HOW THE REPUBLICAN YEAR BEGINS
For new members in the House of Representatives, normally the real work year begins right after the November elections. Even though officially the term begins with being sworn in after the New Year, in real life it begins long before. Long before the January ceremonies offices are assigned, staff’s interviewed and hired, committee memberships are awarded.
Early success in the House is really determined by committee assignments because that is where most work is really done. Those assignments will depend to some degree on a new member’s educational and professional back ground before they decided to move to the marble halls of Washington. For instance, owning an accounting firm would make one of the tax committees a natural. Appointment may also be influenced by the new member’s margin of victory. It’s complicated.
Usually a member already in the House from the new member’s state and party will act as a kind of guide and advocate (Congress is full of lawyers and it’s natural for them to think like lawyers.). Reelection after two years will, in part, depend on the new member’s success in landing on appropriate committees. In normal years those things will all be settled well before the New Year begins.
Committee assignments will be made for every member. Assignments rarely will be undone. Think about the famous (or infamous) Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican from northern Georgia. She was the QAnon fan who talked about Jewish Space Lasers setting the forest fires is California. She was so bizarre that the Democratic majority removed her from all her committee assignments. That meant that she wandered the Capitol wasteland with nothing official to do. She did have time to set about collecting large amounts of campaign money from her devoted followers and was easily reelected. The Republics, who after this last election, have a plurality of only five, need her vote. Still for her, having no committee assignments could not have been much fun!
Once the new House member knows what committees they are on (usually one major committee and a couple of minor ones), they still have to hire a staff. The staff that they hire will be determined partly by their committee assignments so the committee appointments have to come first. Each member will get about a million dollars each year to hire staff. There will be about a dozen in the Washington office and perhaps six more back in the member’s district.
All that should be handled early so that the majority party can be ready to hit the ground running, just after the New Year. Not this year! Committee chairmen could not be chosen, committee memberships could not be finalized, and offices could not really be organized, because those things have to begin after the speaker is chosen. The far right rebels among the Republican majority refused to allow one to be chosen!
The speaker is chosen by the vote of the 434 (one vacancy) members of the whole House. Republican Kevin McCarthy desperately wanted to be speaker but the very right-wing Freedom Caucus members were holding their vote for blackmail. That meant that the Democrat’s new replacement for Nancy Pelosi, Hakeem Jeffries, came in second through fifteen long ballots (he kept getting 212 votes but needed 218 to win). On the fifteenth ballot the right wing members had extracted enough promises from McCarthy to let him win.
Kevin McCarthy will have achieved what used to be called a Pyrric victory (He won but was damaged so much that he really lost.). He does get to hold the gavel but the twenty or so people who make up Freedom Caucus (including the above mentioned Marjorie Taylor Greene) will really be in a position to be in control unless the more moderate Republicans cooperate with Democrats to defeat them. Since Trump’s 2016 election, courage among moderate Republicans has thus far failed to surface,
So, everything is starting late. Normally a House majority would be formulating a legislative agenda. They would be deciding what bills it would be important for them to pass. They would also be beginning the groundwork for a new budget for each of the departments and agencies to go into effect at the beginning of the next fiscal year which begins on October first.
This year they face a more immediate crisis. Janet Yellen, the Secretary of the Treasury, has just announced that the government’s legal debt limit will be reached on January 19th. The government will have spent up to the limit and Congress will need to authorize an increase in order to repay moneys already spent. This gives the Freedom Caucus the opportunity to attempt to blackmail the government into the kinds of budget cuts it desires in order to avoid a catastrophic default.
In the newly organized House there will be no legislative agenda. The Republicans who blackmailed the speaker don’t want anything really. They do want to hold hearings in order to get revenge for Donald Trump’s two impeachments. They want to embarrass Joe Biden by holding hearings to investigate his son Hunter Biden who isn’t even in the government. For the members of the Freedom Caucus, that is supposed to be revenge for Donald Trump’s two impeachment trials. They are also going to try to reverse the impeachments.
Some of these Caucus efforts may not matter. With a Democratic president in the White House, and a slight Democratic majority in the Senate much of what they do will simply be to excite the folks back home and to keep campaign contributions coming in.
It promises to be an interesting year!
H.J. Rishel 1/11/2013
