Opinion: Kevin McCarthy is getting a humiliating history lesson

Editor’s Note: Thomas Balcerski is the Ray Allen Billington Visiting Professor of U.S. History at Occidental College and a Long-term Fellow at the Huntington Library, Art Museum and Botanical Gardens. He is the author of “Bosom Friends: The Intimate World of James Buchanan and William Rufus King” (Oxford University Press). He tweets about presidential history @tbalcerski. The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.

CNN
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It looks like this New Year’s fireworks arrived a few days late to Congress.

Despite holding a numerical majority, the House GOP caucus revealed itself to be intractably divided in the election for speaker of the House this week, with Republican frontrunner Rep. Kevin McCarthy of California failing to receive the needed majority of votes. After six rounds of voting, McCarthy is still falling short of the votes needed. House Democrats, meanwhile, have decisively united around Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York as their party leader.

Not since 1923 has a speaker of the House failed to be elected on the first ballot. But a century later, with razor thin margins in both houses of Congress the new normal, 2023 is already shaping up to be a politically explosive year.

Historically, contested elections for speaker of the House were quite common, with the House deadlocking 13 times before the Civil War. The stalemates typically fell into two categories: those resulting from when the two-party system itself was in flux, and, less commonly but most tellingly for today’s moment, when a vocal minority within the dominant party refused to support the majority’s candidate.

In either instance, a compromise of some sort – whether by choosing a new candidate for speaker or by placating the splinter faction in some significant way – has usually been the result. If history is any guide, we may once again be living a version of one of these two scenarios.

Let’s take a look at three prior examples from the first category, when deadlocked elections speakers resulted from party fissures.

Prior to the Civil War, the future of slavery was the most divisive issue facing the nation. In 1849, the Democrats held the plurality of votes in the House, with 113 representatives to the Whigs’ 108. However,…