The Worst House Speaker in American History
John Nichols
The Nation blog
Dennis Hastert, who served eight years as the most lamentable Speaker of the House in the chamber's history, began a slow exit from the Congress Friday. It was on that day that the former wrestling coach, who attained the speakership not on the basis of any political skills or policy expertise but because he was willing to front for the unpalatable Tom DeLay, announced his decision not to seek reelection from the Illinois district that has elected him since 1986.
Among the fifty men and one woman who have held the speakership since a German-born pastor named Frederick Augustus Conrad Muhlenberg filled the position for the First Congress, there have been more than a few disappointments. Aside from the indicted, the disgraced and the disreputable, there have been the indefensible -- like Howell Cobb, who used his pre-Civil War speakership to promote the extension of slavery. Cobb would eventually find his true calling as the speaker of the Provisional Confederate Congress and the acting president of the southern states that seceded from the U.S. in treasonous defense of human bondage.
Could the shambling, ineffectual and frequently inarticulate Hastert really have been a worse Speaker of the House than a crude proponent of slavery, or a crook like Jim Wright or a conniving partisan like Newt Gingrich? Absolutely.
Even the worst of his predecessors had respect for the House as a institution of Congress, the separate but equal legislative branch of the federal government. Hastert displayed no such understanding or commitment. He made the House during the three congresses in which his speakership coincided with the administration of George Bush and Dick Cheney -- ironically, a man as a House member in the Reagan era coveted the post of Speaker and co-authored a history of the position -- something less than it was ever meant to be.
The House that Hastert built was neither a check nor a balance on the excesses of the Bush presidency. Hastert's House allowed the president to go to war and then initiate the long-term occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan without declarations, it rubber-stamped the administration's anti-Constitutional assaults on civil liberties, it made no complaint when the president attached signing statements that effectively exempted him from hundreds of laws that had been passed by the chamber.
Hastert's House was a crude and unworkable place, where members who sought to uphold their oaths to "defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic" were held up to ridicule and forced to hold hearings on issues involving the most extreme abuses of presidential authority -- lying to the Congress and the American people about matters of war and peace -- in basement rooms.
(Continued here.)
The Nation blog
Dennis Hastert, who served eight years as the most lamentable Speaker of the House in the chamber's history, began a slow exit from the Congress Friday. It was on that day that the former wrestling coach, who attained the speakership not on the basis of any political skills or policy expertise but because he was willing to front for the unpalatable Tom DeLay, announced his decision not to seek reelection from the Illinois district that has elected him since 1986.
Among the fifty men and one woman who have held the speakership since a German-born pastor named Frederick Augustus Conrad Muhlenberg filled the position for the First Congress, there have been more than a few disappointments. Aside from the indicted, the disgraced and the disreputable, there have been the indefensible -- like Howell Cobb, who used his pre-Civil War speakership to promote the extension of slavery. Cobb would eventually find his true calling as the speaker of the Provisional Confederate Congress and the acting president of the southern states that seceded from the U.S. in treasonous defense of human bondage.
Could the shambling, ineffectual and frequently inarticulate Hastert really have been a worse Speaker of the House than a crude proponent of slavery, or a crook like Jim Wright or a conniving partisan like Newt Gingrich? Absolutely.
Even the worst of his predecessors had respect for the House as a institution of Congress, the separate but equal legislative branch of the federal government. Hastert displayed no such understanding or commitment. He made the House during the three congresses in which his speakership coincided with the administration of George Bush and Dick Cheney -- ironically, a man as a House member in the Reagan era coveted the post of Speaker and co-authored a history of the position -- something less than it was ever meant to be.
The House that Hastert built was neither a check nor a balance on the excesses of the Bush presidency. Hastert's House allowed the president to go to war and then initiate the long-term occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan without declarations, it rubber-stamped the administration's anti-Constitutional assaults on civil liberties, it made no complaint when the president attached signing statements that effectively exempted him from hundreds of laws that had been passed by the chamber.
Hastert's House was a crude and unworkable place, where members who sought to uphold their oaths to "defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign or domestic" were held up to ridicule and forced to hold hearings on issues involving the most extreme abuses of presidential authority -- lying to the Congress and the American people about matters of war and peace -- in basement rooms.
(Continued here.)
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