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show notes
Daniel and I chatted with Catholic University’s Matthew Green, who’s written on party leadership selection among a host of other congressional topics, on what will happen between the election and the start of the 120th Congress. This transcript is AI-generated and has been lightly edited by me. - CN
Chris Nehls: Hi, this is Chris Nehls of the American Governance Institute here with Daniel Schuman and our guest, Matt Green, a professor at Catholic University of America. We’re going to talk about some of the stuff that’ll be coming up between the election and the next Congress. It’s actually a pretty busy time for members, particularly if the majority flips to figure out who are going to be their leaders in the next Congress and get that all arranged. And Professor Green is one of the experts on that topic. So we’re going to talk about that and some other stuff about the organization in the next Congress. So thanks for coming on.
Matt Green: Thanks for having me.
Nehls: Sure thing. So let’s just kind of start high level when we have an election and we have an outcome for the midterms, the parties are going to get together ahead of time because they have a lot to do to organize the next Congress, and the first thing on their agenda is usually to pick their next leadership class. Let’s just talk about how that works. And just the mechanics.
Green: Sure. There’s this period between the November elections and January when the next Congress officially meets. During that period, the parties – both parties in both the House and Senate have some big decisions to make. So one of them, as you said, is choosing their leaders. We’ll talk more about that in a minute. They do also have the opportunity to revise their own internal rules.
So each party has its own internal rules. And that can govern things like how committee assignments are decided within the party. It can determine disciplinary action if a party member is not doing what they’re supposed to do, and so forth, that doesn’t get a whole lot of attention, but that can be pretty significant.
So there’s the writing, the rules, possibly rewriting or revising the party’s rules and then choosing leaders. So each party in each chamber has a set of leaders. So in the Senate, for example, each party has a floor leader. Majority is a majority leader, minority has a minority leader. They also have their whips in the House. Similar situation with one important difference I’ll talk about in a second.
And so the parties first meet internally to decide who that leader is going to be. That selection is usually pro forma because most leaders are incumbents and no one challenges them or whoever’s running, just no one else wants the job for whatever reason. And so it’s by acclamation. But occasionally these races can be contested within the party. And so there’s a lot of politicking that goes on.
And then you have this vote, and we can talk more about the mechanics of the vote, if you like. And the big difference here is the House versus the Senate, because in the Senate, each party picks their leader and the majority party has a majority leader, and then you win by majority, vote in both parties in each chamber and then the Senate. That’s the majority leader. So Chuck Schumer, who’s the Senate majority leader, was chosen by Democrats. And then that’s the last vote.
But in the House, you also have this speaker of the House position, which is subject to a vote by the full House on the House floor. So when each party is choosing their top leader, they’re also choosing their nominee for speaker. And then that nominee is formally nominated on the House floor on the first day that the House meets. And then you have an election again, this usually up until about ten years ago, where everyone votes with their party and whoever has more seats, that’s going to be the speaker. But as we saw with Kevin McCarthy, we learned that’s not always the case. And it can get quite complicated. But that is the one big difference in terms of leadership selection, I’d say that really stands out is that the House chooses its speaker. So you have this vote on the full House for the top leader, whereas the Senate, you don’t have that election take place.
Nehls: Great, great. Daniel. Go ahead.
Daniel Schuman: I was going to say that sometimes, as we saw, it’s a point of leverage, but we also saw it’s not just about picking who gets to be speaker, right? It’s also about what the speaker can do. And sometimes whether they can continue on. We saw with Speaker Pelosi when she was getting ready to run for her 97th term as speaker. Sorry, her, I think her third term as speaker. The sorry humor doesn’t always translate well.
Nehls: They’re laughing at home. Don’t worry.
Schuman: Yeah. I hope so. The conservative Democrats tried to put in place term limits for her saying that if you wanted to return, I think you need a three quarters vote. Can you talk about the pressure that may or may not be exerted around trying to either control who gets to serve in that role or to influence the direction of the caucus or the conference during the upcoming two years as they’re figuring out who gets to ascend or to retain these lofty positions.
Green: Certainly. Until recent years, this election for speaker, in particular in the House again, was pretty much pro forma. You had, particularly the Democrats, who had a leadership ladder. So if there was a vacancy, whoever’s next up like the majority leader would become the nominee for speaker, the whip would become majority leader, etc.. So there weren’t a lot of attempts to kind of use this vote as leverage occasionally behind the scenes. There’d be some talk about, well, tip O’Neill, who was speaker in the 1970s and 80s some conservative Democrats would say, we’re not so sure about you, but it was pretty much squelched because the norm was you vote for your nominee on the floor, and there wasn’t really an alternative candidate that wasn’t really the opportunity to try to exert influence these elections.
Now, that started to change after the 1994 election, especially Newt Gingrich. Republicans got the majority and Republicans, after the 1996 election who were unhappy with Gingrich, threatened to oust him altogether in what’s called a what’s colloquially known as a motion to vacate, but is really a privileged, privileged resolution to vacate. That kind of opened a door for these elections, for speaker to no longer be considered automatic and that you have to vote with your party. And when that door was opened, it was an opportunity for factions within each party or just disgruntled individual members to say, well, I’m not necessarily going to vote for our party’s nominee for speaker on the floor unless I get what I want.
So as you mentioned with Pelosi, after the 2018 midterm elections, she was the minority leader. She’d been speaker before. It seemed like that’s going to be the next speaker. But she had a lot of Democrats who had either wanted some leverage or they had promised on the campaign trail not to vote for Pelosi. Because if one thing is true about congressional politics, it’s as soon as you become a leader, you become unpopular. And so there was a series of meetings with Pelosi. Now, what she did do, and yes, some of them were saying, we want term limits, we want changes to the rules, etc. so she basically built a paper that I wrote with Doug Harris at Loyola Maryland, how Pelosi did this. So she met with these individual factions and basically cobbled together a majority that would vote for her on the floor for speaker. And some of it was sort of individual side deals. Okay, I’ll put you on the subcommittee or I’ll give you this special trip or something like that. Nothing really huge about changing the rules. There was talk about getting her out, like suggesting that she just this would be her last term. She would not commit to that, but she sort of implied that she, her, she wouldn’t be there forever. She found a way to kind of commit without committing.
Schuman: Can I press you on that? There have been news reports that they had agreed to change the caucus rules, I think, to increase the threshold to return. But that, at least as far as I can tell, didn’t happen.
Green: Threshold to return, meaning.
Schuman: That the threshold to return as the party leader and thus as the speaker was going to move from 50% to, I think, three quarters, and that there was some sort of a deal to do that. And that didn’t happen, at least that the rules ultimately weren’t changed to do that. But of course, the reporting, it’s nebulous. Was that a thing?
Green: I don’t recall it being a thing. It might have been. I don’t recall that. I certainly don’t remember seeing anything in writing that there was that commitment at all. That might have been an informal commitment that she had made, or a kind of discussion sort of thing. And I wasn’t terribly surprised because that’s a big ask for someone to say, yeah, I want I want you to change the rules of the party or the rules of the House in exchange for my vote, particularly Pelosi, who really kind of had many advantages going into these negotiations, not least of which Democrats really wanted to organize so they could fight Trump and not have a battle over who the next speaker was going to be. But she did make these other side deals and promises. And in fact, what we found in our analysis was those generally weren’t the folks who voted against her for, for speaker, in the end were those who either were just very, very ideologically distant from her. And so they can make a plausible case. Look, I’m going to lose reelection if I’m, you know, my constituents hate you. I can’t vote for you. And the ones who had no business voting against her, but did anyway, those were the ones who got punished.
Punishment is can take many forms. So if you would like to be on a special committee, perhaps your request is denied. So you’re not kicked off a committee necessarily. It’s not this sort of negative punishment, but it’s just failure to get a reward, which we found fascinating because it showed that she was really gauging. Do you have a legitimate reason to vote against me? Political reason. If it’s personal, then we’ll make it personal. So in any event, these races can get personal, obviously. But in any event, once she did that, right. So she did that. But that was mostly off the floor. Those are individual conversations and discussions.
Republicans took a different approach, which was to do this on the floor of the House. So when Kevin McCarthy is running as nominee in the party, first you have the party vote. And Andy Biggs, a member of the House Freedom Caucus, ran against him in the party, got, I think, 31 votes, but McCarthy got the most votes. So again, the norm is everybody gets in line and votes for the winner in the party on the floor. That didn’t happen. You had these dissenters who said, no, I don’t like McCarthy, I’m not going to vote for him.
Now, there’s a great book that came out recently by a guy named John Leganski, who worked for McCarthy. He talks about what was going on behind the scenes. Cannot recommend this book enough. It’s fascinating as they’re trying to figure out what these dissenters want and what they can do to win their votes. But the point is, this was now on the floor of the House. So everyone’s watching on C-Span, seeing that McCarthy can’t get enough votes to become speaker of the House. And this happens over and over and over again.
Now, there were some deals made, probably, as it turned out, the most significant. But we can talk in detail about the decisions, the rules, the deals that were made. But to your point, Daniel, deals were made to change the rules in exchange to get votes for Kevin McCarthy, which would have some pretty profound consequences for how the House operated. So yeah, that can happen and has been happening where you have at least two cases where it’s happened. Someone running for speaker can’t get their party in line, and they’ve got to make deals to win their votes.
Schuman: And there was at least with McCarthy, right? I think it was McCarthy. There were rumors of some other document that existed. That was the deal between the Andy Biggs types and around like the way there were reports of a four, I think, four page thing that no one ever found. No one ever saw that governed how things would operate or what would come up. But of course, no one. I have not run into anyone who’s actually seen it. There were just news reports of this mysterious document.
And I should ask, this is also you’re talking about members, particularly with the Democratic Party waiting in line. But Speaker Pelosi was an outlier there as well, right when she was breaking into leadership. She ran against Steny Hoyer in 2001. She ran against him and was able to knock him off to sort of jump in line. Is that right?
Green: Yeah, I would say jump in line isn’t necessarily the right way to put it, because both of them were fairly either not in the leadership structure or pretty low down. So it wasn’t like one of them was the heir apparent. But yeah, we go back to 2001. So this is so after the 1994 elections, Democrats are in the minority. Dick Gephardt becomes the minority leader. He’s their leader for a number of years. He finally decides to retire his eye on running for the white House, if I recall. And so then you have this race for minority whip not Minority Leader. But the idea here is that whoever actually was Gephardt. Now, I’m going to backtrack. Was Gephardt still the leader at the time?
Schuman: I think Gephardt was leader. I’ve been listening to this WQED series on the speaker that’s coming out, and they’re doing interviews, and it looked like the way Pelosi tells it, that they had all the people in line. They knew exactly what you described. They knew who was going to be the Democrat, all the spots down to like assistant dogcatcher, and everyone just sort of takes one step forward. And Pelosi’s like, well, they’re all white men. And I wasn’t going to wait. So I decided to go and challenge it and sort of insert herself into the process. And then Hoyer is interviewed also, and he’s sort of saying, you know, I had expected or there were expectations that I would be moving to this spot. But of course, at least that’s what it seemed like.
Green: Yeah. So I remember now. So it wasn’t that Gephardt’s leaving triggered this. It was David Bonior’s departure. So he was the whip and he decided he was going to leave the House. And so there was a vacancy for Whip. So that vacancy is the one that both Hoyer and Pelosi were running for. Hoyer had been in leadership before. He had been the caucus chair in the past, but he wasn’t in leadership at the time, so he wasn’t on a leadership ladder, and Pelosi wasn’t either. So it was very much an open race.
So when you have that kind of competition, things can get a little bit more interesting because when you have someone who’s on the leadership ladder, they often have kind of a built-in constituency and often expectation they’re supposed to be in this position. Now, each of them, like Hoyer, might have felt I was entitled, but he wasn’t next in line. That was actually Martin Frost of Texas, who was the caucus chair, was arguably next in line.
But in any event, that race people saw who would win, it would likely take over for Gephardt because people thought he was going to leave at some point and run for the white House. So that gave additional weight to this, to this position. Of course, it’s also important in and of itself, because the whip has got to build majorities or at least keep the party unified. And if you’re in the minority and you can keep the party unified, you put pressure on the majority party. So it’s a very important job. Both had a lot of skills associated with leadership and being whipped. But as Doug Harris and I have written about this race, Pelosi did a number of things that gave her a leg up over Hoyer, not least of which was her tireless campaigning for other members of Congress. Hoyer did it, too, but she raised a ton of money for members. She visited districts all over the place. And I think what is interesting about that race was that it actually lasted three years because people realized.
Schuman: How it lasted. How long?
Green: Three, about three years.
Schuman: Okay.
Green: Three years.
Schuman: That’s a long time.
Green: Before there was a vacancy. So one of the tactics that winning candidates and leadership races use is they get a head start. They want to start building up getting vote commitments. Early on there, once it seemed like David Bonior might leave, then this informal subrosa campaign started so there wasn’t any vacancy. Now we’re running. It was just you just knew these two were running and they would talk to you and say, if there’s a vacancy, I’d love your vote. And some members are like, I don’t. What are you talking about? I mean, come on, there’s no vacancy, right? Like, leave me alone. So. Well, just think about me, right? Just think about me. Keep me in mind, this kind of thing. So this went on for a long time.
And it was also very personal and it created a kind of division within the caucus that lasted for many years. So it was, are you a Pelosi person or are you a Hoyer person? And it would pop up in other races, kind of proxies to other candidates, to two other for another office, but they were each proxies for the Pelosi camp and the Hoyer camp. And so this kind of lingered for a long time in the party that can happen because again, these can be very personal. But then that race also shows how significant these can be because the winner was next in line and because Pelosi won, she’s next in line. And then Gephardt leaves. She becomes the minority leader. And then when Democrats win a majority in 2006, boom. She’s the first woman speaker of the House in history.
Nehls:. You mentioned one of the angles she could try to to play was, look at all this is like a long train of white men. And this is something I think, that the Democrats have really made central to the leadership selection process, at least like in the last decade, trying to balance not just the factional battles. Let’s just dig in a little bit. They’ve got to balance the Blue Dogs and the New Dems and the progressives, but they also have to balance the kind of the demographic broad ten of the party, whereas the Republicans to some degree have to do that. But it really is usually picking between guys named John for their leaders. But yeah, let’s just talk about how the, how this kind of evolved from Pelosi to now it’s like the Democrats have like a gazillion leaders because everybody needs to have a hat. It seems like.
Green: So I’ll just start by saying that it’s a it’s sort of an old tradition in both parties to try to have representation in leadership for different subgroups. Now you go back to the early 1900s. For Democrats, it would be Catholics, Protestants, right? Northerners, Southerners. What we see now is the parties, to some degree, trying to do that, but it also reflects the demographic base of their party. So the Democratic Party just has a more diverse demographic base. And they have embraced this idea of ethnic diversity and gender diversity in their leadership for a long time. So it’s not a surprise when you look at Democratic leadership, you see Latinos, you see women, you see a whole range of folks. And that is, yes, it’s political. It represents different factions in the party, but it is also reflective of the party as a whole.
The Republican party is less ethnically diverse, but it does still strive to some degree to get different interests represented. So it’s interesting. Mike Johnson, current speaker, never officially acknowledged that he was a member of the House Freedom Caucus. And his southern religious conservative. But he in some ways could be seen as representing that subset of the party, not just the Christian religious, the sort of the religious right side, but also the kind of like conservative activist, sometimes performative wing of the party based on his flirting with the Freedom Caucus. He’s not, again, not a member, but sort of that kind of thing. And Emmer, Tom Emmer, who’s the whip? He’s from the North. There are still Republicans from the north. I assume that to some in the party they’re like, okay, he’s like someone that we can deal with. He understands us based on where we’re from as opposed to these other leaders. So yes, you get some similarities if you look at it that way in terms of ethnicity, but it doesn’t mean the Republican Party isn’t also striving for some diversity. Political diversity in their leadership as well.
Schuman: That’s helpful. And within the Democrats, they also have the affinity caucuses, the tri caucus, which is the the Black Caucus, the Hispanic Caucus, the Asian American Pacific Islander, as well as the Democratic women’s group, which are all asserting influence in both parties and in both chambers, but in different ways. They’re also doing this under a set of where you started this under a set of party rules.
And it always struck me as kind of weird, right? The party rules. There’s a party committee and they’ve been meeting. And the Democratic side, I know for a while now about what the party rules will be, but the person who’s running this is chosen by the party leader, who is also the speaker or the minority leader, and they’re setting the terms of the fight over who will be able to run. And I guess a question I wanted to ask of you is like, how fair are the rules, the party rules in terms of one, your ability to move up if ascending into leadership is in fact moving up. Some would say that it’s the other direction, but, but also how fair are the rules in terms of or equitable, maybe in terms of having party members being able to set party priorities versus those priorities sort of coming down from the top? I’d be sorry, Matt. No, no easy questions today and no easy questions and bad jokes. But this is where we are. So I’d love your thoughts on that.
Green: That’s a great question. So first of all, I’ll just say that fairness is in the eye of the beholder. Everyone’s got their views of what is most fair. And there’s almost always going to be trade offs. So for example, if one thinks that parties should be more open in the decision making process and let rank and file have more of a say. That can lead to gridlock. It can lead to. It can make things a lot less efficient. It can actually exacerbate divisions within a party.
There’s this great apocryphal, apocryphal story about Sam Rayburn, who was speaker of the House and head of the Democrats from the 1940s to the 1960s. And John Nance Garner, who had been the vice president under FDR, the first vice president, told Rayburn, look, I know you got a lot of divisions in your party. Just do what we did in the 19 tens. Just have one big caucus meeting where you hash everything out, right? That’s fair. It’s open. It’s an open rule. You can amend things all you want. And Rayburn said, you’re insane. I’ve got Adam Clayton Powell, African American from Harlem in my party, and I’ve got these virulent racist Southerners in my party. I put them in a room together. They’re going to kill each other. Right? So we just can’t do that. So there’s always going to be trade offs.
I think one way to answer this is to think about the way that at least the Democratic Party in the House kind of changed its rules over time and centralized power, where they moved from the Rayburn model, which was yeah, he was a strong speaker. But you defer a lot to Southerners. You let the committees have a big say to this rise of the liberal wing of the party over time. And these folks on the left are saying, well, these southern conservatives are running the show. That’s not fair. We should make it more open. But someone still has to make decisions. So here’s the thing. The speaker will give the speaker more power. Because as Dick Bolling, who is a prominent Democrat at the time, said, the speaker is more accountable. At least the party can always, by majority, just vote them out. So the idea was centralizing power is a way to actually empower the collective like more members. But it’s not like leaders sit around passively and saying, well, what should I do next? Or what does the party want? They have their own Preferences, not least of which to be a leader and to stay in leadership. And what leaders in both parties, especially in the House, have done, is they’ve figured out ways to maintain that overall structure that the party decides.
But then the individual decisions that are made often are left to the speaker. So, for example, who’s going to be chairing a committee? We don’t want the speaker to make that decision entirely. We should have a committee that decides it. Yeah, but who gets to be on that committee? The people the speaker wants. Right. Either by appointment or by some weighted vote system, which the House Republicans use. So effectively, the speaker is setting sort of determining leadership. And as you say, these are some of the folks who then make decisions that affect the power of individual members. In the end, if a majority of either party says, we just disagree with this, they can vote to change the rules of their party. And of course, the majority of the House could vote to change the rules of the House.
But this is where I push back from theorists who say like, well, they could just do it. So it’s democratic. But you know what that takes to do that, right? Like you’ve got to have a majority saying, you know what, Pelosi, we’re not scared of you. We’re going to do this. Or to Mike Johnson. Well, we’re not scared of causing total chaos. We’re going to do this. That’s a big, big step to take. And so in practice, I do think leaders have a lot of say, sorry.
Schuman: I want you to know. No, I want you to play that out more. So like for our last podcast, Chris had me do a dramatic reading of the people who are on the Democratic Policy and Steering committee for which has rules that nobody has ever seen and I’m not sure exist to your knowledge. Do they exist?
Green: I don’t know, the party rules that I have access to are the ones you guys find and post on the internet.
Schuman: So the Steering and policy committee, when you talk about it, its composition are the speaker and the majority, the or the majority leader, majority, minority leader, minority whip, whatever. Two thirds of them. Are there people and the rest are like these regional folks. Party leadership controls who gets to be recommended. But in effect, control who gets to be on the committees then for select committees. The speaker currently has the power to name and remove from that as. And we’re like pulling up the drawbridge. So like more and more efforts to make motions to vacate, which aren’t the efforts to defend the speaker. There are efforts to make it harder and harder as well. So it feels like the party leaders are able to put a wall around efforts to affect his or her power. And I just wonder that’s what it looks like from where I sit. Is that an accurate description? So like overthrowing the current system, it’s not like you just get a bunch of people together and like, yeah, we’re going to get someone else. Like, it’s, it’s, it seems like it’s much harder than that. Could you talk about what that involves? And is it like even, you know. Is it really possible to do. How hard is it to do? I just welcome your thoughts there.
Green: Sure. Well, it’s true actually, that leaders in both parties have certainly found ways to make it harder to be especially removed on the House floor. Now, remember, this is a tricky situation because everybody votes. So you can have oh, I don’t know. Speaking hypothetically, a rogue member from Florida and four of his friends. But with all the Democrats and remove a speaker that a majority, a supermajority of Republicans wanted. So there’s that tension on the House floor between the majority of a party and a majority of the chamber. So in some ways, it’s not surprising that party leaders are making that harder because they can appeal to their party and say, don’t let a few rogue members basically let the other party have power. Like, okay, fine.
What’s interesting is, though, some of these other changes that have occurred, I think, over a longer period of time to effectively empower party leaders well beyond the way they were half a century ago. And again, to do that, in theory, you just need a majority. If it’s a party rule, you just need a majority of the party. But when you come into an existing institutional regime, like a new member of Congress and you’re like, these are the rules. This is the leader, right? We’ll just paraphrase what Sam Rayburn used to say to get along, go along, to go out and just basically say, we’re going to we’re going to weaken you as a leader in the party is very difficult.
And it’s interesting to me that the Freedom Caucus has done more, its members have done more to try to change that than any other group. I can think of a few members on the Democratic side. Pelosi. Fine. But actually, when John Boehner, the speaker of the House, resigned in October 2015, there was a document you may be familiar with that said, here are reforms that we want, and we want the next speaker to agree to them or they don’t get our vote. And that means not just the party, but the floor. Nothing came of it, as far as I can tell, which to me is a lost opportunity, less because I think they were good, but more because I’m just fascinated. That would have been so interesting, right? It would have been like Speaker cannon kind of again, when he was overthrown, he was weakened in 1910 like, wow.
And so the best that, you know, the closest we’ve seen is that race for speaker under Kevin McCarthy, where he agreed to put some dissenting members on the Rules Committee which determines the special rules under which bills come to the floor. And he agreed to make it so only one member could remove and make a privileged resolution to vacate the chair. I didn’t think that privileged resolution rule would make a difference. I was totally wrong. That’s how McCarthy got kicked out. But it didn’t. That rule change didn’t really lead to the kind of broader democratization of the process that a lot of reformers call for.
Actually, interestingly, the appointment of dissenters on the Rules Committee did have an effect, which not many people realize, which is that the number of amendments allowed to bills that were very conservative and supported by Freedom Caucus members went way, way up. So it empowered that faction of the party. But they generally lost. And in fact, the percent of votes on the House floor on anything, bills or amendments in which a majority voted for it, but it still failed, called disappointment votes went way up because all they were doing was saying, we want the whole House to vote on our ideas. But like all Democrats and a handful of moderate Republicans are like, we hate that idea. So they just kept losing. So maybe that was a good thing because it opened up the process. But then as soon as McCarthy left and Johnson came in, or pretty much or not long afterwards, he got some of those folks off. Tom Massie left, right. And then it was back to the way it was before.
So to me, if you want to fundamentally change the way the House operates, you’ve got to think first. Are you talking about your party and party rules, or are you talking about the whole house, number one and number two, are we talking durable rules, changes making, requiring more open rules, or are we just talking about change in personnel? And I think the latter is not durable. And it’s not really, in the end going to change things the way the House operates in a really fundamental way.
Nehls: I was going to ask you if people had studied the legislative outcomes of the centralization of power, and that’s not anticipating you were going to get into the Freedom Caucus change. That was really interesting. But have other people looked at in the political science literature, the effect of we talk a lot about opening up the floor to more debate and legislative processes being more open as an organization, but I’m curious if people have been able to figure out what the impact of a lockdown system has been in terms of policy.
Green: In terms of policy is a good one. I’m not sure how many have looked at that. I know a number of scholars have looked at just the way the House operates, and compared it to changes in the distribution of power in the chamber. A lot of that is correlative. It’s hard to draw a causal link, but it’s certainly intriguing, like what we’re seeing, right?
As you probably know, we’re seeing very, very few open rules, almost none really. So everything is now structured. It limits the debate time and amendments that can be offered more closed rules where you can’t do anything, sometimes more, depending on how tricky it is to pass those rules. More bills pass under suspension. So it’s just a two thirds vote, but it’s like 40 minutes debate, no amendments. And we’re also seeing, and I think this is part of the leadership is partly to blame for this. Fewer bills passing, but they’re longer. So the same amount of legislating might be happening. But the opportunities to debate and discuss individual legislative proposals is diminishing because you get this bill with like 15 things in it. So you got this Christmas tree and it’s like am I gonna vote no? Because I don’t like that one. That one decoration, right. Or I’d love to debate maybe taking the tinsel off, but I can’t do that because I’m not allowed to. It’s just the one big package to continue this metaphor.
And I do want to say this though, again, the cause is key. And it’s not always clear what the cause is, because we can certainly blame leaders, but we also have to consider the extent to which members themselves don’t want to debate. They don’t want these votes. They’re afraid of voting too much. They’re afraid it’s going to hurt them in their next election. They like the Tuesday to Thursday schedule, where they come in Tuesday and leave Thursday. And so it’s possible there’s members saying, please don’t make me have open rules there. I do remember talking to a member of Congress about open rules on appropriations bills, and he was on the Appropriations Committee and he’s like, oh, they’re so annoying. I’m like, But isn’t that. Which is not the job. Right. Let people debate and discuss. So if the members are telling their leaders we like this system, then changing who the leader is isn’t going to change the system.
Schuman: Yeah. I think they like openness to the extent that it’s open to them and not open to anyone else. Right. If you’re on the committee and you get to fix it in the committee, then you don’t want it to be on the floor. If in your leadership, you want it open to you in leadership, but you don’t want anyone else having a say, you want your voice to be heard, but nobody else’s.
Green: Yeah. And I’ll just add, because I’ve been reading recently about reading old literature for this project I’m doing in the old, old days, you would have a lot more open rules before the 70s, but you had two things. One, the rules on amendments were secret. So yeah, sure, we’ll let you have a debate and vote, but you’re not going to be able to do credit claiming on it. And also, I might be able to persuade you to vote against your constituency. And the second is that committee chairs had a lot of informal influence. So the thing was, okay. My bill will come. I’m a chair. My bill will come to the floor. Open rule. But none of you better vote for any amendments or if you know what’s good for you. So in some ways, it wasn’t that much more open back then, but at least you could at least offer an amendment. You could have a vote. And I don’t know if committee chairs just don’t want to do that. If they’re lazy, they don’t have the influence to keep people from doing it.
But to your point, Daniel, it’s like, okay, open as long as I get my say and oh, that’s yeah, I would be really curious to see what a rule of a legislature would be that said, open rules, but only Democrats can offer amendments or something like that. It’s not a rule of a chamber, right. That’s just partisanship.
Schuman: It’s kind of what you described with the Freedom Caucus, with having a couple members on the Rules Committee where they, you know, they got to have votes on their thing, but it doesn’t mean that they won more often. They just got to force people to take a position.
I wanted to flip back to the Senate for a second, although just before we did so to the book that you had referenced by Lagansky. It’s called Glory, Grief in the Gavel: An Insider Guide to Running for Speaker of the House. Just in case folks who are listening might want to go out and look for it.
And also, one other thing I was thinking about just in the context of the House, particularly with the Democrats, is when you realize that you can’t move up, you see a lot of exit as well. So if Gephardt or Pelosi or whoever looks like they’re going to be there for a long time, and you’re and you have to start this long chain to move all the way up, there comes a certain point. You’re thinking, well, maybe I’d be better off as governor or as mayor or as anything else.
The Senate seems different, right? The Democrats haven’t amended their caucus rules. I mean, they made one change with respect to subcommittee chairs, but they haven’t done it in quite a while. And of course, the Senate rules itself don’t really change except for John Fetterman’s attire. They changed the rules by voting the interpretations of the rules. So it seems that their mechanisms are very different from the house. And we’re about to see on the Democratic side, major turnover in leadership with Senator Durbin is not coming back. Number two, Senator Klobuchar is not coming back. Senator Schumer, of course, is not up for reelection this time around. But there is some pressure on him, and there are questions about what will be happening to him in two years. And Schatz looks like he’s moving. So it looks like long periods of stasis and not a lot of obvious changes in the chamber or party rules as compared to the House, which also seems fairly static. But at least people get pushed out slightly faster. I wonder, what do you think about the Senate in the context of the operations of the party?
Green: So I do think I don’t have data to support this. So I’d have to look at it, but my sense is that there’s more stasis in Senate leadership or more stability than in House leadership. And in some ways that makes sense because first of all, senators are serving six years. So if you voted for someone your first year in the Senate, presumably you’re going to support them five years later. And second of all, there’s fewer senators. Now, the old saying is that every senator wants to be a president, right? So there’s a lot of ambition in that chamber. But at the same time, there are just fewer folks like you just have a smaller pool of potential candidates. And there have been periods in history where there’s been some turmoil, some significant turnover. There was probably most famously, Ted Kennedy ran in the late 60s for whip. So he ran for whip and got elected in 1969, kicked out the incumbent, Russell Long. But then he got booted two years later by Senator Robert Byrd as whip. So those things do happen sometimes. But yeah, you tend to see more stability.
But at the same, you know, I don’t want to, but at the same time, there is this thing that’s happening in the Democratic Party in both chambers, this kind of folks who are there and they’re just there forever. You had the Pelosi, Hoyer, Clyburn trifecta for a long time. And frankly, Durbin, how long has he been whip? He’s been whip since 2005. Yeah. He said 20 years as whip. There is some something that might be going on in both parties where folks are there and they just sort of establish themselves.
Schuman: And he’s interesting because he got, he got passed over too.
Green: Right. Well, yeah, he was thinking about possibly when Harry Reid left Yep. Durbin was next in line, but Schumer ended up being elected. And even weirder, Durbin and Schumer are old friends. They used to be roommates when they were both House members. They had this crazy house on the Hill. So again, these things get really personal.
But yeah, I’ll just say this, that part of being in leadership House or Senate, Republican or Democrat, is protecting yourself from challenges from folks who have an eye on your job. One of the really interesting observations in that book by Lagansky is that whole battle for speaker, for McCarthy. He talks a little bit about other Republicans who started to smell blood when he didn’t win the first round, and so he had to keep their eye on Emmer. They had to keep their eye on other leaders. Be like, what are they up to? And he points out the cover of the book, which is when he finally gets chosen speaker. Okay. And everyone’s all the Republicans are applauding like, oh my God, this took forever. We’re so glad we’re done standing right next to McCarthy. Mike Johnson right. And he writes in the book, like, look at the cover of the book. It’s not an accident that Mike Johnson was just sort of hanging. He was hanging out, just kind of like listening in and seeing what we were up to. He clearly had his eye on the speakership, if not this time, then when the opportunity arose, which is what happened. So when members stay in office for a long time in Congress, it’s often not just because they’re popular, but also because they’re making sure that they know if anyone is unhappy, that they’re talking to them and dealing with them.
Schuman: Yeah, it’s reallys really interesting. I’m looking, I pull up the cover of the book now and you and as he’s got like McCarthy is on the left, and then Mike Johnson is just kind of like, yay, I’m waiting for you. You hear the jaws music in the background or something. Just I don’t know who wrote the book. Like, why not me? Right? Like all the members of thinking, why not me? It could be me.
Green: Book would be too long to read, Daniel.
Schuman: Well, like most, most politicians’ autobiographies would certainly not worth reading either. It seems that it can be hard to follow the machinations, both the machinations with respect to the the factional, like the party rules. And then who’s trying to ascend and who there were. There was Rosa DeLauro and was it Nita Lowey? I forget, like when they were running for appropriations chair and like it was a one vote difference. And that was a thing for like 20 something years. There are all these things that seem to happen, but it’s those that shape the policy outcomes and the political outcomes. But they’re really hard to see right from the outside. The reporting generally isn’t on that. You know, I long thought that if you could look at the way that members voted when there are these divisions inside the party, that would be one of the best ways to actually understand. Factions, not factions from ideological or affinity, but the old school, like the mafia, right? You’re this is my person, right? They did me a favor. I’m going to do them a favor. This patronage system that also seems to exist to some extent that we really can’t talk about very well at all. But like I’m a Hoyer person or I’m a Pelosi person, and it goes back to 2000, and here we are in 2026, and Pelosi is endorsing a different person than Hoyer wants to succeed him in Maryland because of this, which, hell, I mean, it may go back to when they were interns together in in the 14th century.
Nehls: Then they seed their staff fall over into other offices. So it’s almost permanent. Right?
Schuman: Yeah. And I can you is there any visibility at all into this what looks like an old school patron client kind of member relationship. Like how would one even observe that or try to understand the way that that works? Or is it just too hard?
Green: Well, it is hard. And I don’t want to overstate the Pelosi Hoyer example, because that was very much a case of two very different politicians and their personalities, and it got personal. And so when that happens, you can see it kind of spread throughout the caucus or through the party. Not all races go that way, but it’s hard to know. Chicken or egg, is it that these leadership races create these things, these differences or these subgroups or factions or those were already there and they come to the fore in these leadership races? One of the things to note here is that these leadership elections are by secret ballot. So you don’t know within the party how folks are voting.
Now, Doug and I have analyzed these races in our book about leadership races in the House. And we had to go back because the stuff you have to wait till it’s been. It’s in archives, but you can see how members promised to vote for each candidate. And if you’ve got more than one whip count, you can cross check it to see if they’re being quote unquote honest. And you do find that while ideology is a part of it, so there’s a more liberal candidate, more moderate or more conservative, and some people sort of glom on that candidate because of shared preferences.
Other stuff can matter as well. So if we’re going to talk about groups that matter, at least in the old days in the House, state delegations were really important. So large delegations or largish ones like the Illinois delegation, Democrats, like we’re voting together. That’s what we do, right? We stick together. Maybe they’re taking orders from a boss at the state or local level back then. But that kind of thing comes out in these leadership races. So what I find so fascinating about them is I don’t think about it like, like the mafia. I think about it more like when you have a large group of people, even if they all say we’re on the same team. They don’t all agree on everything. There’s other stuff that matters to some people. It’s friendships, it’s identity. It’s where they’re from. And then in these leadership races, that’s where it can come to the fore and say, yeah, I know you and I agree on this bill, but I’m from Illinois. Okay. You’re from Louisiana. Sorry. But yeah, just different.
Schuman: Yeah. I think the sociology of that is interesting and sometimes overlooked, both in terms of like, committees are too big, the chamber is too big for members to get to know each other. And that’s not a function of the members not wanting to. It’s just a function that it’s larger than. There’s a number of relationships that a human can normally maintain, and it’s larger than that. Hoyer talks about when Pelosi and he were competing, that Pelosi was from California, and California has a lot of members, and she had been the party chair, I believe, and like she raised crazy amounts of money because that was what she did in the 1980s. She was a huge fundraiser. And Hoyer says, I’m from Maryland, and we’re just not that big a place. And I do wonder about, you know, New York has a big delegation and that supports Jeffries, in part because it’s such a large. And the financial district is there, which is another power source.
When LBJ was powerful on the rise, he was taking. He was getting money from what became, I think, Halliburton. Right, and handing out checks. And that helped his rise to power. And I just wanted to clean up a mistake that I made. Rosa DeLauro lost the race for the assistant to the Democratic leader in 2002 by one vote when she was defeated by Bob Menendez. That’s what I was thinking of. And that was one of those interesting sort of divisive things that happened a little bit as well, where you see folks reaching in. And there was a similar story of what Pelosi did to Dingell. Right.
Green: So again, we’re going to go back to Pelosi.
Schuman: I’m sorry. Keep going back to her.
Green: It’s fine. But remember Pelosi got her start working helping out, volunteering in her dad’s political machine in Baltimore. So a lot of when we talk about Pelosi and a lot of people underestimate her because they’re like, oh, she’s a woman. She’s from California. People were saying she wasn’t bright and all this kind of stuff. And man, she just showed time and again, she understood politics from that perspective. You build coalitions. You are not afraid to signal to people when they’ve displeased you. You don’t have to do something violent, but you make it clear you’ve displeased me. Right?
So Dingell is a classic example. She and Dingell were always butting heads because they’re just different, right? He was conservative, particularly on environmental stuff. He’s from Michigan. She’s from California. She’s more liberal. And Dingell also has a similar approach to politics. There’s stories about the way Dingell treated people on his committee who displeased him, Pelosi as her, as she’s rising in power, I think she sees Dingell as a potential problem. So what does she do? What one of the first things she did is when they redrew the districts in Michigan, and he was redrawn into a district with a more junior member, a woman in the Democratic Party, Pelosi gave a contribution to his opponent, not to Dingell. And everyone’s like, what are you doing? You’re the leader of the party. You’re not supposed to take sides. And she was like, oh, no, no, no, it’s just a standard thing. She’s a friend. I did it before they redistricted. Yeah. Everyone’s like, no, that’s not what’s happening here. You are signaling to Dingell you are displeased with him. Of course, Dingell didn’t care because he wasn’t intimidated.
But finally, Dingell was challenged in the party for the chairmanship or the committee Leadership of Commerce by Henry Waxman. And as an indication of just how powerful Pelosi’s reputation was, everyone assumed that she had directed it, that it was personal against Dingle. She denied it. She said I have absolutely nothing to do with this. Maybe not. Who knows? Waxman won and Dingell was ousted.
So that kind of politics, frankly, you just don’t see that often in Congress because not many lawmakers are like that. There have been a handful that have been that way. I don’t think Jeffries is that way. He seems to be more of a – in another interview, said he’s more of a he’s more of a thermometer than a thermostat is a thermostat. I’m going to change the temperature. This is what I want. Jeffries at this stage is more of a thermometer. What does the party want? Nothing wrong with either of them. But if you’re more of the thermometer, you’re not going to do the kinds of things that Pelosi did because they’re risky. They make people upset.
Schuman: So the last question, just because we’ve been you’ve been very generous with your time and we’ve been unfair in abusing it. So looking forward over the next three months, Sorry, it’s a big question, but looking over the next three months, there’s going to be the factional fights that are going to play out in the two chambers and the two parties. The Senate, of course, is going to be very interesting if it changes, because the math there will be interesting. But on the House side, we’re seeing members getting educated about the power that they possess, which is not something that they really seem to have been all that aware of over the last six, eight, ten years. And there’s more conversations about party rules and chamber rules and factions than I’ve seen in a very long time. I was going to ask, what do you see as happening? But that’s not that’s probably not the question I want us to ask, maybe, what do you think should be happening? If you want to have a healthy house, say, what should the members be doing so that Congress can restore some of the power that it seems to have acceded to the executive branch or elsewhere?
Green: Well. There’s a laundry list of reforms that people have circulated, and. And I think they’re all worth looking at. But I think the two things just off the top of my head that need to be addressed are internal congressional capacity. So what can Congress do to improve what it does? So it works better.
And then the second is standing up for itself against not just the executive, but also the judicial branch. So education about what members can do internally also has to include education about what Congress can do. I give talks where I talk about all the things article one, section eight says that Congress can do, and people are like, but they’re not doing any of those things. I said, I know they need to understand those two things, but I think they both go hand in hand.
So there’s a partisan element, obviously, to both of these. So Democrats are like, yeah, we have a majority. We want to challenge Trump. We want to take him on. We want to impeach him. We want to remove him. I would implore Democrats, if they have a majority in the House and especially in the Senate, think longer term here. Think about what it is that Congress is not getting done because of the way it works. And we can start with the appropriations process, which most people agree is broken beyond belief. How do you fix that? And then number two, and related on the same, it’s like a separate track, but parallel is how does Congress figure out a way to establish itself as a more powerful branch? Frankly, I think the founders wanted it to be the most powerful. What is it? Can it be done legally? What can it do politically? So I’m not actually giving any specific answers to your question because there’s a lot of reforms, but I would want the majority party, frankly, either party to be thinking about those two things. And think longer term for the sake of Congress and for the Republic.
Nehls: That’s a great place to end. Thanks so much for taking the time here. Really appreciate it.
Green: Thank you for having us, having me. It’s been a lot of fun.
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