Congressional Seniority 2: The Committees

As I mentioned in this post, the job of chairing a congressional committee is earned by seniority. Usually, the most senior committee member from the majority party will chair each committee, unless he or she already chairs another committee.

It is often said that the most prestigious title on Capitol Hill is not Speaker or Majority Leader, but Chairman. There's an old saying that Congress in session is Congress on display, but Congress in committee is Congress at work.

For the most part, proposed new laws need approval by the relevant committees of the House and Senate, before they can even be considered on the floor of either house. The committee chairmen largely control the agenda of their committees. That power is not absolute, but it ensures that a committee chair is the most influential member in either house of Congress, regarding issues within his or her committee's bailiwick.

But in the House there has been some shifting back and forth between the speaker and the committee chairs, as to who controls legislative activity. Those shifts have been a function both of rule changes, and the personalities of various speakers.

Congressman Joe Cannon, Republican of Illinois, who was speaker from 1903 to 1911, was perhaps the most powerful speaker in history. One of his most significant sources of power was the right to appoint committee chairmen. A rule change at the end of Cannon's tenure as speaker did away with that power. Seniority then became the deciding factor.

During periods of Democratic control, including their nearly-unbroken streak from 1931 to 1995, that system favored congressmen from the southeastern states. For most of the 20th century, they faced no effective Republican opposition. And serious primary-election challenges to incumbents are few and far between. Therefore, southern Democrats racked up more seniority than those from other regions, and came to control a disproportionate number of committees.

But by 1975, the Republican Party had made gains in the south, and the ranks of northern Democrats had been swelled by their landslide in the 1974 post-Watergate midterm election. Those developments weakened the power of southern Democrats, and paved the way toward a revolt against the seniority system. At the start of the 1975-6 Congress, the House Democratic Caucus ousted three committee chairmen, and replaced them with members who had less seniority.

Seniority has remained a strong factor in the meantime, but not as absolute as it was before 1975.

Then, in 1995, another change came about. After Republicans won a House majority in the 1994 midterm elections, they instituted a six-year term limit on committee chairmen. The Democrats followed suit when they regained control of the House in 2007. Seniority still matters, but House members will not be able to keep control of committees indefinitely, just because their constituents keep sending them back to Washington.

To be continued, including a discussion of Senate seniority.