When the speaker was a czar

And wielded a razor wit

The judgment of history on Kevin McCarthy’s term as speaker of the House of Representatives will not be delivered for some time. Much depends on what happens next. Will the Republican rebels who orchestrated his ouster find a successor more to their liking? Will moderate Democrats join with moderate Republicans to elect a speaker with bipartisan appeal? Yet it’s reasonable to predict that McCarthy won’t be remembered as a giant of the speakership; he won’t be ranked with Henry Clay or Sam Rayburn.

Or Thomas Reed.

Even by the generous standards of the Gilded Age, a body-positive era when fat cats were proudly fat and gravity connoted gravitas, Tom Reed, Republican of Maine, cast an outsized shadow. Well over six feet tall, he weighed upwards of three hundred pounds and possessed “the largest human face I ever saw,” in the words of a colleague. When Reed walked the halls of the Capitol, lesser mortals parted to let him pass, as the ocean parts around a great ship.

First elected to the House in 1876, Reed represented Maine for a dozen terms. He advanced through the ranks of the Republicans, achieving the speakership in 1889. He lost it when the Democrats took the House two years later, but he recaptured the post in 1895. He had predicted his return—a call that didn’t require clairvoyance in the wake of the Panic of 1893. But the size of the Republican sweep wasn’t foreseen by everyone. “The Democratic mortality will be so great next fall that their dead will be buried in trenches and marked ‘Unknown,” Reed had said. He got the body count about right.

In the final decades of the nineteenth century, Congress was nearly as dysfunctional as it is today. The technique of obstruction favored by the minority Democrats was to demand a roll call to determine whether a quorum existed to consider a bill they disliked, and then to refuse to answer the roll call—that is, to sit silent when their names were called—thereby depriving Reed and the Republican majority of the power to act.

Reed bridled at what he called “this peculiar art of metaphysics which admits of corporal presence and parliamentary absence.” He quoted the Koran against his foes: “Dost thou think, O Man, that we have created the heavens and the earth in jest?” In his own voice, he continued, “Are elections a farce, and is government by the people a juggle? Do we marshal our tens of millions at the polls for sport? If there be anything in popular government, it means that whenever the people have elected one party to take control of the House or the Senate, that party shall have both the power and the responsibility. If that is not the effect, what is the use of the election?”

Reed determined to break the Democratic dam. Following another Republican demand for a quorum call, when the clerk called the names and the very Republicans who had demanded the call refused to answer, Reed pounded his gavel and ordered, “The Chair directs the Clerk to record the names of the following members present and refusing to vote.” He began listing them one by one.

They raised a howl at his innovation. This was precisely the reaction he wanted, for it made clearer than ever that they were indeed present. To one of the howlers, Reed responded, “The Chair is making a statement of fact that the gentleman is present. Does he deny it?” The member couldn’t answer without confirming his presence the more. Reed announced that a quorum existed and the consideration should continue.

The Democrats switched tactics. They would demand a quorum call and then slip out of the chamber. Reed responded by sending the sergeant-at-arms and his men after them. When they couldn’t be found, the staffers dragged in Republicans who were absent on account of illness, sometimes transporting them on their sickbeds, to make up for the fugitives.

The Democrats finally challenged Reed in the courts. The case rose to the Supreme Court, which, as Reed knew it typically did in matters internal to Congress, deferred to the congressional leadership—that is, to Reed. The metaphysical follies ended.

He didn’t always get his way. But he did so often enough that the Democrats started calling him “Czar Reed.” They intended it as an insult; he took it as a joke, and then a compliment. He amused himself by throwing barbs from the throne at those who crossed him. A member who tried to interrupt while Reed was speaking was silenced with withering sarcasm; as the fellow shrank in his seat, Reed observed, “Having embedded that fly in the liquid amber of my remarks, I will proceed.” In another speech he asserted that the Democrats could always be counted on to do some “mean, low-lived and contemptible thing.” Several Democrats jeered. “There, I told you so,” Reed said. He assured a Texas congressman that his seat was safe; public education hadn’t reached his district. An Illinois Democrat on the losing side of a vote grandly said he would rather be right than president; Reed told him not to worry, as he would never be either. A member who gathered his thoughts by saying, “I was thinking . . . I was thinking . . .” was congratulated by Reed for his “commendable innovation.” Two Democrats were known for their particular incoherency; Reed said of the pair, “They never open their mouths without subtracting from the sum of human knowledge.”

Reed’s remarks lived on; this last was revived recently in the Republican debate when Nikki Haley said to Vivek Ramaswamy, “I feel a little bit dumber for what you say.” Other Reedisms often repurposed included his allowance that although one man, with God, might make a majority, “many a martyr has been burned at the stake while the votes were being counted.” Likewise his reply to a reporter who asked what he should write about a recently deceased Democrat: “Anything but the truth.” Which sentiment gave rise to Reed’s most famous aphorism, his definition of a statesman as “a dead politician.”

Reed’s wit skewered his rivals in the House but had little effect on larger forces outside the Capitol. He resisted the American declaration of war against Spain in 1898 and opposed the postwar treaty that annexed the Philippines to the United States and made republican America into a colonial empire. Recognizing that time and his party had left him behind, Reed retired from politics. In 1902 he became a statesman.