The topic of today’s episode is, “How Does the House of Representatives Organize Itself for a New Congress?” My guest is Dr. Matthew Green, an extraordinarily accomplished scholar of the U.S. Congress. He has been a professor of politics at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. since 2005, and he received his doctorate from Yale. Matt has authored or coauthored six books, the most recent of which is Legislative Hardball. The first book-length examination of the tactics and effectiveness of the House Freedom Caucus. Matt is also a regular contributor to “Mischiefs of Factions,” a blog about political parties. And he has written about Congress elections and other topics in the Washington Post, Roll Call, and The Hill. Matt, welcome to the program.
Dr. Matthew Green:
Thanks for having me.
Kevin:
Well, we’ve had another election and a new Congress will begin. Before we go any further, let’s stop for a second. What is meant by the phrase, a new Congress?
Dr. Matthew Green:
So every two years in November of an even numbered year, we have a national election for seats in the U.S. Congress, all the seats in the U.S. House, and a third of the seats in the U.S. Senate. When the results of those elections are determines, the winners are sworn in, in January of the following year in a new Congress. So one way to put it is that a new Congress is the Congress that first convenes in January, after a congressional election, with all the members who were elected the previous November.
Dr. Matthew Green:
So if you have say the 116th Congress, you have an election in November, the members who were elected in that election, the following year in January will be sworn in, in the new a 117th Congress. Now, there is an important difference though, between the House and the Senate, which is, as I mentioned all house seats are up for election in November of even numbered years, but only a third of the Senate seats are up for election, which means that the other two thirds of senators are still in their seats.
Dr. Matthew Green:
So what happens as a result is that the Senate considers itself to be a continuing body, which means that there are some things that happen in the new Congress, in the House that don’t happen in the new Congress, in the Senate, unless there’s, for example, a change in party control. And the one of the most important ways in which the Senate doesn’t change is its rules, which are considered to be ongoing because it is a continuing body.
Kevin:
Very good. So in this episode, we’re going to focus on the House of Representatives. How soon after an election, does the efforts start to organize the House for this new Congress?
Dr. Matthew Green:
The organization process starts almost immediately after election day, once it’s clear which party will be in the majority. So even if there’s some seats that are still outstanding, if it’s clear that one party will have the majority of seats in the house, then both parties can start the organization process. A number of things happen in that process. First, you have members of each party, the majority and minority party declaring or announcing their candidacy for leadership positions. There are various leadership positions in both parties.
Dr. Matthew Green:
In some cases they’ve already announced it, but if they haven’t, they formally announce it after election day. The two parties will meet at some point, not long after the election to determine their leadership, their own party leadership. And they’ll also both, as part of that process, will both nominate a candidate for Speaker of the House, which is something that’s determined a little bit later. Also the parties meet and negotiate amongst themselves to decide who will be on what committees, and who will be either in the chairs of committees, if they’re the majority party, or the ranking members if they’re the minority party. So the organization process starts pretty soon after election day.
Kevin:
So this reorganization process, it sounds like it is essentially partisan-based first and foremost. Is it egalitarian or is it being driven by particular actors on the Democratic Party or the Republican Party?
Dr. Matthew Green:
So it is partisan based and in terms of things like… And it’s especially true to things like what the rules of the chamber should be, because the idea is that the rules should be written in a way that benefits the majority party more than the minority party. But when we’re talking about things like committee assignments and leadership positions, it’s really a complex set of factors that are taken into consideration. So you have, for example, what do the members of Congress want?
Dr. Matthew Green:
Does a member of Congress want to be a party leader? Do they want to be on a certain committee? Are there other people who also want to be on that committee? Is it a competitive process that would be required? Or is it a committee that isn’t that popular? And then the party has to consider a range of things like, who would best represent the party’s interests on a committee? Who would best benefit from their own reelection by being on a committee? So for example, if you have a member from Kansas who wants to be on the agriculture committee, they’ll probably be given preference over someone from say, San Francisco. Because there’s a disproportionate amount of agricultural interests in Kansas. So it’s a range of factors that are considered as some could be considered egalitarian, but there’s a lot of politics that goes into it as well.
Kevin:
Yes. And one gets the impression that this is not an entirely transparent process. It’s not like the average viewer could turn on C-SPAN and see 435 members of the House all hashing it out. The action seems to be happening elsewhere. Where does it occur? And what are those things called caucuses that have some role in this reorganization?
Dr. Matthew Green:
Sure. So this process, this organization process, this assignment of lawmakers to committees and to leadership positions is happening primarily within parties. The democratic party calls itself, the caucus and the Republican party calls itself the conference. So the caucus and its members are meeting to talk about what they want to do, the conferences meeting separately, to talk about what they want to do. There are also subgroups within the parties that are making some of these decisions and it can be centralized. Sometimes it is the top leader of each party that has disproportionate say over things like who is going to be on what committee. But the main thing is that it is not happening on the floor of the house. You’re not saying it on C-SPAN. These are negotiations that are happening within parties. There’s also, I should note, some bargaining that happens between parties, especially if the minority party has gained a lot of seats in the House of Representatives, because the ratio of seats on committees between both parties is supposed to reflect the general proportion of seats that each party has in the entire house. So if the minority party has gotten much larger, they’ll go to the majority party and say, hey, you should create more seats on committees for our members. So there can be some bargaining that happens between parties, as well as part of this preliminary organization process.
Kevin:
So you referenced one of the acts of organizing a new Congress is to select the Speaker of the House. This seems to be a really major decision that a ton of attention is paid to by the political media. Why is that? What powers does the Speaker possess and how is the Speaker selected?
Dr. Matthew Green:
So the Speaker of the House of Representatives is one of the most powerful positions, not just in Congress, but in our constitutional system of government. The Speaker is actually explicitly mentioned in the constitution. It’s one of the few constitutional officers that Congress has. As a practical matter, the Speaker of the House has a great deal of power and influence. One of the Speakers powers, for example, is the ability to recognize lawmakers who wish to speak on the floor of the house. So if the Speaker is presiding and she chooses not to recognize you, to speak or offer an amendment, she does not have to. She is also extensively there to help enforce the rules of the chamber and to make sure that they’re being followed. The Speaker also has an important role to play in setting the legislative agenda, making sure that the parties preferences are being considered and that certain bills are getting higher up on the agenda over others.
Dr. Matthew Green:
In fact, there’s a tradition whereby the first 10 numbered bills in the House of Representatives HR. One through HR, 10 are reserved as leadership bills. And so if you want to get a nice number like HR1 you need to be supporting, or writing a bill, that the Speaker considers to be especially important for the party and for Congress. Other powers the Speaker has includes deciding where bills go, which committees they go to when they’re first introduced, representing the House, vis-a-vis the Senate and the White House. So when there’s negotiations over things like a budget, grant budget deals, things like that, the Speaker is usually playing a role. And then within the party, the Speaker also has a great deal of influence over things like committee assignments. She doesn’t decide them all by herself, but she has a great deal of influence over who gets on certain committees, particularly powerful ones like ways and means or budget committee.
Dr. Matthew Green:
The process for choosing Speakers is very interesting. It’s the only leadership position that’s chosen this way in the House. It’s a process whereby, on the opening day that the House meets, each party chooses or formerly nominates a candidate to be Speaker of the House. In fact, anyone can be nominated and anyone, in theory, can actually be Speaker because there’s no restraint or restriction in the constitution about who can be Speaker, but it has always been a member of the House of Representatives. Each party who’s they’ve previously nominated someone within their party. They formally nominate that person on the floor of the House. And then the entire house has a roll call vote, which in this case means every member is called by last name alphabetically, and they then speak who the person is that they would vote for, for Speaker. Those names are all recorded by the clerks. And then at the end, whoever has majority wins the Speakership.
Dr. Matthew Green:
What’s important about this is that because the entire house chooses the Speaker, it’s entirely possible that a party could nominate someone that a majority of their members want, but that person cannot get a majority of the full House, and thus cannot be elected. So when you are nominated to be Speaker and your party is the majority party, one of the most important things you need to do is make sure that everybody in your party, or almost everybody, will vote for you on the floor of the House of Representatives, even if they didn’t like you and they wanted someone else. If they don’t do that, the danger is that the House can’t pick a speaker, or even worse from the majority party’s perspective, the minority parties choice could become Speaker of the House of Representatives. So the Speakership’s a very important position, and the way it’s chosen is unusual and creates this interesting political dynamic over how you, as someone who wants to be Speaker, ends up getting chosen.
Kevin:
So the Speaker has great agenda setting authority. The heads of committees also have agenda setting authority. And the speaker has a role in picking the heads of committee. How does the committee heads selection process work? I mean, you just have legislatures raising their hands saying, pick me and the Speaker select them, or is it more complex than that?
Dr. Matthew Green:
So both parties have their own rules, governing committees are assigned to members and also how committee chairs or ranking members are chosen in particular, each party has a committee that is in charge of making nominations. So for the Democrats, it’s called the Steering and Policy Committee. For the Republicans it’s called the Steering Committee. And those committees consist of party leaders and also some rank and file members. Some of whom are chosen by their peers. Some are chosen by leaders themselves, and they are in charge of nominating individuals to be on committees and nominating people to share those committees or sub committees, or to be ranking members of those committees or subcommittees. Once they have made that nomination they’ve agreed on their nominees, then they present them to the full party. So again, Democrats is the caucus and the Republicans it’s the conference. They present those nominees. And then the party itself votes on those nominations.
Dr. Matthew Green:
So ostensibly it is a fairly democratic process in which every member of each party has a say, but as you mentioned, leadership tends to have a disproportionate influence and they exercise that influence in a couple of ways. One of them is, as I mentioned, these particular committees, Steering and Policy or Steering Committees, they’re members themselves, many of them are chosen by leaders. So it is unlikely that the leader of say the Republican party, would put people on the Steering committee who disagree with that person on things like who should be on what committees or what direction the committee leadership should go. The other way in which leaders exercise influence is through certain committees, these leadership committees, as I mentioned, where the Speaker or the minority leader may have the ability to either choose them, those members or chairs directly or nominate them directly.
Dr. Matthew Green:
And so these are committees, like I mentioned, Ways and Means Rules Committee, which sets the procedures by which bills are considered on the House floor. These are considered so important that it can’t be left up just to the rank and file members themselves. That leaders have to play a role in that, as well. So it’s a process which ostensibly is more democratic than it could be. So it’s not leaders choosing all the members and chairs, but leaders still have a significant degree of influence over the process for choosing who’s on committees and who leads those committees.
Kevin:
I see the Rules Committee. It’s a particularly important one. Could you say a little bit about it and the Speaker’s role in choosing its members?
Dr. Matthew Green:
So the Rules Committee is a committee, some have called it, the traffic cop of the House floor. Thousands of bills are introduced in the House of Representatives every year and the House obviously doesn’t have time to consider them all. So those bills are referred to committees. And many of those, in fact, most of those bills die in committees or what we call standing committee. So legislative committees like Agriculture, Ways and Means, National Security Committee, Agriculture, et cetera. But if those bills do make it through those committees, presumably they’re ready to come to the floor of the House. But the question is under what terms will those bills be debated? Will they be debated under an open rule? So anyone can offer an amendment to a bill at any time, or will it be a closed process where you can’t offer any amendments? Or will it be something in the middle, a structured rule where you can offer certain amendments to certain parts of the bill and the decision over how to consider a bill is made by the Rules Committee.
Dr. Matthew Green:
So the Rules Committee is very, very important, not only for making sure that bills are getting to the floor, but determining how they are considered. And this is where procedure plays a very important role. If you have a bill, for example, and you’re in the majority, and this is a bill that you believe is a great bill, everyone’s going to love it. It’s not controversial. Then you may not be so worried about people offering difficult amendments to it, making things difficult. It’s going to pass easily, et cetera. If your bill is more controversial or more partisan, then you don’t want a whole lot of amendments to it because that could jeopardize it. Or perhaps it’s a bill that’s very delicately put together. And if any part of it changes the whole thing collapses, and it won’t be supported by a majority of the House. Those kinds of bills, the process is very constrained, necessarily, in what members can do in terms of debating it, amending it, et cetera.
Dr. Matthew Green:
So that’s where the Rules Committee comes into play. The Speaker, in the case from the majority party and also the minority leader from minority party, play an outside role in determining who’s on that committee and who chairs or is the ranking member of that committee. And the committee itself has also stacked heavily so that the vast majority of members are from the majority party. Just to be sure that there isn’t any potential defections by folks in the majority, to the minority party to kind of change the plans for how a bill is supposed to come to the floor. So, it’s a very partisan committee. It’s a leadership committee. Leaders play an outside role in determining who is on that committee. And they are the key committee in determining, not just what comes to the floor, but how it comes to the floor, for debate.
Kevin:
We’ve talked a lot about the leadership, but there’s more to the House than that. And there’s more to the House than the leadership and the legislators. There are many employees who are absolutely critical to the Chamber’s operations. Be they, the parliamentarian, the staff who work for committees, and so forth. There are thousands of people working behind the scenes on Capitol Hill. Are they effected in this reorganization process?
Dr. Matthew Green:
Well, the majority of staff who work on Capitol Hill are usually not affected by the reorganization process., Either because they’re working for a member of Congress, who’s getting reelected and most incumbents do get reelected, or they’re providing the kind of support services that are neutral. They’re not partisan. And they are working to keep the buildings heated and keep them lit to do maintenance, these kinds of things that are fundamental to making the Capital function, but they weren’t necessarily changed by reorganization. However, there are times in which certain staff, at least, can be affected by reorganization. One of the ways in which they are affected is if you have a change in party control. So if you, for example, switch from say, the Republican party is the minority, to the Republican party as the majority, then that means that you are going to have certain positions and some staff positions like the sergeant at arms, for example, they might be someone that the Republican party would prefer to have in those positions.
Dr. Matthew Green:
So you can think of these as sort of patronage positions. And they might be replaced by the new majority party. Another way in which the switch in party affects staff is on committees. Because committees are balanced so that the majority party has more seats and they have more staff. If the party that’s the majority loses power, they not only lose seats on that committee, they also lose staff positions. So a number of folks who had jobs are going to lose their jobs, then also people who were hoping to get a job in the committee for the minority party, now they might because the minority party has become the majority party. So, that’s another way in which staff can be affected if there’s a switch in party, I would also note there is one other way that it can sometimes affect staff, and that is if the new majority party, in particular, decides that they really want to reorganize the chamber more fundamentally than it has been.
Dr. Matthew Green:
So for example, after the 1994 elections, Republicans became the majority party in the House. And one of the things they focused on was streamlining the operation of the House and changing some of the functions that were happening at the staff level, which had been that way for decades. And in so doing, they took out certain things like the mail room. People who’ve been working there no longer had jobs. But then they also tried to increase the amount of technology that was available to members and that created new jobs. So when a majority party decides to do a more fundamental reorganization, rather than just picking people for committees, for example, then you can see a change that happens to staff as a consequence.
Kevin:
And as a final followup question, who pays for all of this? There’s a lot of employees there, there’s a lot of changes being made, new technologies implemented, all of that. Where’s the money come from and how’s that work?
Dr. Matthew Green:
Well, the short answer is it’s the taxpayers and it’s the taxpayers who are paying for these things, the House of Representatives and the Senate, they pass appropriations bills every year to fund their own operations, but that’s money from the taxpayers. So, part of the reason why organization is important is that, and why people should care, is because we, the taxpayers are fundamentally paying the salaries, not just of lawmakers, but also staff and the way that the house operates. So yeah, in the end, it’s us that are paying for this reorganization process.
Kevin:
And when those bills pass, each one is going to have different priorities to be funded, different places where they want to allocate the money. And that’s all going to affect the operation of a new Congress.
Dr. Matthew Green:
Exactly.
Kevin:
Matt, thank you so much for being on the program and helping us understand how the House organizes itself for a new Congress.
Dr. Matthew Green:
My pleasure. Thank you, Kevin.
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