“If you are a citizen of the United States, if you take an interest in the Government at Washington, if you, or your family, or your business is affected…by any of the laws that Congress passes or declines to pass – then this article is of great importance to you.” — Mark Sullivan, 1909.

In March 1909, an article appeared in Collier’s magazine entitled “The People’s One Chance in Two Years”. The author, a Capitol Hill journalist named Mark Sullivan, had begun a crusade against “Cannonism”, i.e. the despotic rule of Speaker Joseph Cannon over the House of Representatives. Cannon was an arch-conservative living in an era of progressive reform. Bipartisan majorities supported all kinds of legislation, but Cannon prevented any of it from coming to the floor for a vote. With support from his fellow Republicans in the majority (or, at least, their surrender), Cannon was able to defy the will of the public for the better part of a decade.

Anyone who’s studied the current House of Representatives will be very familiar with this scenario. A powerful Speaker reigns supreme over the chamber; rank-and-file Members are shut out of the process entirely; bipartisan majorities can’t get votes on their bills; frustration abounds. Power in the House (historically) tends to be cyclical – it flows up to the Speaker’s office, then back down to committees and rank-and-file, then back up to the Speaker, over and over. Right now, we are at a high point in concentrated, “top-down” power in the House. Not only are rank-and-file Members largely prevented from exercising their parliamentary rights, the committee system that might distribute power more broadly is practically moribund. The House is little more than a ratifying body for the decisions made by “leadership”.

What galvanized Sullivan in 1909 was the anti-democratic nature of a strong speakership supported by a supine party apparatus. Sullivan takes the case of a hypothetical Member representing 200,000 citizens (the number today is closer to 700,000) being unable to advance any of his bills – unless he is willing to “play the sycophant to Cannon”. This state of affairs can be accurately described as denying meaningful representation to those hundreds of thousands of citizens. Why send a representative to Congress if they are unable to do anything?

Sullivan railed against the person of Cannon, but he was much more concerned with the institution of the House and how it operates. He didn’t waste time campaigning for some other Member to take the Speaker’s gavel, as if the problem with Cannonism was just Cannon. He didn’t think that dropping a “better” person into the Speaker’s chair would fix the House. He knew that what mattered were the rules of the game, how the Speaker wields power in the House. The problem wasn’t how Cannon decided to use his power. It was the fact that “the system” gave him so much power in the first place.

Today’s Members would be well-advised to listen to Sullivan’s advice from over a century ago. In general, they have not. They remain fixated on the person elected to serve as Speaker, as if they were anointing a king. What Sullivan did was to essentially bypass the Members themselves and appeal directly to voters. “Write to your own Congressman” he says, “Tell him it is your wish he should help bring about the new rules.” It was a good argument then, and it’s a good one now.

The public is rightly concerned about our electoral processes these days – attempts at voter suppression, gerrymandering, big money influencing campaigns, even foreign interference. But solving those problems (as important as it is to do so), won’t matter much if our elected representatives continue to operate in a system that provides them no meaningful way to advance their constituents’ interests. Free and fair elections are necessary for a representative democracy to function, but they are not sufficient. Without a legislature that is (small-d) democratic, even the best representatives will find themselves shut out of the process – unable to place items on the agenda, offer amendments to legislation, or even debate proposals. And if your representative cannot carry your viewpoint to Congress, to what extent are you actually represented?

There’s a happy ending to the story of Mark Sullivan and Joseph Cannon. The public did turn against the autocratic House, and supported candidates willing to defy Cannon. In 1910, these Republican “insurgents” banded together with opposition Democrats to push through a series of rules changes that greatly reduced the power of the Speaker and opened up House procedures to the rank-and-file. Speaker Cannon, seeing the House turn against him, invited a resolution to remove him from office. But the House voted it down – a testament to the idea that the problem all along was not Cannon but “Cannonism”.

The people have another chance this year to elect Members willing to defy party leaders and change the rules of the game. If they do not, we will continue to see a dysfunctional Congress unresponsive to the needs of the public.