Evaluating the effectiveness of Speakers requires us to take long trips back through history. Back to the late 1700s and the first Congresses and there difficult days of learning to govern our unique country. To Henry Clay and the evolution of the role of Speaker as a chief political leader for both Congress and the […]

Michel gave his thoughts earlier on developing rankings of some ways we may use to evaluate which Speakers wielded the most power.  For me, it’s not just about having and using power, it’s just as important to use the power effectively.  Speakers that merely attempt to control the actions of the other Representatives in the […]

We’re proposing to measure and rank the relative influence of each Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, to develop so-called “Power Rankings” for this critical position near the top of the United States government’s power structure. As I started collecting data, I hit one of the key questions that we need to answer if […]