third ways that work for all.
Wouldn’t that be a nice example for others to follow?
Click here for a list of my Forbes articles (of which this is #811) and a summary of my book on executive onboarding: The New Leader’s 100-Day Action Plan.
