While House Speaker Billy McCoy indeed won the battle with 47 Republican House members and their 13 Democratic compatriots who went to the political mat to try to unseat him, the veteran lawmaker may well have lost the war to make his second term as speaker an effective one.
McCoy, 65, is beginning his eighth term in the House. The Rienzi Democrat is a second-generation state legislator, and he knows the House match perhaps better than anyone on that side of the Capitol.
McCoy was re-elected 62-60 as speaker after a highly contentious battle with state Rep. Jeff Smith, D-Columbus, who had the support of the 47-member House GOP bloc of votes and that of 13 fellow Democrats who joined in the GOP effort to depose McCoy.
That means that McCoy won re-election as speaker by the narrowest possible margin. After the divisive vote in the speaker’s race, there was talk from both sides about “working together” but that talk was short-lived.
Prior to McCoy’s release of the House committee assignments, Smith’s coalition immediately shifted into another contentious battle with McCoy’s leadership team over House rules - specifically over the number of votes need to “poll” a bill out of committee.
Prior to 1987, House rules required a two-thirds “super-majority” vote of the full House to “poll” a bill out of committee - a process which strips a committee chairman of the power to “pocket veto” a bill by refusing to let it advance to the House floor for a vote. But in 1987, the House rules changed that two-thirds vote requirement to a simply 50 percent-plus one majority vote.
That changed in 2004 when McCoy’s leadership team led a return to the two-thirds vote requirement. The move was interpreted, for good or ill, as a Democratic ploy to make it easier to kill additional tort reform legislation proposed by Republicans.
With 47 Republicans and 9 Democrats (a total of 56) voting to change the rules back to the simple majority, 63 Democrats voted with McCoy to retain the two-thirds vote requirement.
McCoy responded by appointing Democrats to 42 of 42 House committee chairmanships, without any Republicans getting even a minor committee chairmanship. Only Republican freshmen even got committee vice chairmanships.
Of those 42 chairmanships, 26 went to Legislative Black Caucus members in the House. All but two members of the Black Caucus — Reps. Robert Johnson and Chuck Espy — supported McCoy in the speaker’s race.
The impact of the tight speaker’s race, the pitched battle over the rules and the dueling caucuses — House GOP members and Black Caucus members — and escalating partisanship have left a sharply divided House for McCoy to govern.
In an interview last year, former House Speaker Tim Ford — now retired from the House after serving as speaker from 1988 to 2004 — said that any House member winning a speaker’s race “has to be a juggler and realize that you don’t have the same majority every time on every issue, but to be effective you have to have the support of about 80 of the 122 members.”
McCoy doesn’t have that kind of support right now. House members loyal to McCoy are extremely loyal to him. But McCoy’s opponents are just as extreme in their opposition to the veteran lawmaker’s leadership.
The House is close to partisan gridlock at this point, and McCoy’s committee assignments didn’t help matters one bit. But House Republicans at the very least share responsibility for drawing the partisan line in the sand.
It’s likely that the new partisanship in Mississippi Legislature is here to stay by mutual design.
