Before the Contract, How Backbench Speeches to an Empty Chamber Built a Majority

Picture the House of Representatives at the end of a long day in the spring of 1984. The votes are done. The lights are on, the flag is up, the gavel is in the Speaker's hand, and a lone congressman is at the lectern giving a passionate speech to several hundred empty seats. A man talking to a room of furniture is a classic sight in Washington. What makes this one special is that the furniture was on national television.

That is the secret of how a party with no power took over the House. Let me tell you how a handful of backbenchers found out that the audience was never in the room.

The long wait

Start with the scale of the problem. When the Republicans of the early 1980s looked at the House of Representatives, they were looking at an institution the Democrats had controlled since the 1954 election. That majority held through the Eisenhower years, the Kennedy years, the Johnson years, Watergate, Reagan's two landslides and everything in between. By 1983, forty years was not a streak. It was a climate.

When a party has been in the majority for that long, three things happen, and they happen to the minority as much as to the majority. First, the minority learns to behave like a minority. Its members stop expecting to write bills and start expecting to offer amendments that will lose. Second, the majority forgets how to explain itself, because it has not needed to in a generation. Third, the voters stop imagining that anything could be different, and an electorate that cannot imagine a change will not vote for one.

The House rules in those years gave the majority the committee chairs, the calendar and the Rules Committee. The minority could vote no, and it could talk. In the House, the ability to talk is not a small thing, and a small group of members decided to use it.

1979: the camera arrives

In March 1979, the House allowed live television coverage of its floor proceedings, carried on a new cable channel called C-SPAN. The chamber that had been a closed theater for 190 years had a window. The Founders had anticipated something like it. Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution says: "Each House shall keep a Journal of its Proceedings, and from time to time publish the same, excepting such Parts as may in their Judgment require Secrecy." The Framers' view was that representatives work in public, and the voters are entitled to know what is said and done in their name.

The new window was open to everyone, but it was most useful to members who had something to say and nobody to say it to. The majority had committees, the press gallery and a steady stream of attention. The minority had the five minutes it was granted on the floor and a speaking period after the day's business, when members could take the floor on any subject.

Those late-evening speeches, called special orders, had long been a quiet corner of House life. A member would deliver a talk to a nearly empty chamber for the sake of the Congressional Record, in the hope that a few constituents might read it weeks later. With C-SPAN, the speech that used to go into the Record went into living rooms.

1983: the Conservative Opportunity Society

In 1983, a group of young House Republicans, among them Newt Gingrich of Georgia and Robert Walker of Pennsylvania, formed an informal caucus they called the Conservative Opportunity Society. Their founding assumption was a sober one: the Republican Party in the House was not going to win through quiet cooperation with the majority, because quiet cooperation was a way of agreeing to remain the minority.

Their argument had three parts, which I will lay out in the numbered way a good case deserves.

1. The minority has one asset the majority cannot take away: the right to speak. The rules gave the majority control of the agenda. They did not give it control of the microphone.
2. The audience is outside the chamber. A speech given to an empty room and carried on a national cable channel reaches people the member could never address in person. The question was whether the speaker would be talking to the seats, or to the camera.
3. A message repeated for years becomes the terms of the debate. Voters who hear a coherent critique night after night begin to hold the majority to it.

I will add a fourth point that is less obvious: the speeches trained the members. A backbencher who delivers an argument twenty times learns which sentences land and which do not, which examples persuade and which fall flat. Speeches are practice. They are also, in a modest way, a vote of confidence in the voters, because the speaker is betting that an argument made well will be heard by citizens who can think.

May 1984: the empty chamber

Now to the incident that made the strategy famous. In May 1984, Republican members, Gingrich among them, were giving these late-day speeches, and the camera, as usual, showed the speaker at the lectern. Because the House's own camera operators work under the direction of the Speaker's office, the Speaker at that time, Thomas P. "Tip" O'Neill of Massachusetts, could determine what the viewing audience saw. O'Neill ordered the cameras to pan the chamber and show the empty seats, so that viewers would see that the conservative speakers were addressing no one.

The Republicans were furious, and they had reason to be. The camera was supposed to be a neutral window. The Speaker had used it as a weapon, in the middle of a speech, to embarrass the speaker. Gingrich protested, and a few days later O'Neill, who was one of the most skillful and good-humored politicians in Washington but also had a famous temper, attacked Gingrich on the floor in terms that the presiding member ruled out of order.

The press covered the exchange, and the argument that the speakers were speaking to an empty room had boomeranged. Everyone now knew that the speeches were there, that they were on television and that the majority was worried enough about them to give an order about the camera. If you want to understand the value of a free advertisement, consider that a Speaker of the House had just promoted a backbencher's speeches to the evening news. The coverage of the clash, I would note, discussed the Speaker's temper and the minority's tactics at length, and only a little on the substance of the speeches, which tells you something about what makes the news.

There is a constitutional wrinkle here worth noting. The Speaker's control over the cameras was an exercise of the House's power under Article I, Section 5 to "determine the Rules of its Proceedings." The question the episode raised was how to use a rules power: to keep the window clear for everyone's view, or to point it where the majority prefers. The answer is that a power over the rules is a power to be used carefully, because the people watching have long memories.

The ethics fights

The speeches were a means, not an end. The goal was to make the case against the majority, and the best evidence turned out to be the majority's own conduct. A party that governs for forty years develops comfortable habits. Some of those habits became the subject of the Republicans' next campaign.

In 1988, Gingrich filed ethics charges against Speaker Jim Wright of Texas, relating to the way Wright's book had been sold in bulk to groups he addressed. The House Ethics Committee found probable violations, and in 1989 Wright announced his resignation as Speaker. A backbencher had helped bring down the most powerful member of the House through a procedure that was open to any member. It was a case study in the power of persistence.

Then, in 1991 and 1992, it emerged that the House Bank, an institution run by the House for members' convenience, had allowed members to write checks on accounts that lacked sufficient funds, with no penalties, for years. The practice affected many members of both parties. The Republicans did not hold a monopoly on virtue, and I would not say they did, but the fact that the majority had run the bank for decades made the story a majority story. Around the same time, an investigation into the House Post Office led to the 1994 indictment of Dan Rostenkowski, the powerful Democratic chairman of the Ways and Means Committee. Whatever the verdict on the underlying cases, the message was the same: an institution that had not changed hands in forty years had stopped examining itself.

I want to make a careful point here. Ethics fights are a legitimate part of politics, and they are also a temptation. A party that wins by pointing at the other side's scandals has to do better when it gets the keys. The voters have a memory, and the standard you set for your opponents is the one you will be measured against. Conservatives who are tempted to treat an ethics complaint as a weapon should remember that it is a weapon that cuts both ways.

1994: the payoff, kept brief

By 1994 the work was done. The Republican members who had spent a decade making the case from the back of the House chamber offered a legislative agenda called the Contract, signed by Republican candidates on the Capitol steps in September, and in November the voters gave Republicans a majority in the House for the first time in forty years. They gained 54 seats. Gingrich became Speaker. The sister site covers the Contract itself in detail, so I will not dwell on it here. The point is the preparation.

The Contract could not have worked in 1994 if it had been a document invented in the summer of 1994. It worked because the ideas in it had been aired night after night, for ten years, to anyone who cared to listen. Voters in 1994 recognized the Republicans' argument. They had heard it. A good deal of that hearing had come from speeches to an empty room.

The best case against the strategy

A point-by-point rebuttal has to start with the strongest form of the objection, so here it is. Critics said the Conservative Opportunity Society's tactics were grandstanding. Speeches to an empty chamber were theater, they said, and the ethics campaigns were scorched-earth politics that poisoned relations between the parties and made it harder to legislate. They argued that Gingrich's confrontational approach contributed to the polarization that has made Congress harder to run. Some of them were Republicans.

I take that seriously, and I will concede two points. The first is that a confrontational style can, over time, make cooperation harder, and a conservative should care about the health of the institution. The second is that theater is not a substitute for substance. A speech is only as good as the argument inside it.

But the objection fails on three grounds.

1. The minority had no alternative. The procedures gave the majority the agenda, and a minority that goes along quietly stays a minority. To say "do not be confrontational" is to say "do not try to win."
2. Public argument is the Founders' design. The point of Article I, Section 5's publication requirement is that representatives defend their positions before the voters. A speech in the House, on camera, is the Constitution functioning.
3. The speeches were substantive. The members who gave them argued about welfare, taxes, defense policy and the future of the Soviet Union, and they were usually early to the arguments that later prevailed.

The deeper question is whether the 40-year majority had earned its comfort, and the voters answered that in 1994.

What the minority can learn

Here is the checklist.

1. Find the platform you have. The minority does not control the calendar, but it controls its own time at the microphone. Use every minute.
2. Speak to the audience outside the room. The chamber is a stage; the audience is the country. Say the sentence you would want a voter to repeat.
3. Build a team. The Conservative Opportunity Society worked because it was a group, with a shared message and a shared schedule, and not a collection of individual stunts.
4. Be patient. The path from the first speeches in 1983 to the majority in 1994 took eleven years. A minority that wants results in one cycle has chosen the wrong strategy.
5. Hold yourself to the standard you set. If you campaign against the abuses of the majority, you must be prepared to be judged by the same yardstick.

For the larger picture of how comebacks are built, see Five Conservative Comebacks Side by Side, and the Ingredient They All Shared, and for the view from the Rules Committee, where bills move or die, see Schoolhouse Rock Left Out the Rules Committee, and That Is Where Bills Move. The numbers that decide control of the House are laid out in The Numbers That Run Congress, From 218 to 60 to 290 to 38 and Back. And if you would like to put a question to your own member, Asking a Town Hall Question a Member Has to Answer on the Record shows how. The minority's other tools are collected in The Seven Member Rule and Other Oversight Tools a Congressional Minority Keeps.

The case in brief

1. The House Democrats' majority lasted forty years, from the 1954 election to 1994, and a minority that thinks it can win quietly has chosen to remain a minority.
2. C-SPAN's live coverage of the House, which began in 1979, let a few members address a national audience from a nearly empty chamber, and Article I, Section 5 supplies the constitutional principle that representatives work in public.
3. The Conservative Opportunity Society, founded in 1983, made the case night after night, and the May 1984 clash with Speaker O'Neill over the camera's view of the empty seats made the strategy famous.
4. The ethics fights of the late 1980s and early 1990s gave the argument its evidence, though a party that wins that way must meet the same standard in power.
5. The 1994 majority was won by persistence, not by a document drafted in the summer, and the ten years of speeches prepared the voters to recognize the argument.

What you can do: watch one hour of House floor proceedings on C-SPAN, or read a day's Congressional Record at Congress.gov, and write down one argument you heard that you would like your representative to answer.