The Squad and the Speaker
Rambunctious freshmen come into the House in a wave election, shake things up, challenge the leaders, divide the party. That is a pretty good capsule description of “the squad,” the four freshman congresswomen whose squabble with Speaker Nancy Pelosi has now been overshadowed by the astonishingly racist attacks on them by the president of the United States, and by the defense of those attacks by nearly all congressional Republicans. For now, the tensions between the squad and the leaders has been submerged, as Democrats, starting with the speaker, have come to their defense and closed ranks to condemn Trump’s racist and ignorant remarks. But the tensions over tactics, strategies, and outcomes are still there, and will inevitably reemerge.
In some respects, there is nothing new about tensions between freshman members of the House and its leadership. The wave classes of 1958, 1964, and 1974 for the Democrats, and 1994 and 2010 for the Republicans, brought similar struggles. Looking closely at them helps reveal both what they share with today’s tensions and what’s genuinely distinctive about this moment.
Democrats gained 48 seats in 1958, the second midterm election of Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency, including seats won by a substantial number of non-southern liberals that added to their large majority in the House. The 63 freshmen included a number of notables who played a big role in the House in subsequent decades—including Bob Giaimo of Connecticut, John Brademas of Indiana, Dan Rostenkowski of Illinois, Jim O’Hara of Michigan, Ken Hechler of West Virginia, and Bob Kastenmeier of Wisconsin. But in many ways, the biggest influence came from a House member who left for the Senate that year, Minnesota’s Eugene McCarthy.
[Steve Israel: House insurrections are here to stay]
McCarthy was a liberal agitator who had bristled at the continuing oversize role of southern conservative Democrats, known
