First Branch Forecast Podcast - Caucus Rules
For this episode, Daniel and I discussed the little-known but important set of rules that govern how Democrats and Republicans how to operate as caucuses within the House of Representatives. These rules determine how members are selected to committees, how leadership has to treat legislation, various punishments for misconduct and falling out of line, and a host of other things the parties need to decide on to work as a single unit. The Democrats keep theirs secret. The caucuses typically revisit caucus rules at the start of every Congress. With the House majority potentially flipping in November, adopting caucus rules will be important for how the Democratic caucus decides how to share power and what potential the rank and file will have to impact the chamber. Members arriving in Washington after the election, we explain, should be thinking not only about the rules that govern the House, but govern themselves as party members. Chris Nehls: Hi, this is Chris Nehls with the American Governance Institute. Welcome to another episode of the First Branch Podcast. This time around, we decided to keep it local. I was thinking of a conversation to have with someone about caucus rules, and it turned out that the person that probably knows the most about them is Daniel Schuman, who is nearby and easy to contact. So here we are. We’re going to have a conversation about What the caucus rules are, how they relate to the chamber rules in the house and why you should care about them. So thank you, Daniel, for taking the time. Daniel Schuman: Thank you for having me on my show. Nehls: It’s the nightmare scenario. Two of us talking to each other. At least it’s two of us because it could be even worse, right? That’s just be one. Schuman: That’s true. It could be just be one. There’s a word for that. It’s called radio. Nehls: Yeah, monologues are probably not the thing that we need to be promoting. But yeah. So each Congress, the parties get together and write their own rules in the House. And they’re usually held close. And by hook or crook, you’ve been able to get a copy usually of what took you some time. But why don’t you talk about what these things are and why the caucuses go through this process. Schuman: Thank you for the question. As regular listeners of this podcast know, there are lots of different rules that relate to the legislative branch. Of course, there’s rules that come from the Constitution, the House of Representatives every two years, usually, but not always on the first day of the new Congress will adopt rules that governs its operations. But in the 20th century, the congressional parties took on some new and different roles, and some of the authority or some of the mechanisms for governing the operations of members in the chamber happened in the caucus rules and not in the chamber rules. And this often flies below the radar, but it really controls a lot of how things work. Nehls: And just to clarify, the caucuses, it’s basically everybody that’s of a party in the House. It’s not the specific caucuses, we’re talking about the entire body of Democrats or Republicans. Schuman: Yeah, so of course, everything is lingo and Democrats and Republicans can’t even agree on what to call their thing. So the Democrats have a Democratic caucus... C-A-U-C-U-S, if you’re hearing me otherwise, that’s not what I’m saying. For Republicans, they have a conference. And basically, this means that the people that are affiliated with those parties that the party recognizes as being members of that party. You don’t have to be a member of the Democratic caucus or the Republican conference, but since one of the things that these rules govern as it relates to the operations of the chamber is who gets to sit on committees, in the modern era, if you’re not a member of the caucus or the conference, then you don’t get a committee assignment, which is no bueno if you’re actually trying to do stuff. So even if you’re an independent, you probably have to say I’m affiliating with someone. So the Constitution says that you need to have a clerk of the House. The chamber rules talk about the election methods. But then if the Democrats have a majority, they actually have a process by which they pick the people who would serve in those roles. They decided among themselves. And then they turn around and they’re like, all right, hey, everybody, we’re going to vote. It’s called the fait accompli. Who’s ready? And that’s how it works for a lot of things. So when you wonder, like, how do Republicans pick Who’s going to serve on what committee or be the committee chair? Their party rules govern that. So, they have term limits for committee chairs, which Democrats don’t have. That is not a function of the chamber rules, although it could be. It is a function of their party rules. Nehls: So, let’s dig in a little bit. You mentioned committees. First off, let’s just start with who gets to determine what these caucus rules are? Does the caucus all get together and have a big Caucus conference and throw out a whole bunch of ideas and then they write them up or how do they? I’m pretty sure that’s not how that happens. How do they do that? Schuman: That is not how that happens. Maybe at times. So, the party became more relevant, certainly on the Democratic side, when there was a significant effort to overthrow the Democratic committee chairs. Back in the days of old, if once you were on a committee, you got to stay on the committee by virtue of a seniority, not by virtue of being appointed. Not by virtue of election process where you could not be appointed, right? That basically always happened. And you ended up with a whole bunch of very conservative Democrats running both the policy committees and also the rules committee, having significant control there. And that was against the interest of the majority of the party. Nehls: And we’re talking about the 50s and 60s. Schuman: Yeah, that’s right. So they got together, they formed a working group called the Democratic Study Group. And they got together and they tried to revise these systems. In 1961, they expanded expanded the Rules Committee. And in later on, like early 1970s, they moved the locus of power away from the committee chairs that were very powerful — so powerful that they would make you come in for a vote and you wouldn’t know what you were voting on, right? They were just extraordinarily powerful to move that power to the party — So they create a mechanism by which people will get reappointed as their party’s leader on the committee or members of the committee, but also mechanisms by which you could not return necessarily in that role. And while they give a lot of deference to seniority, they don’t always defer to seniority. And just if you’re a Democratic member of a committee and they really don’t like you or a Republican member of a committee, they will kick you off. They will find ways to punish you and the party will vote to punish you. And then they bring it to the fore and the floor vote reifies that. One weird thing is the detente between the parties, right? The Democrats will generally defer to the Republican choices for who’s on a committee and vice versa. So, if the Republicans decide to punish someone, the Democrats will be like, cool, and let it happen and vice versa. So there’s a lot of power that is asserted through this mechanism. The writing of the rules, which was your question — See, I remembered it. So in theory, the party members can propose changes in the rules at any time. They have regular caucus meetings. They don’t usually have a quorum at those meetings. Those meetings are also not public, by the way, just for fun. So you can propose rules changes. The Democrats have a committee on caucus rules. I think the Republicans have something similar that is usually chaired by a person who is the right arm of the Speaker, whose job it is to protect the Speaker’s prerogatives, not necessarily to reflect the interests of the members. So, you go and you talk to the chair of the committee on caucus rules or procedures or whatever it’s called, and you will try to persuade them of things. Good luck with that. This is basically a mechanism of both leadership control, but also where the factions will fight things out a little bit within the structure of something that is set up by leadership. The reality is these rules don’t change very often. The last big change that I remember to the Democratic Party rules was like, changing the pronouns. There are other changes that can happen over time, but they’re really not that visible. Until just a handful of years ago, they weren’t even publicly available. You couldn’t see what the party rules were for the Democrats, although Republicans were much better, they had published their conference rules for a number of years. It is possible to change them. Members have worked to change them. Members have used these mechanisms to change the way the party works because it changes the way the chamber works. But people don’t usually organize around this as a mechanism to do things. Nehls: But originally,the Speaker, at least in the late 60s and 70s, the idea was that the caucus would get to what the majority wanted to do based the powers that they had collectively given to the Speaker to get stuff done. And over time, the caucus rules have remained fairly static as the power of the Speaker has increased and as the Speaker has taken on more and more of the actual House rules, right? Schuman: Yeah. So that’s right. They have changed to some extent at different points. Leadership is very good about finding little points of leverage. You just change your word, you change the phrase, you move a comma and it significantly changes how power works. And some of these things you need in the rules themselves written down in black and white, but if you’re having a vote and the Speaker’s on the other side of that vote, things are not going to go well for you as a general rule, unless there’s a lot of people with you. One of the most powerful mechanisms inside this is the steering and policy committee for the Democrats. The Republicans have broken their steering and policy committees separately. Steering, it makes you think of cattle, I think, makes me think of cattle or maybe a car, but it’s about who gets to be on the committees and who gets to be the chair. And that entity, the steering and policy committee is created by the caucus rules, but they operate differently. We don’t actually know what their rules are because while they in theory have adopted them, I have never run into anyone who has ever seen them. So it is the secret committee that runs the democratic party to a fair extent, to the extent that they run anything. I don’t know if they meet, maybe they meet, do they have an independent existence outside what the Speaker wants? It’s an open question. I will see if I can find it because I’ve got the document out in front of me. The people who serve on the steering and policy committee for the Democrats are by and large the speaker and majority leaders people. This is not the different factions being represented. There is some efforts to include regional representation. They elect a handful of representatives from each region, but the Speaker gets to pick a bunch of people. The Majority Leader gets to pick a bunch of people. I think the Whip gets to pick a bunch of people. I’d have to go back and look. And I think the speaker gets three votes just to make things even more fun. Nehls: Oh, wow. Schuman: I think that’s right. As a functional matter, this body makes recommendations to the caucus about who to name. And at times the Speaker’s preference can lose, but it’s just not that common. Oh, here we go. I’ve got the list. So you’re ready for this? Sorry, this is going to be the most boring minute of podcasting, but let’s see if I can do it. The Democratic Steering and Policy Committee shall consist of the Speaker, the Democratic Leader, the Democratic Whip, the Assistant Speaker, by the way, who’s chosen by the Speaker, the Caucus Chair, the Caucus Vice Chair, the Chair of the DCCC. The DPCC chair, the DPCC co-chairs, the CLR, the FLR, the BLR, this is literally, it’s written, I’m reading it to you, right? The chair of the committee on caucus rules, the three co-chairs of steering and policy. So the Democratic steering and policy committee shall include the three co-chairs of steering and policy. This is recursive. The parliamentarian of the steering and policy, the senior chief deputy whip, all the chief deputy whips, How many chief deputy whips are there? There’s a lot. A member of the freshman class, a single member of the freshman class, by the way, 12 members who shall be elected from the 12 equal regions to set forth in Rule 11, then up to 15 members who shall be appointed by whom? The Speaker. You also get the Chair of the Appropriations Committee, the Chair of the Committee on Budget, the Chair of the Committee on Rules, the Chair of the Committee on Energy and Commerce, the Chair of the Committee on Financial Services, and the Chair of the Committee on Ways and Means. Ways and Means, by the way, was the formal process mechanism by which people were appointed to committees back in the days of old. And when do you get kicked off steering and policy? When a successor is elected or appointed. That’s great. But you’re not allowed to serve more than two terms. And who gets to chair the steering and policy committee? Come on. One word. You know what it is, Chris. Who gets to be the chair? Nehls: Is it the Speaker? Schuman: Yes. Yes, it is. In fact, the Speaker. So Mel Brooks had it wrong: It may be good to be the king, but it’s really good to be the Speaker. And what do you get to do? The functions of the committee is to report its nominations for House committee memberships, to report its nominations for House committee chairs. They could also recommend vacating committee chairs and removing members from committee. By majority vote, they can declare that a chair or subcommittee chair position is vacant. And that’s not a description of a member’s qualities, right? Nehls: So you’re saying that they can just decapitate the leadership of a committee if they get mad enough? Schuman: They can recommend to the caucus by majority vote, and then the caucus will vote. Then, should such a recommendation be made, the caucus shall meet to consider such a recommendation. I like to think that whoever wrote this was doing it tongue-in-cheek. Within five to ten legislators after the committee reports these recommendations, they can debate for up to 60 minutes, equally divided between proponents and opponents, and then they vote. They also play a role in policy development to create policy priorities. And if a majority of the caucus votes for a policy priority, then the members are bound, whatever that means. I assume not literally, but the members are bound to follow that policy directive. So we’ve got the regional whips, right? There is a voting mechanism for that. That’s like the only part of this thing that is actually democratic, right? Each of the people in a different region — there’s 12 regions of the country — the members get together and they vote for the person that they want. And if you serve them for 12 years, then you have to get booted. There’s also regional whips, right? The whips are the people who work for the whip to get members to vote the way that who wants? Right. And they’re elected by secret ballot. Isn’t that nice? What you have is a a nucleus, perhaps. Or a cadre of in this very Soviet process of how decisions, how people are appointed, how people can in theory be removed. Some control over decision-making where the democratic leader, the Speaker in the majority is the one who’s in charge. And also just in case you were concerned, the caucus chair is also responsible for codifying and revising the caucus rules and for recommending modifications when advisable. So the person who’s in charge of this is the person who is responsible for overseeing the process by which the rules change that would affect potentially their power. Isn’t that special? Nehls: That’s pretty well insulated. Yeah. Now, let me take the other side. You have seen in this Congress a fair amount of freelancing in the majority party. By members who have been upsetting the Republican Party’s apple cart a little bit, and maybe you’ve got a big agenda. You’re coming into the 120th Congress, or pick your favorite Congress. You’ve got a big agenda you want to get accomplished. The leadership team has a big job of organizing everybody. So from the leadership perspective, what are they really trying to accomplish with this kind of level of lockdown? Schuman: A number of things. One is control, right? Control of outcomes. Another is, so you’ve had to suffer through Chris like this annoying talk that I gave about three mechanisms of control in a legislature, right? You have control over what gets to the floor. That’s what the rules committee is for, largely, right? That is the Speaker dominated process. You have control over who gets to write the legislation. And then you have control over who gets elected. So in the caucus rules, we see who gets to write it in part back when the committees did the work you get to control is on the committees. And then of course you also have the money side, right? It’s the DCCC, the campaign committee is also chosen through this mechanism. So that’s two of the three major levers are being asserted through here. But it’s worth remembering that this is just a group of people who came together and wrote rules for themselves. How are they any different from any of the other parties that have existed over time and have chosen to organize one way or another? How are they different from a subset of members who decide they want to operate differently? Why should your committee membership be dependent upon the operations of the Democratic and Republican parties? Shouldn’t all members get to sit on committees? Or maybe a lot of members shouldn’t sit on committees like at the British Parliament. A lot of people don’t sit in committees at all. When you look at the Senate went through five different variations on this as well. As it turns out, it’s really freaking annoying to try to figure out who gets to sit on what because everybody wants to be on the most powerful committees. Part of the rules that we haven’t gotten into, it’s like there are exclusive committees and non-exclusive committees. An exclusive committee is a committee you want to be on. A non-exclusive committee is one that you don’t as much. So if you want to be an appropriator on Ways and Means or Financial Services — I believe those are the exclusive committees and you can only be on that one — there’s a process by which you serve on that. And if you’re on those, you can’t be on others unless, of course, you get a waiver from whom? From the Speaker in the caucus that can give you a waiver to be on more committees than you might be able to be on otherwise. Jamie Raskin got to be on 27 different committees. I exaggerate slightly. Because he got waivers. And as it turns out, he’s an incredibly capable member, being on multiple committees is fine. But this is how they start. Because you can sort by single transferable vote, right? You could do it by melee where you have them fighting whoever’s the strongest gets to do. You could do it that way. You can do it by seniority. We’ve seen the problems with that. You could do it by the chamber. You could do it by parties. This is a little bit of like a PR system, like a proportional representation, like a party-less system, kind of. It’s where those things kind of smoosh together a little bit where the political system has become. Nehls: It’s interesting who’s the committees that weren’t on that list. Health, Education, and Labor. Schuman: Who cares? Nehls: Even some of the foreign policy oriented ones, right? Schuman: I went to look here at the committee [caucus rules] and Appropriations, Ways and Means and Rules shall be the exclusive committees. But then also Energy and Commerce became an exclusive committee exclusively starting in the 104th. Then Financial Services became exclusive for the 109th. Now, what do all these have in common? The ability to raise boatloads of money. Boatloads. Absolute boatloads of money. And the non-exclusive ones for those playing along at home. Agriculture is non-exclusive. Armed services, it says here, is non-exclusive. I find that hard to believe, but maybe it’s true. Budget. No one wants to be on Budget. Education, Labor, Foreign Affairs. Homeland Security. House Administration. Judiciary, Natural Resources, Oversight and Reform, Science, Space and Technology, right? And then the best of them all, the Small Business Committee. Yeah, no one’s ever heard of it. Transportation, Infrastructure and Veterans Affairs are non-exclusive. This is what it is. Nehls: Some of these committees, these are the ones that are deeply invested in what we would consider public policy that affect most Americans. Obviously, financial services has a huge impact on the economy and things like regulation of crypto or whatever. Schuman: It’s not valuable from a fundraising perspective, right, which is why you can serve on more than one of them. You can be on whatever, on Agriculture and Education and Labor, and that’s okay. And I should say just, there are several committees that aren’t even on this list. The Ethics Committee, you’re appointed by the Speaker. House Administration Committee, which used to be a spoils committee, appointed by the Speaker. And the House Intelligence Committee, foolishly, is also appointed by the Speaker and the Minority Leader. So they pick the people that they want and not necessarily the people that would be best, which there’s a real disjunction here. Why does this, the party rules could say the Speaker or the minority they can recommend, but the part, nope, it’s just given to them. They can do what they want. And it’s very weird. Nehls: So talk about how this impacts the way that a majority would operate in terms of you have a pretty big tent party in the case of the Democratic Party. We love to talk about the factions. You have a fairly large left of center progressive faction. You have a centrist New Dem faction. You have a small, but once mighty Blue Dog faction. You’ve got all the kind of affinity caucuses. Schuman: And some people that are none of them. Nehls: I think you’ll probably see this next Congress, people that ran against both party labels and might be interesting free agents out there. So if the caucus rules are shaping it around leadership, its preferences, let’s talk about what the impact of that is on the legislative operations of the House. Schuman: So one, as the factions try to assert power, they can recommend people to the Steering and Policy Committee on the Democratic side or the Steering Committee on the Republican side about who they want to be on these things. So when you look at the committees, progressives and new Dems are not represented equally on the committees, as it turns out. House Intelligence, which is all national security hawks, just about., the Financial Services Committee are much more conservative pro-business Democrats. You take the progressives, you put them on the House Oversight Committee, right? And the Republicans put the Freedom Caucus there because it makes a lot of noise, but they’re trying to put them in a place where they can’t do as much. So leadership and giving out chits and trying to balance the pressures that are on them or what they’re trying or to balance their agenda. It creates unrepresentative committees that focus around weird kind of things. And also, Mr. Speaker, Madam Speaker, I really want to be on this committee. Okay, I’ll help you, but now you owe me. You’re creating this system of mutual relationships and dependencies where you do me a favor now, and maybe one day in the future, I’ll, you’ll do me a favor then. Right. It’s very Don Corleone-ish. Nehls: Yeah. I’ll give you the rug, but eventually you got to help me out, get rid of this body. Right. Schuman: That’s right. And we’re painting a unpleasant picture of it. It’s politics, but it doesn’t have to work necessarily this way. There’s many other ways that has worked, but what’s interesting is when was the last time — I was gonna say you opened up a newspaper — when you open a newspaper online and they talked about this. The Democrats and the Republicans don’t even publish a list publicly of all the members who have been appointed to the policy and steering committee, for example. You have to go and really dig for it. They sent an internal dear colleague, but it’s not online. And that’s kind of telling, right? The way that power is being exercised and decisions are being made, and not just decisions on an issue, but decisions around the range of issues that a committee might consider, it is all set by who’s on there. Nehls: So there’s a super conference or super Congress that we don’t know about. Schuman: There is, except as far as I can tell, don’t think it’s real. I think that it’s really just the Speaker having tools that are available to hide some of the assertions of these power, or maybe there’s a balance in that. I can’t really tell. It’s tough to tell what’s really happening behind the scenes. In addition to these rules, there is this huge culture of deference that these rules inculcate, in part because if you piss off the wrong person, they're... I'm just thinking about what Nancy Pelosi would do to AOC repeatedly, just massively undermining her. Or what Speaker Pelosi did to help people like Abigail Spanberger, who's now governor. Yeah. Who put her put rockets on her career. Nehls: Or lead balloons on Katie Porter. Schuman: Yeah, that’s right. So it’s really interesting to see This is really how power is asserted, or one of the ways that power is really asserted. And it’s just not talked about that much. Nehls: For the rank and file that want to have impact on policy, obviously, the more junior you are, you get the one freshman. Schuman: Its a big deal to be elected by your freshman class. As president of the freshman class of the 120th Congress it’s a thing. 40 years later, they still mention it in their bios. It’s still a thing. Nehls: So it’s, yeah, weird summer camp stuff. I don’t know. Schuman: I was thinking the movie Election, right? Nehls: Yeah. Pick Flick. So there are going to be limits to some of the rank and file out of the gate, right? You’re going to have to incur some level of seniority. But for the folks that have been there, know how the place works, these seem like they’re pretty limiting to — and we’ve talked a lot about The legislative process being pretty bottled up by leadership anyway — But let’s just pull on that of how does this really limit the legislative possibilities for the rank and file? Schuman: One, if you’re placed on the Committee on Macrame and Ballroom Dancing, that’s what you’re doing. And you can change committees, but it’s hard. And then you have to kiss the ring to do it. And they’re going to take into account, did you pay your party dues? And have you been sufficiently deferential to leadership? Party dues, I didn’t mean this as a metaphor. Did you kick up money, right? Like to Tony Soprano, did you take bags of money and transfer it as part of your dues process? You combine that with not enough staff. You combine that with the challenges of forming these intergroup collaborations like congressional member organizations and if you’re a member just hanging out by yourself, you don’t have a lot of capability of doing stuff. And so you have some incentives, right? Incentive number one is you try to climb the caucus power structure. You have the stations of the cross, right? You got to serve an Ethics Committee for a while. It sucks, but you got to do it. And you go to House Admin and you do it and you do these other things and you slowly, and after 173 years, then maybe you have a chance to be the deputy dog catcher, right? And that is one mechanism by which you rise. The second mechanism by which you rise is you just have to outlive everybody else on your committee. And you get to be subcommittee chair eventually, even though all the caucus rules, gives the committee chair the power to control the staff, the power to set its direction. You can do things, but there’s limitation. You can be really vigorous and you can rise, but even talent must give way to seniority and other assertions of power. Every so often you get members who are no longer competent to be chairs of their committee or people who are rising up. Eleanor Holmes Norton was vying to be the chair of the House Oversight Committee and she was just not capable of it. So sometimes what they do is they layer you where they give you someone else who actually does the work, but you get to keep the title until you retire. That’s not great. And sometimes every so often they will let someone jump over you as well. Just because you are manifestly incapable. And they only do that if you’re in the majority and it really matters, but otherwise they tend to defer to seniority. That’s also tied up with the tri-caucus that is the [Congressional Black Caucus] and so on that are very interested in seniority as a anti-racism mechanism that allowed them to rise, but in return for this rigid, you’re rising based upon how long you’ve been in that particular place. So for a lot of members, it’s really limiting. So you try to rise to the committee, you may try to rise through leadership. The other place you may try to rise is through your faction, right? Progressives, New Dems, Blue Dogs, or maybe something else. And that is another way where if you can get enough members standing behind you, then you can assert political power outside the structure a little bit. And that works too. That is an effective way to gain and assert power and some members will pursue that. Nehls: So, Daniel, what should members be thinking about in terms of changing the caucus rules or approaching the caucus rules in the next Congress? Schuman: That’s a great question. The first thing they should be thinking about is actually knowing what the rules are, both for the caucus and also for the steering and policy committee for the Democrats or the steering committee for the Republicans, which apparently has rules, but no one has ever seen them and they’re not publicly available. So the Steering and Policy Committee is what is the larger leadership control at this moment, people that recommend who gets appointed to the various committees, but we don’t know how it operates. We don’t know what its rules are, although it says that it has rules, but we don’t actually know what the rules are. And when I’ve talked to members, they don’t know what the rules are either. So they should have rules. There should be minutes from the decisions that should be made available to everyone. The decisions that they make members should probably be thinking about changing who sits on steering and policy. So that is more reflective of the members of the caucus because right or the conference, because right now it’s dominated on the Democratic side by leadership. They get two thirds of the members so it’s really hard to kind of do stuff. That said, they may want to pull some things into that away from the Speakers or the party leaders. So right now the party leader chooses who is on House Admin, Ethics Committee, the super-powerful Rules Committee, and the Intelligence Committee. But maybe that should be decided or recommended by the Steering and Policy Committee. Or maybe that should be decided through some other mechanism. But it probably shouldn’t just be one person. A good starting point is let’s require the information about Steering and Policy to be made available at least to the members and probably publicly available. That would be a really smart thing to do. That’s one set of things because it governs composition of the committees. Nehls: So what do you think we would learn if we had those, the steering and policy committee rules open? Schuman: No way of answering that question. We have seen reporting and rumors that you have to kick in a certain amount of money to be appointed to one of these committees. Is that a rule? We would learn if there are real rules or if this is Calvin ball, if it’s just the vibes, right? If it’s they make these appointments based upon God knows what, we would find out, particularly with how the decisions have been made in the past, we would find out how it works so that people would know what they’re supposed to do besides just endlessly sucking up. This could help, but we don’t know what else is in there, but we should. Nehls: You mentioned changes to appointments to the other, the standing committees in the House. For people who might not be so familiar with why the Rules Committee matters so much or why the Ethics Committee doesn’t do so much at all… Schuman: The Rules Committee matters because the Rules Committee controls what goes to the floor. And if you have members that are not able to be appointed or removed by your party leader, then they can more represent the different perspectives from inside the faction, for one. So with the Freedom Caucus, they got three of their members on there, which meant that for things like surveillance that they disagreed with, they were able to defect and extract concessions from leadership that was trying to jam through things that their party didn’t support. The Ethics Committee is a different matter. Nehls: Let’s talk about Admin [the House Administration Committee] just for a second, because Admin Committee is about operations Schuman: It used to be about spoils, but maybe a more responsive Admin Committee or people that are there differently. Maybe they lean toward the election stuff, which is less exciting for me, but maybe they lean more towards the chamber operation stuff, which would be more interesting. Making the place work better, that is a great place to get. You want people from your caucus or conference to be doing that work, as opposed to it just simply reflecting whatever it is that the speaker wants. There’s a balance there. In the Intel Committee, because the last couple of speakers have all been intelligence hawks, they basically mass surveillance forever, right, instead of operating as intended, which is oversight of the intelligence community, it’s their biggest cheerleader. It’s a bunch of lapdogs. So maybe it should more reflect the perspectives of the members of the caucus and not the perspective of the person who’s the Speaker. Nehls: Just going back to House Administration, it’s the authorizing committee, but the Speaker gets to determine who’s on it — authorizing committee for the legislative branch’s offices, which most of which the Speaker gets to select the person that’s going to run those offices, too. Schuman: The Speaker has a lot of say. Nehls: And you’re, oversight is of the Speaker’s person. And in the past that hasn’t really gone particularly swimmingly in terms of making the things that members need to do their jobs effective, like making sure these offices are run well. I think we’re in a better place now. Schuman: And it goes back and forth. It’s useful to have folks who have relationships with the Speaker because they support all of what the Speaker does, but they also need to have an institutional perspective. That can get lost. And they have to be the right person for the job. One time we had a person who was named chair of the Admin Committee and they picked her because she was a woman because they had no other women who were chairs of any of the other committees. So that was how they decided. And that’s not right. One, you shouldn’t have only one committee chair by a woman, but then you shouldn’t choose the chair of the House Admin committee on that basis. Nehls: She probably wasn’t super enthusiastic about doing that. Schuman: And you had a bad result, right? You just shouldn’t operate things that way. But looking at the party rules, there’s lots of other things to do as well. So we’ve talked before about ethics, where there’s the Ethics Committee that sometimes it operates, but largely it doesn’t. There are some minor ethics rules within the party rules. If you’re the chair of a committee and you get indicted, then you’re supposed to temporarily step down. But one, why is indictment the trigger? And why is it only the chairs? And if there are other things that are going on, if you’re working on Financial Services and it seems like you’re engaged in financial crimes and the Ethics Committee is investigating, maybe that should be a basis on which you step down. But so there’s other things that could be enforced through these mechanisms as well. It doesn’t necessarily have to just be through the Ethics Committee. You can do policing through other processes. We also see members who have high turnover rates. There should be someone that goes and investigates that’s not just the party leader who has mixed incentives to kick someone out who’s doing really bad stuff or to try to help them. So there’s lots of these operational things that get bound up within these [rules.] This is the secret Congress. This is where power is asserted in some ways. There should also be regular meetings of the caucus. You can imagine opportunities through this, too. Find the caucus to vote for certain ways on legislation, for example, to move things or to prevent them from being advanced. To direct the Rules Committee to report amendments or not. This stuff happens, that’s what’s happening underneath, right? They’re not just free agents deciding on their own. They’re doing, in many respects, or at least some respects, the bidding of the party or the bidding of the party leader. That could have more of a direct connection to what the members want and not just what a couple of members want. And you can imagine other pieces that sort of connect to this as well. They work hand in glove, chamber rules and party rules, but the party rules are largely not visible. This is where a lot of power can be exercised, where the decisions to shape who gets appointed and how they can exercise power. The rules talk about the staff on committees are controlled by the committee chair. Maybe some of them should be controlled by the subcommittee chairs. Maybe the staff should serve all the members. It says something to that effect, but that’s not how it works in practice. But maybe it could be set up where it does work that way in practice. You could do a lot of different things. And look, this is not an anti-leadership rant, right? I’ve got one of those, but this is not it. In this era, the parties are relevant. The parties need to be able to exercise some level of control as should the factions, as should the committees, as should individual members. And there needs to be a better balance and the caucus rules or the conference rules are one place to do this. Nehls: I love that idea of the caucus and the chamber rules going hand in glove. I think people are much more aware, at least I hope they are, because we’ve been talking about it for years and years of the importance of the chamber rules in determining what happens in terms of the power that members can have legislatively. People now are more people are interested in suggesting new House rules, but the caucus rules seem still a little under the radar and probably something that members-elect are not going to really, the incoming freshman class are not going to hear about until they show up and are told, all right, here’s what they are, vote yes. Schuman: That’s right. And members don’t even think about this, even the senior members, this isn’t something they really think about. It’s just not on the radar as an effective way to exercise power, but it should be. We saw the Republican Conference in 2022. They figured out for incoming members, we’re going to teach you about the Republican Conference rules. We’re going to give you this really great document that they produced that talks about what happens after you’re elected before you’re sworn in and how the conference rules work and how you can assert power and how leadership uses this to assert power over you. And for the Freedom Caucus wing, that seems to have worked out really well for them to actually organize around that. You would think that other folks would learn from that example? Nehls: They did outreach directly to like, like the people that they wanted to have join their caucus and said, you’re going to hear from leadership, but don’t listen to them. Here’s what you should do. And it was a great PowerPoint. I think we put it in the First Branch Forecast and wrote about it a bunch of times. Schuman: The only other place I’ve ever seen recommendations for caucus rules is from us. There is a Democratic Caucus Committee, which is run by leadership. So here’s your suggestion box. It’s a great way to identify, address some minor problems, but also identify malcontents. Does that work? Maybe it does, but there could be much better ways to do all of these things. Nehls: Whenever anyone mentions the Freedom Caucus out loud, it sounds like you’re looking for a new recipe for a new group of the obstructionists, but it’s really not about That necessarily, right? Schuman: This is what the Democratic Study Group did, right, when they wanted to overthrow the Southern Committee chairs. They spent years organizing. They caused the Democratic Caucus to meet on a monthly basis. They proposed a series of reforms in 1970 and 1972 or three in the 1974 that fundamentally changed the way the Democratic Caucus worked so that it was more representative to the people that were electing Democrats to Congress, right? This is not anti-leadership. This is about The different factions and the different power points, leadership, rules, committee, party, committees themselves, factions in the rank and file, all sharing power in ways that make some kind of sense. And when you have secret rules, then things get out of whack and things need to be more back into balance. Nehls: Yeah. Well, thanks so much, Daniel. Thanks for joining our show. Schuman: I’m always glad to join our show. Anytime you need me to join our show, just let me know and I will make it a point to be there. Thank you. I know this was fun to do. Get full access to First Branch Forecast at firstbranchforecast.substack.com/subscribe
