A U.S. House speaker solution in Iowa Friday - Condoleeza Rice?

Former Secretary of State's foreign policy credentials may be valuable as House takes up issues in Middle East, Ukraine

Condoleeza Rice (Hooover Historic Foundation)

Another one bites the dust.
Minnesota U.S. Rep Tom Emmer became the latest candidate for Speaker of the House of Representatives to drop from consideration Tuesday.
As the collectively flummoxed House members head back to the drawing board, maybe they should look a little south of Minnesota.
If anyone's looking for a potential consensus builder for speaker, and that person does not have to be a sitting member of Congress, one possibility will be in Iowa Friday evening.

Former U.S. Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice will be in Cedar Rapids at a fundraiser for the Hoover Historic Foundation in West Branch, hometown of President Herbert Hoover, where his presidential library and birthplace are located.

As part of that program, Rice is having a conversation with PBS "Firing Line" host Margaret Hoover, the great granddaughter of President Hoover and his Waterloo-born First Lady, Lou Henry Hoover..
In an April 2021 online CNN article, former President George W. Bush said he wrote in Secretary Rice on his ballot for president in 2020 -- and told her he was going to do so.

Rice served as Bush’s secretary of state during his second term in office and as national security advisor during his first term. She also was an advisor on the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe during the administration of his father, President George H.W. Bush.

The Hoover Historic Foundation couldn’t have found a better or more timely speaker with ties to President Hoover’s legacy of humantarianism abroad. Former Secretary Rice is currently president of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, founded by President Hoover himself.

Former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, right, is interviewd by Margaret Hoover on a 2019 episode of “Firing Line” on PBS (PBS photo))

She also is a former Stanford provost and, according to online biographies and university articles, she straightened out the university's budget and got Stanford on firm financial footing during her tenure, converting an operating deficit into a record surplus.
She has firm roots in the American civil rights movement. She was a childhood friend of Denise McNair, one of the four girls killed in the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Ala. 60 years ago last month. Rice’s father was a Presbyterian minister in Birmingham at the time.
Rice experienced Jim Crow segregation and discrimination firsthand. She was taught by her parents she he had to be “twice as good” as white majority peers to succeed in her career.
She heeded her parents direction and became the first Black woman secretary of state and the first woman and first Black to be provost at Stanford, the Hoovers’ alma mater — and the youngest provost in school history.
At a time when Congress specifically and the country in general is facing major international issues with dual wars in the Middle East and Ukraine, it might be an opportune time to have someone with Rice’s abilities running the House and being third in line to the presidency.
Many can and have taken issue with her on policies — from outside and within her own party— but not on credentials.
In a 2017 Q&A article from The Catalyst, a journal of The Bush Institute, entitled, “Why Democracy is Worth the Effort,” Secretary Rice said, “It’s not a matter of western values; it’s not a matter of American values; it’s a matter of universal values. People want to control their own futures.”
In a September 2019 episode of “Firing Line,” she told Margaret Hoover, “I marvel every day at the wisdom of the Founding Fathers and the Constitution…Because they understood the need for institutional intermediation between the desires of the people and the policies that came out. That’s why they created representative government. And when you constantly go around those institutions, you do that at your own peril.”
If the impasse on the House speaker debate continues, maybe it’s worth posing a question to Secretary Rice about filling that role when she’s in Iowa Friday.
Maybe Margaret Hoover or someone in attendance will get that chance..
Details on Secretary Rice’s visit and the Hoover Presidential Foundation benefit can be found here.

Pat Kinney is a freelance writer and former longtime news staffer with the Waterloo-Cedar Falls Courier and, prior to that, several years at the Ames Tribune. He is currently an oral historian with the Grout Museum District in Waterloo. His “View from the Cedar Valley” column is part of “Iowa Writers Collaborative,” a collection of news and opinion writers from around the state.

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