The Congressional Seniority System

The seniority system governs much of what goes on in Congress. The most important aspect of that is the appointment of committee chairmen. The custom of allocating chairmanships according to seniority largely survives, but the rules have been changed a bit in recent decades.

However, seniority has never been as important in choosing party leaders, such as the speaker, majority and minority leaders and whips, etc. As I wrote here, we'll probably never see a repeat of what happened to Henry Clay, who was elected speaker of the House during his first term in that body. Those who are elected to the top leadership jobs in Congress are typically veteran members. But Speaker Nancy Pelosi, although she's been in the House for more than 21 years, is only number 32 in seniority among House Democrats in the 2007-8 Congress.

But, for some reason, both parties apply a strict seniority rule in choosing one leader: the president pro tempore of the Senate. That's probably because it's seen as a largely honorary position. It's currently held by Senator Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia. Byrd has been in the Senate since 1959, having by now served longer than any other senator in history, and is 91 years old.

Neither the vice president (as ex-officio president of the Senate) nor the president pro tempore, does much of the work of presiding over the Senate. That task is typically delegated on a day-to-day basis to junior senators from the majority party. As I wrote here, the precedent was set in the First Congress in 1789-90 that the president of the Senate would exercise little real power over that body.

But the kicker is that the president pro tempore is number three in the line of succession to the presidency. Perhaps that ought to give senators second thoughts about putting in that position a man who has acknowledged that he's no longer fit enough even to run a congressional committee.

I'll have more to say about congressional seniority in some future posts.