Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), also known from the abbreviated name AOC, recently shared a story via her Instagram a few days ago about how seniority was key to attaining leadership power in the House of Representatives, especially if one were to eye on taking the chair of a committee seat. She began her rundown by stating, “A major factor in this is that the Dem Party determines many leadership positions (ex. Committee chairs) almost purely by seniority. The positions that aren’t determined by seniority often still need to appeal to those that are. That means if you are on a committee and want to chair it, you basically have to wait until almost everyone before you resigns or leaves office. That often takes decades. So people wait. And wait. And wait. Right off the bat that’s how 20 leadership positions are decided.”
In the months before Democrats flipped the House in the midterms in 2018, gun-control activist David Hogg explicitly noted to writer Lisa Miller in an article that year, “The reason Republicans are successful right now is because they’re empowering young people. Older Democrats just won’t move the f--- off the plate and let us take control. Nancy Pelosi is old.” Hogg’s statement still holds value today a few years later, for many of the senior members of the House in the Democratic party have kept their leadership seats. Meanwhile Republicans have geared up support amongst ten women candidates running for Congress, via support from House Republican Chairwoman Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) by her recent political action committee, known as EPAC.
Ella Nilsen, who currently works for CNN as a climate reporter, wrote in a piece for Vox back in December 2018 about Pelosi possibly being open to supporting term limits for committee chairs. At the time Nilsen detailed how Pelosi was open to the conversation, adding she was sympathetic towards concerns made by incoming freshmen, for she tried that same tactic in 2007 when she became Speaker, unfortunately at the time, “the caucus did not support that.” Over a decade later, the matter on term limits for committee chairs was still, “a matter before the caucus,” said Pelosi.
Nilsen would go on to say imposing such term limits on committee chairs would draw backlash from key bases such as the Congressional Black Caucus and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Those in this realm support the seniority-based method because they believe it, “helps elevate minority representatives to positions of power.” Having no term limits also provide Democratic lawmakers who hold safe districts, longer tenure on committee seats of which they serve. Hence why those not in favor of such term limits tend to be in the upper echelon of congressional party power.
The communication-savvy lawmaker representing Bronx and Queens further issued in her social media story, “This incentivizes people to stay for very very long periods of time if they want to lead/significantly influence their committee. It also means that now, those who DID wait and are in leadership (or next in line for it) are incentivized to protect the automatic seniority system as much as possible because of their sunk time cost. This is one of many, many rules and norms that party leadership maintains that makes it much harder on members who are younger, not independently wealthy, or are raising a family.”
This was all but a similar issue less than a hundred years ago faced by newcomer Lyndon Baines Johnson, elected for the 10th congressional district of Texas after winning a special election in 1937, at the age of 29. At the time he developed strong relations with President Roosevelt, whereby in 1940 Johnson was appointed by the president to serve on the House Committee on Naval Affairs. Even as a sitting member on the committee, there was very little for Johnson to do, limited to speaking only once during a session. Much of the business during committee sessions were decided by a Georgian democrat named Carl Vinson, where he too was elected into Congress at a young age, the age of 30 to be exact, but that was in 1914.
One does not have to look too far into seeing how up-and-coming lawmakers wanted to change the party’s status-quo in Congress. As thoroughly researched in my previous publication about Newt Gingrich, he was the leader that made drastic changes to his party, even when many may have not supported him in the beginning. Part of his Contract for America plan was a call for terms limits for committee chairs. Even though House Republicans imposed a three-term limit in 1992 for their party, they would add such a measure to the full House rules once they gained majority power at the start of the 104th Congress in 1995.
Molly Reynolds wrote in her November 2017 piece for Brookings Institute, claiming that term limits for committee chairs may have been causing an increase amongst Republican lawmakers calling it quits, retiring from office. In the first chart, from the 96th (1979-81) through the 105th Congress (1997-99), there was an average of 8.6% of committee chairs retiring. After the 106th (2001-03) through 115th Congress (2017-2019*) there was an increase up towards 12.3% of chairs retiring.
While in the second chart, showing the 106th through the 115th, “Of the 55 Republicans that have been term-limited out of committee chair or ranking member positions, 19 have chosen to retire when their leadership posts were expiring. In 2000, when the first class of Republican chairs affecting [sic] by the limits were running for re-election, one-third departed. In more recent years (2014, 2016, and 2018*), however, that number has been higher, topping 40 percent.”
Reynolds used data from political scientists Alan Wiseman, and Craig Volden stating between 1974 through 2014, both Democrats and Republicans scored at about equal in their effectiveness, but noticed Democrats would have their effectiveness rise at a greater rate when serving a fourth term or longer. This depicted Republican chairs having less of an advantage on their means to be effective in their time serving as chair compared to those across the aisle. However, it was noted by Reynolds that the authors viewed, “the average effectiveness of chairs declined over time. The average chair in the 113th (2013-2014) was roughly half as effective [as] the average chair in the 93rd Congress (1973-1974).”
Just because Republicans had less of an effect compared to their Democratic colleagues with the gavel, Republican committee chairs still held effectiveness towards members of their own party who have yet to hold such a high position, also known as rank-and-file. Reynolds described, “Since the 104th Congress, roughly two-thirds of Republican committee chairs have scored higher than their average fellow Republican who has served the same number of terms.”
In the last paragraph of her piece, she brought up the so called “double whammy” of term limits for committee chairs, noting such a position has not been as effective as it used to be in decades past, hence more has been drawn away from the chairperson on an individual basis, and more towards by going the way of congressional party leadership. “But if we are to take seriously the consequences of House retirements, term limits for committee chairs, and how they affect Republicans’ choices, should be considered a key part of the story,” Reynolds concluded.
Heading back towards AOC’s Instagram story, Ocasio-Cortez described in her conclusion about the difficulty of attaining office if one were a normal young politico, “It’s hard enough to get elected to Congress as a normal person. Then, once you are here, there are many norms that make it very difficult to stay. This incentivizes a lot of younger and up and coming members to leave relatively quickly or run for something else outside the House. I do think there is hope for change soon because a lot of new members have been elected recently. But this one reason why this is how it is now.”
That isn’t to say becoming a politician isn’t all sunshine and rainbows, for the art of campaigning in the public spotlight can be tiring and draining not only on an individual level, but for one’s family as well. In a 2019 mini-documentary for Vice News, starring Alexandra Pelosi, the daughter of Nancy Pelosi, some outgoing lawmakers she interviewed told her that the worst part of the job was the two-year election cycle, while a former House Speaker Paul Ryan said that the challenge for being a member of Congress is to be in so many places at once.
When pressing former New Jersey Republican congressman Frank LoBiondo, “You said you were for term limits, saying you’ll stay six terms but ended up staying for 12. Why?” To which LoBiondo replied, “So when you’re running, you have no idea of what you might be able to do for the district, and how all of it unfolds, and how you get a result. You don’t know who to trust, you don’t know how it works. I just had a couple projects completed, one that I worked on for 20 years, so if you think you’re going to get here and snap your fingers and flip a light switch and get something done, you have a rude awakening coming.”
When it came to committee chairmanships, former Rep. Tom Rooney (R-FL) said during his part of the interview, “You get to a point here where you’re about to break through and get on leadership. But the people that are up there don’t leave. So they move around from committee chair to committee chair, and it’s like musical chairs from the most senior people, and those of us that are ready to be like ‘Okay we’ve been here ten years now, it’s time for us to deliver,’ and then you hit this ceiling.”
The debate about term limits has always resurfaced at the start of every Congress, mostly from incoming freshmen members, regardless if it has been about committee chairs or serving public office. If AOC believes there is hope for such change, perhaps looking into Gingrich’s approach on how he fought against many senior members of his own party may just help her ambitions to seek change within her caucus too. As a former Republican House aide recalled, “The old bulls threw everything at Newt to try to defeat him. But his abilities really showed themselves: his decisiveness, his vote counting, his organization. He blitzed the conference.”
In a brief description written in Robert Caro’s first volume The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, he explained that the only qualification to get admission into the small ring of power was by seniority. “Ability wouldn’t get you into that select circle. Energy wouldn’t get you into it. Only age would get you into it. There was only one way to become one of the rulers of the House: to wait.”
Working in politics is all about who you know, and sometimes who you know takes time. As much as AOC has been committed towards pursuing short term gains, waiting patiently in this instance might benefit in her favor if she plays the long game.
