Why would voting for a US House Speaker candidate from a majority party be "taboo" and punishable if you're a member of a minority party?

Question

If I'm a US House representative and a member of the numerical minority party, and the majority party is struggling to get consensus on a candidate for House Speaker that I find particularly unpalatable, unsuitable, unproductive or even (potentially) dangerous, I'd certainly want to vote for a better candidate of that party, believing that a vote for someone in my numerical minority party has no chance of winning and so that would just be "throwing my vote away".

But apparently I'm not "seeing the big picture" and would likely be punished for thinking that way.

Wikipedia's Speaker of the United States House of Representatives; Selection includes the following:

Representatives are not restricted to voting for the candidate nominated by their party, but generally do, as the outcome of the election effectively determines which party has the majority and consequently will organize the House. As the Constitution does not explicitly state that the speaker must be an incumbent member of the House, it is permissible for representatives to vote for someone who is not a member of the House at the time, and non-members have received a few votes in various speaker elections over the past several years. Every person elected speaker, however, has been a member.

Representatives who choose to vote for someone other than their party's nominated candidate usually vote for someone else in their party or vote "present". Anyone who votes for the other party's candidate would face serious consequences, as was the case when Democrat James Traficant voted for Republican Dennis Hastert in 2001 (107th Congress). In response, the Democrats stripped him of his seniority and he lost all of his committee posts.

Question: Why would voting for a US House Speaker candidate from a numerical majority party be "taboo" and punishable if you're a member of a numerical minority party?

I use the term "numerical majority" to distinguish it from the use of the term "majority" in the block quote "...as the outcome of the election effectively determines which party has the majority and consequently will organize the House"

which seems to define "majority" as the party to which the Speaker is a member rather than something that can be determined by counting.

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Context: What originally triggered my question is the current situation for the incoming US House in 2023, there seems to be some debate about a particular candidate and I'm wondering why a bunch of Democrats wouldn't just join up with a bunch of Republicans, acknowledge that the Republicans have a numerical majority and so no Democrat could win a Speaker vote and just vote together on a Republican they all feel would be the most suitable.

Answer 1

"Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake." -- Napoleon Bonaparte (attributed)

I think that's the basic mantra here: if the opposing party is having a leadership crisis, don't wade in there and help them fix it. Letting it play out is more likely to create internal strife, legislative dysfunction, appeasement of the more radical factions, and other exploitable weaknesses within the party. Voting for the opponent still gives the opponent control, and removes pressures from their leadership selection process. You're just doing them a favor and yourself a disfavor.

It is has long been traditional for House party members to fall in line behind the in-party majority choice for leader, regardless of their actual support for that choice. This seems to just be garden variety displays of unity by a group: human tendency has been to keep dissensions in private and to present a united front publicly so as not to undermine themselves. Indeed, what may not be clear is that at the formal selection of the Speaker both parties will nominate their party's choice (and maybe a few other nominees will pop up), and voting for the opponent is a public display of disunity and lack of faith and support in your own party's leadership. In the current previous, 116th congress, the Democrat caucus even formally codified that the in-party majority choice for leader was a binding choice on the whole caucus. But there is a sense in which the last two decades—since the 105th Congress, when Newt Gingrich was under fire over ethics issues—of House speaker votes have been atypical: there have been more party members not voting for their candidate (mostly by voting "present") in both parties than is historically typical. A nice rundown of such behaviors can be found in this article, written in the lead-up to the successful bid for Pelosi's current term as Speaker.

The Gingrich era is rife with potential influences on how this plays out in the present day, as well. Gingrich was essentially the original modern Republican firebrand, who intentionally stoked political, especially partisan, strife so he could exploit it for gain. He also arguably created the Hastert rule—nothing goes to the floor for a vote unless the majority of the majority supports it, regardless of overall chamber support—which has been taken to the present day extremes where almost nothing goes to the floor for a vote unless the majority party alone has enough votes to pass it. He considered it a failure to be a leader, or even just to be the "majority party", if you needed the other party's votes for anything. Hastert himself said "If you start to rely on the minority to get the majority of your votes, then all of a sudden you’re not running the shop anymore;" similar claims have been levied when other Speakers have eschewed the Hastert rule. This has become the norm for both parties now—though not iron clad, as John Boehner (R) ignored the Hastert rule on many bills, resulting in several bills passing with well less than a majority of Republican support, and other speakers like Ryan only publicly promised to apply the rule to certain types of legislation, while never actually defying the rule on any bill during his tenure—, and amplifies the need for caucus members to fall in line when asked and to publicly support party leadership: if the party can't get enough votes from its own party, nothing is getting done, which is going to harm every party member's chances for re-election. This is something whole books and reams of Q&A's can be written about, but I'm not one of the people who knows enough to write such a book, so I'll leave these matters where they are now.

More broadly speaking, a caucus member who can't be trusted to toe the line on a simple display of public party unity is a member who has undermined the caucus's ability to trust them on other issues. The House party leadership (minority or majority) controls much of the funding its members receive for re-election efforts—and with a 2 year election cycle, House members are pretty much in re-election mode from the instant of their election; AOC in her freshman year tweets talked about how some of the first instructions she received were about soliciting donations for re-election, for example—which is a very sizeable cudgel to wield against anyone who threatens the public perception of the party's strength via unity. It's access to such sizeable funding and support machinery that tends to keep both caucuses united, and largely discourages people from switching to Independent or other third party affiliation, as well as incentivizes them to choose to abide by majority-decided caucus rules etc. Each member tries to balance what the caucus needs of them versus what they think they need to do for re-election; narrow majorities make this a very difficult task for both individual Representatives and the party, while larger majorities allow more breathing room to allow more endangered or extreme Representatives to focus on what earns them re-election (or media attention, should they not be the same thing) without sacrificing the party's ability to get things done.

Answer 2

The answer from zibadawa timmy provides a good explanation for general cases. However, the example cited in the block quote (James Traficant) has some special circumstances that deserve mention, especially since they (probably) contributed to how Traficant was treated. Much of the following is from the Wikipedia article about Traficant, supplemented by memory.

Traficant was elected to Congress as a Democrat after serving as sheriff of Mahoning County, OH. While serving as sheriff, he gained popularity by ignoring foreclosure orders during an economic downturn. However, he was also charged with racketeering for accepting bribes ... and won the case by claiming he was conducting a secret investigation into corruption. This increased his profile, allowing him to win the Congressional seat over a Republican incumbent in the next election.

When the Republicans took control of Congress in 1995, Traficant began voting with them more than his own party. This was in spite of the fact that partisanship in the House was becoming increasingly rancorous in general. In 2001, there was no competition within the Republican caucus over the office of Speaker. Thus when Traficant voted with the Republicans for Dennis Hastert to be Speaker of the House in 2001, he sent a signal that he had no interest in supporting the party he was ostensibly a member of. Additionally, he was under investigation for using campaign funds for personal purposes - for which he was convicted and expelled from Congress the following year. Democrats stripping Traficant of his committee assignments disciplined him for his votes with Republicans over the previous years as well as his vote for Hastert to be Speaker. It also sent a public signal that they were not tolerant of Traficant's corruption.

Answer 3

This question seems predicated on the idea that a US congressional majority party decides on its speaker in official public votes that happen on the House floor. That's not how it works.

Certainly there is such a vote. However, it would be irresponsible for party leadership to just wade into that vote before being certain how it would go.

What they do instead is get together among themselves ahead of time ("private caucus") and hash out amongst themselves who their candidate for Speaker will be. They don't have to arrive at a unanimous decision, just at someone who will get 218 votes (a majority of the US House) from their caucus alone. Then they go to the floor of the US House on its first session and make the actual vote.

At that point, you might see a few outliers vote for an alternate candidate, but there will be 218 or more for the previously agreed-upon candidate. This is when the minority party gets their votes too, and of course at this point there's nothing they can do to affect the result.

So you might ask what at this point is wrong with someone in that minority party, or perhaps one of those "protest" votes, voting for someone on the other side? Well, this is effectively a party loyalty vote. Its only value is what the story is in the news.

If you are going to publicly at this point, when the vote is about nothing other than marketing, tell the world you think the other party is better than yours, why should its leadership ever trust you with anything it doesn't have to?

The example they gave of Traficant is interesting, because he was indeed so untrustworthy a person that he ended up in jail with 10 felony convictions, including bribery, racketeering, and tax evasion.

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Historical update:

The following statement was made:

However, it would be irresponsible for party leadership to just wade into that vote before being certain how it would go.

It seems this post made a major error when it assumed that the emerging leadership would not engage in behavior that would be, in its terms, "irresponsible". In fact what occurred was a messy public floor battle the likes of which hadn't been seen in a century, even with similarly close majorities.

Otherwise, it seems the process worked as predicted; a few Republicans refused to vote for their winner, but in the end enough did. It just worked out that way in public for the whole world to see, rather than in private.