Shortly after the insurrection on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th, both chambers of the legislature reconvened to certify the ballots cast by the Electoral College that would determine the next president. This vote came many hours late, but ended mostly as the Constitution had intended. The will of the people was respected, and Joseph R. Biden was named the 46th President of the United States. Unsurprisingly — but to the continued outrage of Democrats — 8 of 51 Republican Senators and a whopping 139 of the 200+ Republican Members of the House of Representatives objected to certifying the election, despite the events earlier in the day.
Much attention has been paid to high-profile Senate Republicans who chose their careers over the stability of the country, and with good reason. Sens. Hawley and Cruz both played an outsized role in casting the 2020 election results in doubt, and both are 2024 presidential hopefuls. Hawley in particular has put in extraordinary effort in making himself the antagonist in chief, and has become the only Senator to oppose every single cabinet appointee proposed by the Biden Administration.
But it is the 139 Republican house members who voted against certifying the election that should be of more interest. Their votes shine light on an oft-ignored structural issue within Republican national politics, and give us a clear view of where the party is headed if the situation isn’t remedied.
Lawmakers and Incentives
The incentives of a lawmaker in a representative democracy are fairly straightforward. The lawmaker works with the legislative body to enact change and meet the needs of the people. The people evaluate the quality and effects of those changes, and in turn hold a regularly scheduled electoral referendum to determine whether the lawmaker’s performance has been adequate enough to keep their job for an additional term.
But lawmakers have other incentives too. Despite the fact that a career in Washington DC is an atypical one, representing your district in the legislative process is still a job, burdened by the incentives of any other job. Like most people, lawmakers want to succeed at the work they do. They look for opportunities to grow, expect to progress in their careers, and want to be rewarded for good performance — beyond just continuing to win re-election. This might look different for any given person, but a freshman congressperson might dream of chairing an important committee or becoming Speaker of the House, while a junior senator might aspire to join conference leadership or run for governor of their home state.
It’s important to understand that these two sets of incentives — electoral incentives and career incentives — are sometimes at odds with each other. Failing to properly account for these competing incentives can be detrimental to the lawmaking process, and political parties would be wise to account for these conflicting interests when designing additional rules.
Incentives created both intentionally and accidentally will be a reoccurring thread on this site, and the vote on January 6th provides the opportunity to clearly contrast two different systems and how they interact with electoral incentives to produce wildly different results.
Consider the the current and former Speakers of the US House of Representatives, one a Democrat, the other a Republican:
The difference between the last two Speakers are numerous. Paul Ryan is a conservative Republican who came to hold the gavel as part of an intra-party uprising in which the conservative Tea Party members of the caucus ousted the previous moderate Speaker John Boehner. Once a promising up-and-coming lawmaker whom many on the right saw as a future president, Ryan served just two terms as Speaker, oversaw very little major legislation, and is largely considered a failure by many even in his own party, after being unable prevent the same kind of infighting that saw him become Speaker in the first place. Nancy Pelosi is a liberal Democrat from California who is currently serving her fourth term as Speaker. She became the first woman to hold the Speakership, and was responsible for shepherding large parts of President Obama’s domestic agenda through the house like the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank Act. In a stark contrast to Ryan, even her political adversaries will grudgingly admit that she is an effective Speaker, capable of persuading both the few members in the chamber to her left and the considerably larger number of members to her right.
Still, for purposes of understanding the way House Republicans voted on January 6th, there is another difference between Ryan and Pelosi that is more significant: their ages. Paul Ryan left Congress when he was less than 50 years old. By contrast, Pelosi will be in her early 80s at the minimum when she eventually retires. This difference in age is reflected throughout the entire chamber. The average House Republican in the 117th Congress is 56 years old, while the average House Democrats is 60. That four year gap may not seem large, but it obscures some more significant differences in the age demographics of the two conferences. Almost 40% of House Democrats are 65 or older, and a whopping 56 members — including the every member of Democratic House leadership — are at least 70. At 80 years old, Pelosi is actually the youngest member of the leadership. By contrast, less than 25% of House Republicans are 65 or older, and every member of the Republican leadership is in their 50s.
Not only are House Democrats significantly older than House Republicans, but Democratic Conference Leadership is also considerably older than its own members. Republicans have some old members as well but none of them hold positions in conference leadership.
Incentives over time
The reasons for the discrepancy in age are fairly easy to explain, but it’s worth delving into how short-term incentives change as the lawmaker ages, even if the long term incentives don’t. If you are a newly elected lawmaker, you have just one simple goal — make it to your second term. This lines up nicely with both electoral and aspirational incentives — you need to win reelection to keep your job, and you need to keep your job to gain more power in Congress by advancing legislation, chairing a committee, etc. There are, however, just a handful of leadership positions — just 5 if you exclude the Dean of the House — so a more realistic goal for an incoming congressperson might be to chair a house subcommittee. As time goes on, the need to win re-election is complicated by the need to build coalitions, establish relationships with peers, and succeed at the job of participating or eventually chairing a legislative subcommittee. Elections are still part of the incentive map — that part never changes — but as long as you are executing against your job as a lawmaker, you mostly have to worry about winning in your home district every two years, and not much else.
Incentives Beyond Congress
The incentive map changes slightly if a congressperson has aspirations beyond congressional committee chairmanship. If a congressperson aspires to eventually hold some higher office, they need to worry about more than just constituents from a single district. The Speaker must win an election of their peers, and a future senator or governor knows that they can’t be too independent from their party, less they lose those voters in some future state-wide or national election. Put simply, members who aspire to hold some larger office are incentivized to engage in considerably more nationalized, partisan, politics when compared to other members, who only need to win the people in their home district and can more easily disregard the national partisan landscape.
You might expect that congress would be compromised of people from both the aforementioned groups — politicians focused mostly on lawmaking and winning re-election, as well as who are engaged in a more visible kind of career building partisanship — and to find them equal quantities among both parties In a body as large, comprised of over 400 people from all over the country. You would be wrong. As previously described, both parties have a distinct set of internal conference rules which create their own additional incentives, upsetting what you might call the “natural” careerist and electoral incentives shares by all lawmakers regardless of party.
The 108th Congress
The Republican House Conference and the Democratic House Conference have dramatically different rules for electing leadership and handing out committee assignments. As you might expect, these systems each introduce their own sets of incentives which futhesr add to the map of concerns that a lawmaker must already balance. There are a lot of differences between the rules the two parties use, but there is one rule difference that is of particular concern. In the 108th Congress, the Republican House Conference introduced a new set of rules that capped every subcommittee chair to serving a maximum of three terms. Democrats have no such rule — their members can remain in charge of a committee theoretically indefinitely.
The introduction GOP-specific term limit rule completely broke the dynamics of the Republican Conference. This rule is a key influencing factor that shapes modern Congressional Republican Politics, and incentivizes poor lawmaking by rewarding partisanship and punishing straying from the pack. It’s the primary explanation for discrepancy for why Republican Senators and Congressman voted so differently on January 6th. They’re playing with different rules and incentives.
Becoming a subcommittee chair is no easy task. The chair of a committee is expected to have some kind of experience or professional expertise on the topic in question, and often spends years building and a team of aids and staffers to help them with this endeavor. The six year cap on subcommittee chairmanship completely breaks the natural incentives at play here. Why spend 10 years passing laws, acquiring expertise, and building a team for a job that you will be ultimately barred from holding for more than 6 years?
This system stifles any natural career growth a congressperson might otherwise have, and is the reason the average age of the a congressional Republican is so much lower than that of a congressional Democrat. In Republican politics, Congress is merely a stepping stone to some other, more prestigious job. You either join party leadership early, or you leave to do something else. This dynamic has many deleterious effects, but there are three that are of particular significance and worth discussing individually:
1. National Partisanship
Republican lawmakers don’t know where they will eventually end up, but they know that it’s not in Congress. This means that they are incentivized not to burn bridges with the national party apparatus, and avoid votes that aren’t strictly by the party line. You might need favors from those same Republican lawmakers or voters in a few years. Instead of being accountable to your district alone, you’re suddenly accountable to every Republican that might one day be a voter you have to win. This approach completely flattens out the nuances of district-by-district politics, and celebrates the most extreme kinds of national partisanship.
2. Vacuous Policy Making
A few terms in the House are something of an audition for your future in the party. Why invest in legislating when you can spend your time in Congress building your brand? Freshman GOP Congressman Madison Cawthorn from North Carolina essentially admits this as the strategy behind his success in his recent profile in TIME Magazine. “I have built my staff around comms rather than legislation”, said Cawthorn in an email he sent to his new colleagues on the hill.
This might seem funny, but the sad part is that Cawthorn is actually correct and is ultimately setting himself up for success. The incentives of a Republican lawmaker punish the mundane and tedious work of lawmaking, but reward the kind of keyboard warrior nonsense that is the backbone of so much of modern Republican politics. This modern trend is no coincidence — it is the natural result of the incentives created by the GOP’s system. Lawmaking is boring. Owning the libs might make you president.
3. Fueling the Swamp
Despite the successes you might have as a Republican House member, the reality is that there are only so many post-congressional jobs in DC that might be available to you. This means that ultimately, many congressional Republicans find themselves out of work, banned from leadership roles, and ultimately leave Congress when they’re still young. Those people don’t just disappear though — they eventually do find a new home, usually on K Street. This might sound like some kind of moral failure on the part of those former members, but again it’s actually just the natural byproduct of the incentives laid out by the conference rules. Paul Ryan for instance, once the Speaker of House and among the most powerful people in the United States, now spends his time as News Corp’s newest board member.
The Vote to Certify
These incentives should put the January 6th vote into some perspective. Republicans never had the votes to overturn the election and they knew it. Given the state of the numbers and violence the members had themselves experienced but a few hours earlier in the day, one might think there would be some incentive to vote in the best interests of the legislative body as whole, be a good lawmaker, and certify the election. But given that Joe Biden was always going to be the president, why bother to stray across the party line? It doesn’t matter whether a given member was voting out of cynicism or perceived pressure — the system itself was pushing them towards making the wrong choice and damaging the health of the Republic. It’s telling that among the few GOP members who did vote to certify was Liz Cheney — a member of the conference senior leadership. She is among the few people who doesn’t have to worry abut the term limits of subcommittee chairmanships and already has something of her own political brand given the legacy of her father. Even still, nearly a third of the conference voted to strip her of her title in a later vote — probably for the same reasons they voted not to certify the election.
