The topic of this episode is, “What does the Committee on House Administration do?”
And who better to answer this question than my guest, Representative Rodney Davis. He is the ranking member of the Committee on House Administration, or CHA as it often is called. He has been on the committee since 2014. Rep. Davis currently serving his fifth term in Congress representing the 13th District of Illinois, which covers a 14-county region that includes both urban and rural communities in central and southwestern Illinois.
Kevin Kosar:
Ranking member, Rodney Davis, welcome to the podcast.
Rodney Davis:
Hi. Thanks for having me on. I always enjoy being with you.
Kevin Kosar:
Let me first ask, how did you end up on the Committee on House Administration and later become its top Republican?
Rodney Davis:
Well, it’s interesting. I was not on House Administration my first term. I came in, winning the closest Republican victory in the nation. I was told that my third committee was going to be raising enough money to get reelected.
Rodney Davis:
I wanted to be on transportation infrastructure and agriculture, two committees I currently still serve on, but they were very important to my district. Well, I ended up winning my reelect by a very good margin. I went back to Congress, really excited to get a third committee. I walked up to Speaker Boehner on the floor and I said, “Mr. Speaker, I’d like you to consider me for House Administration.”
Rodney Davis:
We were the majority at the time. We had multiple spots open. He looked at me and he’s like, “That’s a good idea.” I’m a former staffer. I love this stuff. I used to get told when I worked in the district office, “We’re doing it this way because we always have.” Now they don’t say that as much to me anymore because we make changes. We make things better. Now, the House Administration Committee, we’re in the minority. We only have three members. I rose up in seniority, to where I was second in seniority the last time we were in the majority, and then Leader McCarthy made me the ranking member during the last Congress.
Kevin Kosar:
Yeah. You alluded to the fact that there are some committees one joins because it is advantageous directly to one’s constituents and it can certainly help with the fundraising. But Committee on House Administration is not one of them.
Kevin Kosar:
Its jurisdiction is sprawling. It includes elections policy, the operation of the House of Representatives and all the offices within it, overseeing the Library of Congress, Smithsonian, Chief Administrative Office, Clerk of the House, Sergeant at Arms, House Inspector General, et cetera, et cetera. Which of these subjects has the committee spent the most time since you joined, but prior to 2021?
Rodney Davis:
Yeah. Prior to even 2020, during my first term as the ranking member, I never would’ve thought that the smallest committee in Congress, House Administration, would become the Democrats’ legislative committee.
Rodney Davis:
They tried to run and they did successfully, through our committee, they ran H.R. 1. It was a 700 page bill that is changing the face of how elections are run in our country. It would have changed the face of how campaigns were funded in our country. That went through our committee of nine people, six Democrats, and three Republicans. During that Congress, we fought valiantly. We kept everybody together, making sure that we oppose this national takeover of our elections.
Rodney Davis:
You fast forward that to the pandemic of 2020, in that first term that I was ranking member, we never would have thought House Admin would have to deal with such an issue about, how’s the house going to operate? What’s happening with security? What’s happening with Capitol grounds?
Rodney Davis:
That took up so much of my time during the year of 2020, throughout the pandemic, because we were trying to get the majority to focus on planning, so that we could reopen our house campus. We asked them to plan for testing, when we didn’t have access to testing on Capitol Hill. Now we’ve asked them, plan for vaccinations. They’ve done that, but it’s been a lot slower. Those issues have really been the two that have taken up our time over the last two congresses.
Kevin Kosar:
And 2021 brought additional issues, including dealing with security relating to January 6th and a disputed election in Iowa. Were there others on top of that?
Rodney Davis:
Well, it’s been a very busy committee. I can tell you because of all of our action, I’ve had more members come up to me in the last six months, asking about serving on House Administration, than I ever had my entire eight year career in Congress. They see that we have a role in things that make the house work.
Rodney Davis:
January 6th, it was just a day that was a travesty for American history. It showed our foreign adversaries how to take down a branch of government. I never would’ve thought it would have been perpetrated by Americans who questioned the election.
Rodney Davis:
These are the issues that, we as a committee have oversight for, to make sure they never happen again. I want questions answered. Why in the world were we not in a better security posture to protect the Capitol and protect everyone prior to January 6th? Those are the things that we now have to go hash out, to make sure that we’re in a better security position for every single person on Capitol Hill, especially as we move towards reopening again.
Kevin Kosar:
The committee’s issue portfolio, as you’ve already indicated, is it’s got stuff in it that are pretty politically fraught, pretty intense. How does the committee manage the politics and still keep getting so much work done?
Rodney Davis:
Well, I wish we were doing more. I wish there was more bipartisanship. And certainly, when we were in the majority, it was a very bipartisan committee. But Chairperson Lofgren has chosen to take a much more partisan route. Our three members, it’s me, it’s Barry Loudermilk and Brian Steil, we’re nimble, we’re fast and we fight.
Rodney Davis:
We fight like hell to make sure that our voices are heard and are our visions of how to run the Capitol complex and how to oversee those agencies are put forth. Frankly, there’s no better example of our successes working as a team together, than the Democrats walking away from trying to unseat our fellow member of Congress, Mariannette Miller-Meeks in Iowa.
Rodney Davis:
She won a very close race by six votes. The Democrats were on a path to overturn her election and unseat her. Speaker Pelosi said she envisioned a scenario of that happening. We were able to work with our leadership, our political folks, and with Mariannette Miller-Meeks’ team and beat back their attempts and beat back their high price lawyers and the Democrat Campaign Congressional Committee too.
Kevin Kosar:
Let’s talk about congressional reform. The Select Committee on Modernization was stood up in 2019 and has been reporting out various ideas for reform. Implementation of many of these ideas falls squarely in your committee’s jurisdiction. How have you managed this relationship or partnership with the Select Committee?
Rodney Davis:
Well, I’m on the Select Committee, so I’ve really enjoyed watching Chairman Derek Kilmer work with his Vice Chair Tom Graves in the first Congress that this committee was in operation, and then also working with Vice Chair William Timmons now.
Rodney Davis:
If you want to see bipartisanship in action, pop onto one of our Modernization Committee hearings. We just had one today on disability access on Capitol Hill. It’s not the most exciting issue, that’s going to get the coverage in the 24 hour news cycle, but it’s important. It’s how do we make the house campus more accessible?
Rodney Davis:
You’re right. During the last congress, if you want to see bipartisan success, it’s the recommendations that we all made in a bipartisan way, that came out of the Modernization Committee. Now, I’ve learned with my first two and a half years in the minority now, that this is a very majority-driven institution. Although I would argue, I probably believed a little bit more in the bipartisanship nature when we were in the majority, because that’s what I saw from my committee chairs. I don’t see that now.
Rodney Davis:
I certainly hope that Chairperson Lofgren will continue to implement and schedule to be implemented any statutory changes that we’ve offered on the Modernization Committee, that she too serves on.
Kevin Kosar:
Which congressional reform issues are your top priorities to work on this year or into next year?
Rodney Davis:
Well, it’s one that’s very appropriate post-January 6th. It’s changing the way the Capitol Police Board operates. Frankly, I don’t think leadership of either the House or the Senate wants it to change because they have control. They can make decisions, but I truly believe those political decisions played a major role and an impact on putting our Capitol Police and the entire security posture in and around the Capitol on January 5th and 6th in a bad position.
Rodney Davis:
I want to change that. The Capitol Police Board should not unilaterally be able to make security decisions and overrule our Capitol Police chief and our officers. The Sergeant at Arms in the House and the Senate, they’re politically appointed. They work in complete conjunction with the Leader of the Senate and the Speaker of the House.
Rodney Davis:
And again, I’m finding out this is a very majority-driven institution. I’ve learned a lot during the pandemic because you have, not just different security postures between the Senate and the House. I mean, how in the world should we have different security postures between the north and south side of the Capitol, let alone different COVID responses?
Rodney Davis:
I mean, I had no idea that when you walk in the rotunda of the Capitol, that somehow COVID behaves differently. The Senate’s worked under different medical advice from the same doctor than the House has. I’m just amazed because I thought they were more vulnerable. They’re older than us. But instead, the House has different guidelines that are politically driven and they’re set by the speaker.
Kevin Kosar:
Now we know from the public opinion survey data that the American public is down on Congress, for the most part. You look over the last 20 years, public approval has hovered somewhere between 10 and 20 or 25%.
Kevin Kosar:
Historically, public approval has been not high, but it’s been around like 40%. So, it seems to me that there’s a rich audience out there, so to speak for a message of, “Hey, as a member of Congress, I’m going to reform the place, the place that you dislike so much,” but I’m not a legislator. So what do I know? Do you talk about congressional reform to your constituents? And if you do, do they respond positively to it?
Rodney Davis:
I do. I certainly do. As a matter of fact, I think they respond positively. I’ve been reelected now four times and elected five times. These are the issues I talk about. I brag about being ranked the either 13 or I’m now 14, the 14th most bipartisan member of congress, according to the Lugar Center. I talk about these things all the time.
Rodney Davis:
The problem is, we don’t have news as we knew it growing up, anymore. We have everybody having the ability to choose their own news. So instead of broadcast news, we have our own self-imposed narrow cast news and news sources. What happens is, those narrow casting news sources only want entertainment value. They don’t want somebody on there that’s going to pat their Democrat cohorts on the back and say, “Hey, you know what? Let’s work together on this. I got about 80% of what I wanted. You got 80% of what you wanted. Let’s move ahead. And then we’ll deal with the 20, 25% of the stuff that we didn’t get done later.”
Rodney Davis:
They want to just see us fight. It’s all or nothing. And that leads to the polarization and the atmosphere we’re in right now, which leads to congressional approval ratings going down. Frankly, I didn’t think we could get much lower than 13%, which we’ve been pretty much over the past few years, but it could happen.
Kevin Kosar:
Yeah, I think you’re absolutely right about the media. I read four different news sources today, all of whom have Capitol Hill reporters. I didn’t see a single story about the work you and the committee were doing to make the Capitol more accessible to people who are disabled or differently abled. Not a single word of it, which is part of the problem. It’s all bad news and conflict and not much good news.
Kevin Kosar:
For the Committee on Administration, it used to be a really powerful committee in the seventies or even the early eighties. It was like a pool of the majority Democrats. It’s very interesting to me that you say that we’re back to that, to some degree. At the same time, you guys are modernizing Congress, which is a kind of bipartisan effort.
Kevin Kosar:
Who’s that responsibility fallen upon, to kind of work through all that stuff that it takes to modernize Congress’s technology and its internal procedures and the kind of bureaucracy stuff that is part of the institution’s day-to-day operating? Does that fall on you, the minority, or is it shared with the majority or what?
Rodney Davis:
Well, it depends on the issue. When it comes to modernizing data and constituent management software systems, we’ve gotten bipartisan support in making things happen. I got to give a lot of credit to my colleague, Susan DelBene, because when she was on the Modernization Committee in the last Congress with me, we took over and led an effort to really change the way technology operates within the house.
Rodney Davis:
Remember, I’m a former staffer. A lot of former staffers realize that there was somewhat of a duopoly in how you communicate with your own constituents. There were certain systems that almost every office used. They were slow to innovate. They were slow to continue to change the number of clicks it took to actually get a communication out to your constituents.
Rodney Davis:
New technology needed to be let in, but no one wants to change things in government, let alone the House of Representatives. So, we’ve had to force a lot of these issues in place via the Modernization Committee recommendations or frankly, just through our House Administration Committee and the great staff that I have, that are just as nimble as we are in getting things done, as the three members of the Republican side of House Admin.
Kevin Kosar:
Well, thank you for your time. You are an extremely busy man and we’ve taken a big chunk of your middle of your day. So Rodney Davis, ranking member of the Committee on House Administration, thank you so much for explaining to me how your committee works and the role it plays in congressional reform.
Rodney Davis:
Well, thanks for having me on. Great to be with you and AEI. Please let us know if we can be helpful in the future.
Kevin Kosar:
Thank you for listening to Understanding Congress, a podcast of the American Enterprise Institute. This program was produced by Elayne Allen and hosted by Kevin Kosar.
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