Press: House Republicans should take a lesson from Willie Brown  

The House of Representatives is a mess. The silly infighting among Republicans over who’s going to be the next Speaker not only makes the House look bad, it makes the entire Republican Party look like a bunch of amateurs. If they can’t even govern their own caucus, how can they be trusted to govern the nation?  

There must be some path out of this unending and embarrassing civil war. And there is. It was former Rep. Sam Farr (D-Calif.) who first suggested it to me, back when Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) was still struggling to save his own grip on the Speaker’s post: “Why doesn’t Kevin borrow a page from Willie Brown?”  

At the time, I laughed it off, figuring McCarthy was so clueless he wouldn’t take advice from anybody. But today things are a lot more serious — now that House Republicans have thrown McCarthy overboard, stabbed Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-La.) in the back and are likely to do the same to Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio), leaving the House completely rudderless. Willie Brown to the rescue.  

It happened in a battle for Speaker of the California Assembly in 1980. Assemblyman Howard Berman, who’d failed to dethrone Speaker Leo McCarthy in 1979, mounted another campaign for Speaker a year later, when McCarthy decided to step down.  

McCarthy allies wouldn’t forgive Berman, and turned instead to San Francisco’s Willie Brown. But neither could round up the 41 votes required for Speaker. The first tally was 23 Democrats for Berman, 23 Democrats for Brown.  

That’s when Brown pulled off one of the greatest legislative feats of all time. Secretly, he’d been negotiating with Assembly Republicans for months over a bipartisan approach to governing the Assembly. His efforts paid off when Republican leader Carol Hallett stunned everyone by announcing 28 Republican votes for Brown. In the end, more Republicans than Democrats voted for him, and Willie Brown went on to become one of the strongest and most effective Speakers in California history for the next 14 years.  

The lesson is clear: When your own party can’t get its stuff together, look across the aisle and make the best deal you can for the sake of the country. That lesson’s especially important now, with a pending government shutdown and war in the Middle East demanding the full attention of Congress. And the door for some bipartisan solution to the current chaos has already been opened by Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.).  

“House Republicans now have a choice,” Jeffries declared last week. “There are only two paths forward. On the one hand, House Republicans can continue to triple down on the chaos, the dysfunction, and the extremism that has been visited upon the American people as a result of the House Republican civil war. On the other hand, traditional Republicans can break away from the extremism, partner with Democrats on an enlightened bipartisan path forward so we can end the recklessness and get back to doing the business of the American people — and Democrats are ready, willing, and able to get that done.”  

This is not impossible; this is eminently do-able. The math is there. Assuming all Democrats hang together, only four Republicans are needed to get 217 votes and elect a new Republican Speaker. Deals can be hammered out on committee chairs and membership, and on important policy matters like Ukraine, spending and impeachment.   

All it takes is one traditional, centrist Republican willing to end the craziness by leading a group of commonsense Republicans in a power-sharing arrangement with Democrats. The world is waiting for you to step up to the plate.  

Press hosts “The Bill Press Pod.” He is the author of “From the Left: A Life in the Crossfire.”