Speakership

This morning I published a ranking of all fifty-six Speakers of the House, built on a rubric I stated in full: tenure, legislative output, institutional change, each graded zero to four, summing to twelve, emitted as a three-digit profile string so anyone can attack the arithmetic. In that table, Mike Johnson is twenty-seventh, with a profile of 220 and a score of four out of twelve. I put the number in the paper because I believed it. I stand by the method. And I want to use this space to say plainly that the number is close to worthless as a statement about the man, that the reason is a specific defect in my own rubric, and that the defect has a shape I should have seen before I shipped it. ...

The presidency has been ranked for eighty years. Schlesinger started it in 1948, Siena has run it seven times, C-SPAN four times, and there are two dozen surveys in between. You can find a president’s standing on ten named characteristics, with the per-category scores, on a live web page. The Speakership has been ranked once. In 1998. By a master’s student. That is the whole of it. Dennis Roy Still, at Iowa State, mailed a questionnaire to sixty congressional scholars and asked them to rate fifty Speakers on four questions. His abstract calls it, accurately, “the first attempt to rank the U.S. House Speakers” (Still, Ranking the American Speakers, Iowa State University Digital Repository). Nobody has repeated it in the twenty-eight years since. Still’s scholars could rate only thirty-eight of his fifty, and the six Speakers who have held the gavel since 1998 were not in his survey at all. Eighteen of the fifty-six people who have been Speaker have never been rated by anyone. ...