Michael Kruse for Politico:
This week 38 years ago, in the first official act on the first official day of the 99th Congress, the Democrats in power did something nearly unprecedented in the history of the House of Representatives.
Speaker Tip O’Neill started to swear in the members old and new, and House Majority Leader Jim Wright spoke up to stop him. “I object,” he said, “to the oath being administered to the gentleman from Indiana” — to Rick McIntyre, the Republican who had arrived at the Capitol with a certificate from the Indiana secretary of state saying he had beaten in the 8th district the incumbent Democrat Frank McCloskey, albeit by just 34 votes. This development drew from some of the Republicans in the room a murmur of boos and discontent. “And I base this,” Wright went on, “upon facts and statements which I consider to be reliable.” There would be plenty of time, hours and then days, weeks and then months, to debate the facts as well as their relative reliability. For now, though, O’Neill, the liberal kingpin from Massachusetts, simply directed McIntyre to stay seated and silent as the more than 430 other congressmen and women stood to swear to “support and defend the Constitution.”
Republicans at the time had been in the minority for the previous 30 years and all but two of the 20 before that. Party leaders in the lower chamber were used to being in positions of powerlessness. But here they expressed on the House floor a particular pitch of indignation.
“A grave injustice,” said Minority Leader Bob Michel of Illinois.
“Grievous,” said Guy Vander Jagt of Michigan, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee.
“The blatant abuse of power,” said Bill Frenzel of Minnesota, the vice chair of the House Administration Committee, “by a ruthless majority.”
The Democrats did have reasons for their reservations about the accuracy of the results. Their candidate had appeared to be the winner after the initial tabulation (although that seemed to have been a byproduct of a double-count in a single precinct). The secretary of state had based his certification on a recount finished in just one of the district’s 15 counties (as recounts in the rest were pending). Moreover, Democrats had questions about thousands of votes that had been tossed out because of errors made by poll workers, not voters, that amounted to technicalities (especially important when the margin was almost infinitesimally close). Still, the move here was extraordinary, a legislative body in essence overriding the apparent will of the citizens of southern Indiana and dismissing the assessment of the appointed officer of the state, leaving the seat vacant and creating a three-person task force of two Democrats and one Republican to investigate the election and ultimately initiate a recount of its own — a controversial, fiercely contested process that six months later would make McCloskey the winner by all of four votes….
That bitter first half of 1985 did not, of course, by itself create inter-party strife. But for the principal players, several of whom would become some of the most influential political figures of their respective generations — Newt Gingrich and Dick Cheney, Leon Panetta and Tony Coelho, among others — it was a wound that never healed and permanently altered relationships with colleagues on the other side of the aisle. According to more than 40 interviews with current and former members of Congress, local and national operatives from both parties who were involved and prominent elections attorneys and recount specialists for whom the drama shaped their early careers, Indiana 8 became a rallying cry that transformed Gingrich from a more lightly regarded nuisance on the GOP fringe into the central figure of a revolution that would culminate 10 years later with his own ascension to speaker — ushering in once and for all an era of unabating partisan ferocity.
Perhaps most importantly, though, Indiana 8 turned into a new kind of political battlefront the actual mechanics and logistics of elections. Indiana 8 didn’t just presage the zero-sum struggle in Florida — it outright influenced how that fight unfolded. If 2000 was a singular precursor to the so-called “Voting Wars,” a singular precursor to 2000 was Indiana 8. “There is no better case to demonstrate how and how not to conduct a recount,” according to The Recount Primer, a seminal 1994 self-published book by a trio of recount-specialist attorneys — two of whom worked on behalf of McCloskey and all of whom worked for Al Gore in Florida. “Election officials are concerned with accuracy, not outcome,” they wrote. The directive was decidedly different for partisan representatives. “Partisan representatives should be concerned with achieving one of three goals: a) preserving a margin of victory, b) identifying election night mistakes which will turn a narrow loss into a win, or c) creating doubt as to the outcome sufficient to require a new election.” And while it was Democrats who penned the Primer, it was arguably Republicans in 2000 who paid just as much or even more heed to the lessons gleaned from Indiana 8. Among the maxims: “If a candidate is ahead, the scope of the recount should be as narrow as possible, and the rules and procedures for the recount should be the same as those used election night.”
Ultimately, too, Indiana 8 anticipated the Donald Trump-led talk of “Stop the Count” and “Stop the Steal” in 2020 and 2022 that reverberates still heading toward 2024. It revealed to anybody paying attention and prone to cynicism the corrosive effects of partisan, post-vote wrangling, of counting, recounting and re-recounting, of quarrels over which ballots are valid and which ballots are not and why — the sorts of inquiries that even in good faith paradoxically raise as many questions as answers, almost unavoidably injecting into the minds of voters not more certainty but additional suspicion. And in the end, it showed the ways short-term wins can lead to long-term consequences — namely, the erosion of confidence on the part of the public and even the politicians themselves in the fairness of an electoral system elementally important to democracy.