The Congress Industrial Complex

Who's who writing about Congress?

The last few days have seen a flurry of good writing about Congress and I wanted to draw your attention to some smart reads and upcoming events.

→ Matt Glassman has a compendium of useful information and links about the upcoming speaker election in the 119th Congress. If you want to understand how a contested election works, read his article.

—> Josh Huder wisely points out that Republican leaders are becoming less experienced because the leadership pipeline is broken.

—> Kevin Kosar previewed a January 8th panel discussion on the woebegone 118th and what to expect of the 119th Congress.

—> Among the panelists are Gabe Fleisher, who writes the excellent Wake up to Politics.

—> GovTrack.us, of course, has two excellent newsletter (I write one) on what’s happened and what’s expected each week in Congress. Amy West took a look at what happened as the 118th ran out the door.

Clearing the decks

Do you need a combined House and Senate calendar for the 119th Congress? Roll Call has a paper version. Would someone nicely ask the Library of Congress to build a digital one?

Did you read the Gaetz report? It’s here. One big takeaway point is that these substantially completed ethics reports should be routinely published. If it happens, it will be funny if Matt Gaetz takes back his resignation and serves in the 119th Congress long enough to reward Speaker Johnson for trying to block the report’s release.

Rep. Cori Bush, in her exit interview with Politico’s Nicholas Wu, made some really good points about congressional operations with respect to member pay and seniority.

I wish I would have known how expensive it is to be a member of Congress. It wouldn’t have changed anything as far as me running, but it would have helped me to be prepared for what life is like. You’re being criticized for having a lot of money while you’re figuring out, “How do I have a home in two places? How do I make sure that I have toilet paper in two places at the same time? How do I have all the things that I need in both places to bounce back and forth?”

I think that understanding how — at least as far as the Democratic Party is — seniority plays so much of a role in who gets what committee assignment, what bills are brought to the floor, just in so many different areas, how seniority plays such a major role. We have great people in the Congress who, just sometimes in my conversations, I hear this disillusionment, and some of it is because people are waiting their turn. They have great ideas, and they’re really remarkable in the work that they’re doing, and we need those voices to be represented. We see in the Republican Conference they don’t seem to go by seniority as much. I think that the Democrats, we need to pay attention to that.

Police and prosecutors are the focus of several important recent news stories.

• The indominable Katherine Tully-McManus wrote about how congressional security has and has not changed. (In my opinions, we still haven’t fixed oversight, something that the police chief appears to agree with.)

• The DC Police intel chief was convicted of tipping off the Proud Boys leader about a warrant for his arrest. (Other police officers were found to have ties to white nationalists.)

• It appears the Department of Justice’s Public Integrity unit may have screwed up in their prosecution of corrupt Sen. Menendez. (These are the same folks who declined to prosecute Rep. Gaetz.)

If you’re a member of Congress and actually convicted of corruption, you will now lose your pension under a newly signed law. I’m not sure this is actually a good idea, but eh, what’cha gonna do?

Post office renamings are a large and increasing share of bills passed by Congress. By way of Kevin Kosar, NOTUS has an excellent and eye-opening article on how the renamings are becoming controversial, and how that process work.

The war on CBO. The Congressional Budget Office has a conservative leader and has been viewed with suspicion by folks on the left as elevating cost-benefit analysis and undermining progressive legislation. But now it appears Trumpian conservatives have a bone to pick with the agency because its analysis of the costs of extending Trump’s tax cuts directly conflicts with rhetoric about reducing the size and expense of government. The apparent solution is to boost the untrustworth numbers from OMB in the hopes of finding a free lunch.

Jimmy Carter

Former President Jimmy Carter has died and his body will lie in state at the Capitol. The government will shut down on January 9th in memorium.

I met him a few times when I was a student at Emory University. He taught a class on the Arab-Israeli conflict and routinely would answer studenet questions at annual town halls. He, and Gerald Ford, were president at a time of great transition, when the balance of powers between the Legislative and Executive branches were seriously reworked. His election also marked a major change in how presidents ran for office.

I bring this up because we appear to be in another major transitional period. Carter took advantage of new rules to elevate himself to power and signed into law major changes in the way the government operates. We now have another president who has managed to rewrite the rules—and major changes afoot in Congress.