The Speaker's office as gatekeeper
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Asked in October 2021 whether the televised fights between moderate and progressive Democrats were real, John Kiriakou said his interviewer was exactly right to doubt them, and then explained why.

The system he studied

He is embarrassed even to say, he began, that he got a master's degree in legislative affairs because he so badly wanted to work on Capitol Hill; he has worked on both the House and the Senate side, and can tell you that the entire system is broken. 

The way things used to work, he says, is that anybody could propose legislation, it would be referred to the appropriate committee, and the chairman of that committee was really the power: you had to convince the chairman that the legislation was worthwhile. If it passed committee it went to the Rules Committee, the most powerful committee on Capitol Hill, which decided whether or not your bill got a floor vote. 

What changed

Newt Gingrich changed all that in the 1990s, Kiriakou says, and now literally everything has to go through the office of the Speaker. Subsequent Speakers never changed it back, because who wants to give up power and authority? So if you want something passed into law, the Speaker has to say it is all right.  

'Nancy said I couldn't do it'

His evidence is a conversation from six months earlier. He told a member of Congress that his whistleblower protection legislation had been really good, and asked what had happened to it, it had been killed in committee. The member's answer, in Kiriakou's account and in his exact words, was: oh, Nancy said I couldn't do it. 

Well, Kiriakou says, that's how every piece of legislation is. So when he reads in Politico or sees on CNN that there is a fight between moderates and progressives, and that the Speaker had to delay a vote to placate the liberals, that is nonsense. They vote yes if she tells them to vote yes, and they vote on whatever she tells them to vote on.  The situation in the Senate, he adds, is almost exactly the same. 

What replaced ideology

Kiriakou dates the loss of individual conscience in the chamber to the collapse of cross-party ideological grouping. As recently as the 1980s, he says, there were conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans in the Senate, and the job of a party whip was almost impossible because people were grouped by ideology rather than by party, which is why so many Democrats voted against the civil rights and voting rights acts, and why liberal Republicans such as Mac Mathias of Maryland and Senator Brooke of Massachusetts were unabashed liberals. It is not like that any more, and things are now so closely divided that the whip's job is paramount.  

See also

- Lobbyists Writing Legislation
- Think Tank Financing
- Congressional intelligence oversight
- George Washington University
- Senate Foreign Relations Committee
- Whistleblower Protection Act
- Washington political culture
