If a newly elected representative bucks the House speaker, they will be pigeon holed and neutralized to the point of being unable to represent their state. There has to be a better way.
I think party primary voters should select the Speaker and Majority-Minority leaders.
“There has to be a better way.”
There isn’t. And the type of power you’re talking about has existed since governments began. And it’s that power checking power that protects the people and the law through a republican system of government.
The speaker wants more power, the chairmen want more power, they struggle against each other to get something done, or to stop something from being done. And then if they get something done, it is then sent to another body, whose members were chosen by totally different constituencies than the first body, and that same power struggle occurs there too. And then should both bodies actually agree on something, it has to be sent to a third part of the legislature, a single executive, who can utterly reject all that work.
And should it even become law, it is subject to review by a body separate from all of these, a court who can compare it with the guidelines of the people (a constitution) to determine if what they did was legal.
And all of these different people can be removed from office by either the people or their representatives.
It’s messy, but brilliant.
I'm slowly plowing through a 1970 book on Alexander Hamilton by Gerald Stourzh. This morning a page jumped out at me, for it elaborated on the importance of first principles to republics. Beginning with Aristotle and on to Machiavelli, Coke, Algernon Sidney, Trenchard, George Mason, Thomas Jefferson, Richard Henry Lee, . . . all wrote at length on the importance of endless repetition of first principles to keep republics vibrant and protective of their rights.
Over these past hundred years, the left has expertly replaced our first principle, securing our unalienable rights, with a bumper sticker slogan, democracy. I wager 95% of Americans think our founding principle is majority rule.