Philippa Kaur

Editor’s note: This article was published prior to a 15th vote in the House of Representatives that saw Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California elected as House Speaker in the early hours of Jan. 7, 2023. It still has lots of super interesting information and analysis in it though, so please do read on.

It is fair to say that the beginning of the 118th U.S. Congress has not gone entirely to plan.

In the space of four days, members-elect of the House of Representatives have held more than a dozen votes over who would take on the role of speaker. Yet, as of Jan. 6, 2023, the position remains unfilled.

As a result, representatives have not been sworn in to start the job they were elected to do. The sticking point: A dwindling group of holdout conservatives in the GOP are refusing to toe the line and fall behind the party leadership’s preferred candidate, Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California.

The Conversation had a plethora of questions over what this means for governance, and the authority of the speaker – whoever that may be. So we put them to Rachel Paine Caufield, an expert on all thing Congress at Drake University.

Can the House do any other business while there is no speaker?

In short, no. The only business being done in the U.S. House of Representatives at the moment is voting for the role of speaker.

No other business can proceed until a speaker is in place. And this is for one very simple reason: No representatives can be sworn in until there is a speaker. So right now we have no formal representatives serving in the House of Representatives, and as a result no one has the legal authority in the House to carry out the work of government.

Other usual House activity, such as briefings on issues including security, is also not happening. Would-be representatives can’t be briefed yet because they have not been sworn in.

They can still meet with constituents. But they can’t make any formal request of government, because they are just representatives-elect until they are sworn in – and that applies to both new members of the House as well as returning members.

Does it affect the Senate?

The Senate can still operate, and there are certain things the Senate alone is responsible for, such as ratifying treaties and confirming judicial nominees.

But any legislation needs to go through both the Senate and the House – so no laws can be passed until a speaker is in place.

Can unofficial business be done in the House?

Certainly representatives are meeting while this situation is going on. My guess would be that the Democrats – who are unified in their support of Hakeem Jeffries as their nominee for speaker – are having conversations about future legislative activity.

GOP conservative holdouts Lauren Boebert and Matt Gaetz (right).
Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

For the Republicans, the priority right now is how to navigate this impasse over the speaker position. But don’t think that some of those discussions are not also about legislation. The holdouts in the GOP are looking for concessions on things such as term limits for representatives – and that is a legislative issue; they will need to pass law on it.

But for the most part, the fight over the speakership is the only issue in town.

What is the U.S. missing out on in terms of House business?

If you look at the House calendar for the first few weeks of the year, there isn’t an awful lot on it.

In the first few days, normally you would have the selection of the speaker and swearing in of members. And then they would traditionally break. There wasn’t expected to be a huge amount of legislation being pushed straight out of the gate.

One thing that is being delayed is a revision of the rules of the House of Representatives – something that happens at the beginning of each session of Congress. A rules package decides what the rules of the House will be in that session; then representatives get down to legislative business.

You have to keep in mind that legislative activity is heavier at the end of sessions – and we just finished a session of Congress in December. If legislation doesn’t pass in the House and the Senate in a single two-year session, then it dies – so there is no leftover business from last year; everything starts over again.

As a result, you traditionally don’t see a lot of dramatic legislative activity early in a House session.

But what happens if the impasse continues?

The one pressing thing the House has coming up that is not being dealt with is a vote over the raising of the debt ceiling.

Congress needs to raise the debt ceiling this spring; otherwise the U.S. will default on its obligations.

But the House still has four or five weeks until this really is a pressing issue – and brinkmanship is common when it comes to the debt ceiling, so expect that to be a protracted debate and negotiation in any case.

Can this situation continue?

Yes. The U.S. Constitution identifies only three congressional roles that need to be filled – the speaker of the House is one, the other two being the president of the Senate (the constitution designates that the vice president of the U.S. fills this role), and the Senate president pro tempore, a ceremonial position to serve as the president of the Senate if the vice president can’t fulfill his or her Senate duties.

So there does need to be a speaker in place. The Constitution requires only that the House shall elect a speaker, but doesn’t specify how or lay out a time frame – they can vote for weeks or even months.

By tradition, the speaker is elected by a majority of the House – so right now that would mean 218 representatives, assuming all are present and voting. Although the House rules currently specify that a majority is needed, that can be changed – it isn’t in the Constitution. The GOP could lower the vote majority needed to 213 to push McCarthy over the line, although they wouldn’t go lower as that could allow the Democrats to select Jeffries, who already has the support of all 212 Democrats in the House.

Hang on! If representatives aren’t sworn in, who can change the House rules?

That could come down to the clerk’s office that is currently presiding over the House session. In the same way that the clerk’s office is allowing representatives-elect to nominate speakers, they could allow a motion putting forward a change in the House rules.

It has never happened before, and it would raise a number of procedural questions – but theoretically it is possible.

Who can be a House speaker? We have heard a lot of names

The Constitution has no rules whatsoever about who can and cannot be the House speaker. Representatives-elect can nominate – and even elect – someone who is not a member of the House to be speaker. That is why you have seen Donald Trump be nominated by one member; someone even joked about former speaker Newt Gingrich.

There are requirements for serving as a member of the House of Representatives – you have to be over the age of 25, a U.S. citizen for at least seven years and live in the state from which you were elected. But as a speaker doesn’t have to be a member of the House, these rules don’t apply. So you could, theoretically, nominate a 7-year-old German child.

Could Trump really be the speaker?

Constitutionally, yes. Practically, no. There seems to be very little appetite for this among GOP members in the House – he only received one vote, and may not want the job in any case.

How has this all affected the authority of the role of Speaker?

The short answer is we don’t know yet. The fact that it has taken this many votes and still we don’t have a speaker in place in itself will have an effect. It indicates a divided majority party that will be difficult to lead – that in itself will diminish the power of the role.

Any concessions struck to reach a deal over the speakership could further erode the speaker’s authority. What is being negotiated by holdouts in the GOP are largely measures to empower individual members at the expense of party leadership.

This isn’t that uncommon. Over history the power of the speakership has ebbed and flowed.

‘Uncle’ Joe Cannon – a powerful speaker.
HUM Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images

One of the most powerful speakers in U.S. history, “Uncle” Joe Cannon, was removed in 1910 by his party for that reason – they thought the speaker had too much power. In 1974, the influx of so-called “Watergate babies” – a group of northern liberal Democrats elected as part of a backlash after Watergate – led to an effort to diminish the power of committee chairs in the House. The rules changes left a vacuum that was filled by the speaker, with the result that the power of the position increased.

That all said, what is being discussed is unheard of. The main concession – a change to the “motion to vacate the chair” rule so that any one member, or a small number of members, can initiate a process that is effectively a vote of no confidence – has never been tried before.

Another request by the GOP holdouts is to open the rules on the house floor so that any member can propose amendments to any bill. There are 435 members, and all have pet projects and constituent needs. Such a change would be chaos. In effect, it would mean that 435 people will be involved in the making of the legislative sausage right on the house floor.

Will any concessions be binding?

They don’t necessarily have to be adopted by future speakers, no. Some will have to be adopted in a new rules package for the House, but the rules package is changed every new session, so they won’t be binding forever. Indeed, some Democratic representatives have indicated that if concessions are made, they would potentially challenge the rules package or vote against some of the most extreme measures that holdouts are demanding.

Some of the concessions being discussed won’t need a rule change at all. They are, in effect, agreements between different factions in the Republican Party. For example, a concession that the GOP leadership will not use its SuperPac to favor candidates in open Republican primaries – that is something that can’t be dictated by House rules; it is more an issue of trust. More

Two years after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol building, the conspiracy theories about a malign group controlling the country have not gone away. This continues to corrode US democracy, fuelling stark polarisation that is deepening distrust and political violence.

Many in the mob on January 6 2021 believed that there was a “deep state” in control of their country, which had taken over powerful positions and were making decisions.

Some used this term to describe the people and institutions who they claimed had stopped their “rightful” president, Donald Trump, being re-elected and thwarted what they considered to be their righteous path, something Trump himself claims to believe. Other people have since argued that the attack was a hoax created by similar deep state actors.

Some of the elements of what is described as the deep state definitely exist, such as agencies acting covertly, and sometimes without direct oversight from accountable politicians. Running well placed and therefore vulnerable informants could be an example where direct political oversight is inappropriate.

Some people remain convinced these activities represent a take-over by unelected officials and reason enough to take up arms, while others see them as a function of a modern state.

For those who travelled to Washington DC on January 6 and proceeded to break in to the building and put the lives of elected representatives at risk, an alleged deep state had orchestrated the “theft” of the presidential election.

But belief in a deep state working against Trump isn’t confined to a fringe minority. A poll conducted by NPR/Ipsos after the 2020 election found 39% of Americans believe the deep state worked to undermine Trump. Some also believe the deep state has used or even started or faked the pandemic to curtail their rights.

Some on the left of US politics also have their own version of a deep state, driven by military and economic leadership, which generates wars and crises to perpetuate their interests. This force – they say – has persecuted and even assassinated those who stand in their way.

Much of what some describe as the deep state has legitimate government function. The intelligence services, law enforcement and the media are all underpinned by laws, regulations, courts or other forms of oversight.

But the now-popular concept of a deep state gets dangerously close to conspiracy theory precisely because it is founded on kernels of truth. There are intelligence agencies operating covertly. The media is a values-and-opinions-led industry run by billionaire owners. Business and lobby groups do influence politics to shape laws and regulations in their favour. That all of these things are true does not mean there is a deep state in the way those using the term mean.

Why did this take hold?

A key problem in US politics is that all sides are fatigued by polarisation and do not trust their political opponents. They assume their opponents have co-opted a section of government, and media and use this influence to brief aggressively against them.

The former academic and now filmmaker Adam Curtis is among those who argue that many powerful people deliberately sow confusion to undermine trust in political institutions (“hypernormalisation)”, and that this can destabilise the public’s understanding of what is real and what is fiction.

In the US (and increasingly in other countries too) people on all sides have come to believe that money, and particularly foreign money, is skewing politics away from the interests of the people. These beliefs have a radicalising effect on some people.

There are similar emerging narratives and movements in the UK, Germany and other parts of Europe, particularly in Scandinavia. In the UK, those who advocated for the campaign to leave the EU still refer to a mythical pro-European deep state preventing the benefits of Brexit being realised.

The QAnon movement, originally based on a conspiracy theory that Donald Trump was fighting paedophilic, Satan-worshipping elites trying to control politics, has grown to include conspiracy theories about COVID and even 5G telephone masts. The QAnon phenomenon’s extension to Germany is poorly understood but has driven the advance of far-right groups.

QAnon activists believe in a wide range of conspiracies about the so-called deep state.
Zuma/Alamy

While the US has always been curiously susceptible to conspiracy theories, (think the Kennedy assassination or the moon landings), the more recent conspiracies and QAnon activism has been enabled by the ubiquity of the internet. Real world threats – such as those of those of January 6 in the US and the so called Reichsbürger coup plot in Germany in December 2022 – have been encouraged by narratives that begin on the dark web (part of the internet used for completely anonymous communication).

Read more:
What is the Reichsbürger movement accused of trying to overthrow the German government?

Another contributor is the distribution of self-published ebooks through mainstream platforms like Amazon and Scribd. Before the internet era finding such a large audience would have been expensive and logistically difficult for purveyors of these conspiracy theories.

One of the great ironies of those evoking the idea of the deep state is that they have themselves have behaved like a deep or parallel state. They have acted in secret, with their own command-and-control structures, message management and military-style coordination of their actions.

What can be done to mitigate the harm of uninformed beliefs, and conspiracies? This movement has parallels with the debates around the deradicalisation of jihadists in the 2000s. As was found then the more involvement there is from government officials and agencies, the greater the push-back and reinforcement of the radicalising narratives.

The conclusion from the experiences around jihadist radicalisation is that prevention is more effective than cure. But the work on prevention and disruption needs to be well funded and is politically and socially difficult.

The continued prevalence of narratives around the deep state mean that the January 2021 attack are unlikely to be the last attempted. A prosecution of Trump for incitement of the January 6 mob action might satisfy the needs of those who were victims of the attack but may also stoke the conspiracy theories that just aren’t going away. More

Politicians around the world tout immigration restrictions as a way to fight wage stagnation and boost the job prospects of low-paid or unemployed locals.

The Trump administration pushed the message aggressively, at one stage calling a proposal to halve migration numbers the RAISE Act (standing for Reforming American Immigration for a Strong Economy), saying it would raise workers’ wages and help struggling families enter the middle class.

Whether or not cutting low-skilled migration would lift working class wages remains a highly contentious question.

Read more:
A myth that won’t die: stopping migration did not kickstart the economy

My research examines the question in a broader way. Its findings – looking back at an extraordinary time of change in US history, from the 1880s on – suggest that while restricting immigration might at first help low-income workers, over time it hurts those local workers. This is due to what I call the “honeypot effect”, in which wage hikes for poor jobs keep people in poor jobs.

The problem is that there are very few real-world immigration restrictions to examine. Immigration to the global West has been rising steadily since the 1960s.

The COVID pandemic essentially eliminated immigration for a short time, but it is as good as impossible to isolate the effects of that from the effects of everything else that was going on at the same time.

America’s first exclusion: the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882

Up until 1882, the US had an open-border policy with virtually no restrictions on entry. The Chinese Exclusion Act – introduced that year in response to the widespread belief that low-skilled Chinese immigrants were responsible for depressed wages and unemployment – was a first.

It was also long-lasting. It completely prohibited the immigration of Chinese labourers for more than fifty years.

It represents an ideal so-called “natural experiment”. Because Chinese immigration had been very heavily concentrated in certain locations, its impact was isolated to those locations, allowing what happened where it did restrict immigration to be compared to what happened where it did not.

And I discovered there was data. The US Government fully discloses Census data after 72 years. This allowed me to link individuals across US censuses to track the employment situation of millions of Americans over the entirety of their working lives.

A significant, negative, long-term effect

What I found was surprising. The Chinese Exclusion Act had a significant, negative long-term effect on American workers. My estimate is that workers in locations exposed to the Act earned on average 6-15% less over their working lives than their counterparts in other locations

The negative effects were strongest for low-skilled and unemployed workers.

The exclusion of Chinese immigrants not only failed to improve conditions for working-class Americans, but made them substantially worse off in the long run.

The honeypot and the occupational ladder

Then I set out to examine this seemingly counter-intuitive result: why shortages of low-skilled labour had led to worse long-term outcomes for low-skilled workers.

The answer appears to lie in a “honeypot” effect.

Higher low-skilled wages are attractive.

A closer look suggests the Chinese Exclusion Act was initially successful in boosting low-skilled wages and the employment of Americans in low-skilled jobs in the regions it had an effect.

This created a “honeypot” – American workers in those locations increasingly took and remained in low-skilled jobs. They became significantly less likely to become educated, meaning they fell behind their counterparts in other locations on the occupational ladder.

And their initial wage gains were short-lived, with increased arrivals from other countries and other parts of the US eventually filling the labour shortages.

This left the workers who had opted to stay in low-skilled jobs stuck with low pay, depressing their lifetime earnings compared to their counterparts in regions unaffected by the Chinese Exclusion Act.

Underlying the honeypot effect is the reality that most workers progress up an occupation ladder over their working lives, often as a result of education and training.

Read more:
Legal work-related immigration has fallen by a third since 2020, contributing to US labor shortages

But education involves trade-offs. It can require giving up immediate income to earn more down the track.

Immediate income which is higher is harder to give up.

And there might be another mechanism at play. When low-skilled workers are in short supply, there might be fewer high-skilled jobs on offer because high-skilled jobs need low-skilled jobs to complement them.

Implications for today

The economy of 1882 bears little resemblance to today’s economy and we should take care in drawing general conclusions.

However, studies of modern immigration inflows into the United States and Europe also find they boost the education and occupational status of native workers, suggesting the processes underlying the honeypot effect are present in modern economies.

Immigration restrictions are too blunt an instrument and their effects are too complex to be used to boost wages and employment.

Read more:
Nobel economics prize winners showed economists how to turn the real world into their laboratory

My findings suggest that even if restrictions are successful in creating wage gains for some in the short run, they are just as likely to lead to negative outcomes for locals in the long run.

This is not to say that increasing low-skilled wages is a bad thing. But immigration restrictions can only create temporary, unsustainable wage increases.

There are better, more sustainable ways to help low-skilled workers, backed by stronger evidence.

Attempts to help low-skilled workers should promote – or at the very least not discourage – education and occupational upgrading. That way they would help the low-skilled workers and the economy as a whole. More