(Note: these learning modules encompass the actual class lectures, and are designed for those students who have to miss class through no fault of their own, and also as a refresher for all students. Bold print in the notes are what the professor writes on the board.)

LEARNING MODULE: WEEKS 10-11, Congress

How the leadership of Congress and its institutions is selected. There is legally a new Congress every two years, because all of the U.S. House members and one-third of the Senators are elected in November of even numbered years. So in January, the party members of each chamber meet in what they call their party caucus (Democrats) or conference (Republicans). So there are four of these bodies, one for each of the two parties in each of the two chambers. Each of these four bodies ratifies (or changes slightly) the decisions regarding who will be the committee chairs and the members of the committees made by a small group of their members (a special committee, usually consisting of the most powerful and senior party members). Congress members make their requests of what committee they’d like to serve on to this special committee. The party caucus/conference also selects the party leaders of that chamber. These decisions are then voted on by the entire chamber (entire House or Senate), and a party-line vote means that the majority party wins all of the leadership positions (every committee chair, plus the House Speaker position and the Senate Majority Leader position). This obviously creates a very partisan and divisive situation in Congress. Mississippi is one of the few state legislatures that avoids such extreme partisanship, since the minority party does have a few committee chairmanships (which include Black Caucus Democrats in the Republican-controlled state legislature). One positive outcome is that there are sometimes battles between the Mississippi governor and the state legislature, such as over who would control the spending of the Covid-19 federal money, and the legislature often unites despite party and supports the state legislative position (in this case, they ended up agreeing on how the money would be spent, and it was legally appropriated by the legislature). Other examples were the bipartisan 1987 Highway Bill, and the 1992 tax increase for education at all levels, which were passed over gubernatorial vetoes.

The top leadership positions in the House are Speaker of the House, who is Republican Mike Johnson from Louisiana. The number two position is the Majority Leader. The third top position is the Majority Whip, who counts the votes (asks members how they plan to vote on bills important to the majority party, so he can decide when they will be voted on by the floor). The minority party in the House today is the Democratic Party, so their top position is called the Minority Leader, who today is Hakeem Jeffries, an African American from New York state. The current Minority Whip is a woman from Massachusetts. Democrats a few years ago created an Assistant Democratic Leader position, which is held by an African American man from Colorado. It was previously held by James Clyburn, an African American from South Carolina, who made the critical decision to endorse Joe Biden right before the critical South Carolina presidential primary (Biden easily won that primary, reversing his early defeats in other states and soon locked up the nomination). On the Senate side, there are two ceremonial positions- the Vice President under the constitution is President of the Senate, but he (J.D. Vance) votes only if there is a tie, which seldom happened until the recent years of a closely divided House in partisanship, so he usually doesn’t show up; the President Pro Tempore of the Senate is the senator of the majority party with the longest service; this position under federal law becomes President right after the House Speaker, but again it doesn’t do much and that senator is more important as a Chair of an important committee; the current President Pro Tempore is 91-year-old Charles Grassley of Iowa, who jogs 5 miles a day. The top Senate leadership position in real power is the Senate Majority Leader, who is Republican John Thune of South Dakota; the next position is the Majority Whip. The minority party Democrats have the Democratic Minority Leader, who is Chuck Schumer of New York; below him is the Democratic Minority Whip. The voting records of these leaders are pretty ideologically consistent, pretty liberal for Democrats and pretty conservative for Republicans.

Committees. Committees have historically been the real work horses of Congress. Historically, those committee members have been experts on the subjects falling under the jurisdiction of those committees, and they have worked across party lines to solve important social issues. Therefore, such landmark legislation as the 1964 Civil Rights Act and Medicare and Medicaid had overwhelming and bipartisan political support. There are about 20 committees in each chamber. Some of the top committees are the Appropriations Committees in each chamber (since they spend the money), the House Ways and Means and the Senate Finance Committees (taxation committees), the House Rules Committee (dominated by the majority party by a 2-1 margin, it recommends when each House bill will be voted on and which amendments to it may be offered from the floor), and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (special constitutional power over recommending confirmation of ambassadors and treaty ratification). Mississippi’s Senators (both Republican) Roger Wicker is Chairman of the Armed Services Committee, Chairman of the Helsinki Commission, and a senior member of the Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, and Cindy Hyde-Smith is on Appropriations and Agriculture (by assuming her seat after Cochran retired early, her party conference let her just keep his seats). Both Senators have conservative voting records, but they are also known for non-divisive constituency service efforts. Mississippi has 4 U.S. House members, 3 conservative Republicans from white majority districts and 1 liberal African American Democrat (Bennie Thompson). Thompson represents the Mississippi Delta district plus Jackson, was a civil rights pioneer in the 1960s, and is only the second African American elected to Congress from Mississippi since Reconstruction (the first was Mike Espy). Thompson is the ranking minority member (and former Chair) of the Homeland Security Committee, and Chaired the January 6 Special Committee.

Now we come to an important subject that you should know well for the next test.

How a Bill Becomes a Law.

1) Introduction to chamber. A congress member of that chamber writes up a bill on an issue he or she cares about, often important to their district or state. Their staff typically helps out a lot (staff positions are important, a member’s Chief of Staff typically makes only one thousand dollars less than the Congress member’s salary of $174,000, I’ve had two students serve as chiefs of staff). The congress member asks other members of that chamber to co-sponsor the bill, so popular bills will have many co-sponsors. The presiding officer of the chamber will refer the bill to the committee that has jurisdiction over it (it may even be referred to more than one committee, if its subject laps over into multiple committees). Note that the President is from the other branch of government, so he cannot introduce a bill, and he has to have a congressional ally of his do so.

2) Each committee has subcommittees, as it divides itself into even more specialized subjects, and these subcommittees have only a subset of the committee’s members. The committee chair sends the bill to the appropriate subcommittee, and the subcommittee will have hearings on the bill, where they have experts testify on it (relevant executive branch officials, interest groups, even the congressman who wrote the bill), and will then have a markup session where they rewrite the bill. Most bills die in subcommittee, as they are too ideologically extreme or too poorly written to begin with; figures on 90% of bills dying in committee are misleading, however, since you may have 5 bills on the same subject, which the subcommittee combines into one inclusive bill. Bills that survive the subcommittee are reported to the full committee.

3) You then have the full committee meetings. They may have their own hearings on the bill and their own markup session, especially if it is an important and controversial bill. Or they might just ratify what the subcommittee has done. Typically, a full committee hearing is like the Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearing and the Trump impeachment hearings that occurred in Trump’s first term. Members sit by party on either leg of a horseshoe shaped desk, all Democrats on one side, all Republicans on the other, and they sit by seniority (new members are at the end, highest seniority based on years serving on that committee are at the head of the table). The most senior members ask questions and make statements first, and they alternate from majority to minority party members. This is where amendments (changes) to the bill are also considered, majority votes are required, and amendments that fail often are reconsidered by the full chamber. Bills can die at this stage also.

4) Scheduling for floor debate and votes. Scheduling is done in the House by the House Rules Committee, and in the Senate by the Senate Majority Leader. Obviously, they push their own party’s issues and bills. Historically, they have also worked with the minority party leaders, which produced more bipartisanship. The House Rules Committee exists because the House is such a large body (435 members) that they cannot permit unlimited debate on the floor, so committee chairs will often testify before the Rules Committee about how many hours of debate they desire and which amendments should be offered from the floor (typically, those that failed in committee but had significant support); typically, you might get 4 hours of floor debate, 2 hours for each party. This is an important stage, since this stage may simply decide to kill a bill, and not schedule it for a vote. (In the 1950s the House Rules Committee was chaired by a segregationist Democrat from Virginia who killed civil rights legislation by refusing to even vote on the bills.) Majority votes are needed in this committee, of course.

5) Floor action on the bill. The House of Representatives will debate the bill, debate amendments, vote on each amendment, and then vote on the bill as amended (vote on the bill after it has been changed by amendments). The Senate has a similar process (remember that each chamber deals only with bills introduced by members of that chamber, so you will have two separate bills on any given issue considered at the same time), but with only 100 members it also has the tradition of unlimited debate (filibuster). That is where less than a majority of members can try to talk a bill to death, if they feel strongly about the bill and they do not have a majority of votes to kill it. Why does this happen? The Senate historically has prided itself as being the greatest debating body in the world, and one person can indeed sometimes make the difference by getting others to notice an important problem. The classic movie, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, shows a courageous amateur Senator going against a corrupt political machine by staging a one-man filibuster, he finally collapsed, his colleagues felt bad, and he won! Ah, idealism. Unfortunately, this filibuster power is sometimes abused. The second longest filibuster was held by South Carolina Senator Strom Thurmond (he had been the presidential candidate of the States’ Rights or Dixiecrat Party in 1948) who tried to kill the 1957 Civil Rights Act by talking for 24 hours and 18 minutes (they dehydrate themselves beforehand). Just this year, liberal African American Democrat Cory Booker, set a new record of 25 hours and 5 minutes, passionately protesting Trump administration policies (Booker had failed to win the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination). The Senate at first required a two-thirds vote of members to kill a filibuster, but today the vote required is only 60 members.

6) Conference Committee. Let’s say those bills have finally been passed the House and the Senate; but remember, they were independently and separately written up, debated, and then passed by each chamber, so you really have two different bills on the same subject. As such, there is usually a conference committee, which consists of both House and Senate members, typically the most knowledgeable and powerful members of the committees that wrote up that bill. They take the two bills, compromise, and come up with one bill; obviously, that bill should be supported by a majority of the House members of that conference committee, and a majority of the Senate members of that conference committee. Why? Well, a bill has to pass both the House and Senate before it is sent to the President, and you now in actuality have a new bill! Complicated, long-drawn out process? No wonder there are so many congressional staff positions to help our congress members! This conference committee may also have a bill vetoed by the President sent back to them, and the committee can look at the President’s concerns and maybe rewrite the bill so that it is more acceptable to him. (The only way that a conference committee can be avoided is if one chamber votes to merely accept the other chamber’s version of the bill, which happened recently with Trump’s Big Beautiful budget Bill.)

7) Well, here we go, back to the House and the Senate, where this new conference committee bill is voted on by each chamber, separately. One change is that amendments cannot be offered or voted on. Each chamber will just vote on this final conference committee bill. However, once again the Senate can try to kill the bill through the filibuster. So this is a very important step, and the conference committee does have to work hard to make sure that it has the votes. (To avoid a possible Senate filibuster, the House accepted the Senate version of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.)

8) Presidential Action. Hopefully, Congress has done such a great job that the President just signs the bill. Again, historically, why hard work in committees and much bipartisanship is so important. Despite the media focus on people yelling and screaming about politics, and some congress members always running to the cameras, there are many bills that are bipartisan, deal with important problems, and are enacted into law. The trillions of federal dollars spent in 2020 on relief from the Covid-19 virus and the government shutdown of our society is one example. Trump advisor and son-in-law Jared Kushner actually took the lead on the First Step, Criminal Justice Reform bill (his father was a white-collar felon, so he had empathy), which got over 90% support in each chamber. Ivanka Trump got paid leave for federal employees enacted into law. However, the President can veto the bill.

9) Congressional Override of Presidential Veto, requires a two-thirds vote in the House, and a two-thirds vote in the Senate, with each chamber voting separately of course. Vetoes are seldom overridden, as it is hard to get a two-thirds vote, so Congress typically will carefully consider any concerns that the President has about a bill, even early in this bill-passing process. Trump vetoed 10 bills in his first term (as of January 1, 2021), all vetoes except one were sustained (upheld) by Republican-controlled Senate, and most involved Congressional attempts to limit U.S. support for Mideast allies with questionable human rights records. Biden vetoed 13 bills, and all of his vetoes were upheld. But as the Mississippi case shows, a legislature can work together in a bipartisan fashion on an important issue and override an executive’s veto (in Mississippi, the 1987 Highway Bill, the 1992 tax increase for education, the 1992 university libraries bond bill). The latest vetoes overriden at the federal level were: in Obama’s last year, as he vetoed a bill permitting the families of the 9-11 terrorist attack to sue the government of Saudi Arabia (like Trump, he saw this as interfering with his foreign policy freedom); Trump’s last Defense Authorization Act, which he vetoed because it permitted the renaming of military bases with politically incorrect names and restrained his ability to withdraw troops from foreign nations.

10) Even after all of this work, you’re not out of the woods yet! Opponents of your bill might try to defund it, that is, appropriate zero money for it. The U.S. has an annual appropriations process, so each agency has an appropriation bill each year. Each Appropriations Committee subcommittee is entrusted with one or more federal agencies, and itemizes how the money is spent. So, if you have a new program that passed the previous 9 stages (called the authorization stage), you still have to ensure that the program is funded through the appropriations stage. Appropriations have to go through a similar process, but the only committee handling it is the Appropriations Committee. Plus, these bills are typically huge, so just work with the subcommittee members to make sure that your bill is funded through the proper agency and line item. Presidents might veto appropriations bills for larger reasons than the money on one new program, however. When Republicans gained control of Congress in 1994, they tried to cut domestic program spending, and Clinton vetoed their appropriations bills, they didn’t have the votes to override, so they passed appropriations bills with higher spending levels.

Well, we’re out of time, so briefly, what are Congressional norms? They are the rules of behavior, how you as a Congress person should behave if you wish to be successful in Congress. There are 7 norms:

1) Be a Workhorse, not a Showhorse. Don’t spend a lot of time talking into the cameras, running for President, making speeches about every possible subject on the floor. Instead, learn the ropes and the rules. Study the issues and problems of your constituency, and become an expert on them. There is no short-cut for hard work and study. Senators were pleasantly surprised when newly-elected Senator from New York, Hillary Clinton in 2001, was quiet, did her homework, and studied the issues of her state, even though she had been First Lady of the United States and of Arkansas. They shouldn’t have been too surprised that she was a Workhorse, though, since she did the same thing as First Lady of Arkansas, when she chaired an education reform committee, testified before the state legislature, and prompted one Republican legislator to compliment her (“I think we may have voted for the wrong Clinton as governor!”). Being a workhorse is important in any institution. (Several of my alumni outworked their Harvard colleagues in a top law school and in a governmental lobbying firm; one was so successful that our department’s main office is named after her, while another had a law firm job paying twice what we pay our professors lined up a year before he graduated.)

2) Specialize. Don’t be a know it all, trying to learn about every issue, and talking about every issue on the floor. Specialize, become an expert on some (often obscure) issue that is important to your district or state. There are so many issues that Congress must deal with that other Congress members will then turn to you for your specialized knowledge. Former Mississippi Senator John Stennis became the expert on the Tenn-Tom Waterway, so that’s how that federal waterway (dams/locks) got created. Senator Roger Wicker is a respected expert on national defense policy, while farmer Cindy Hyde-Smith is knowledgeable about agriculture issues.

3) Interpersonal Courtesy. Members should always show courtesy to one another, which is just common sense, but it also reduces the intensity of bitter political debates. Remember, you may need your colleague’s support on a different bill in the future. Courtesy also shows that you are not self-centered or arrogant, and that you have humility. One person who has violated this norm is Senator Ted Cruz of Texas. The guy is brilliant, was Solicitor General of Texas, so he defended conservative viewpoints in arguing before the U.S. Supreme Court. But he really wants to have his way. One time, he literally called the Senate Republican Leader a liar on the floor, and two of his senior party colleagues basically called him out. Some members have been so exasperated with him that when the 2016 GOP nomination came down to Trump or Cruz, Senator Lindsey Graham likened it to a choice between “being shot or poisoned.” Poor Cruz then got booed at the GOP national convention when he failed to endorse Trump by name and just talked about the conservative principles of the party.

4) Reciprocity. Help out your colleagues. If a colleague sponsored a bill that is referred to your subcommittee, let her know when the bill is being considered, give them the chance to testify on its behalf, let her know why specifically the bill was voted down. If a colleague makes an impassioned plea for a bill that you don’t care about either way, maybe defer to their concerns and vote for it.

5) Apprenticeship. Learn the ropes, learn the rules of your chamber and committee. Don’t talk a lot at first, but listen to more experienced members. Lyndon Johnson did this, he sought out a mentor to learn from, and he ended up becoming the Senate Majority Leader in the 1950s. Trent Lott of Mississippi did this also, and he became a leader in both chambers.

6) Institutional Patriotism. Historically, the House has bragged about its large size, that it has 435 subject matter experts, so it really does the work of writing up valuable legislation. The Senate brags about its smaller size (only 100 members), so each Senator is individually important, and they can talk as long as they want on the floor, they are a great debating society. Historically, both chambers have been suspicious of the other branches, particularly of the President, so they worked to ensure that they would indeed pass the laws and perform their constitutional duties. The House Judiciary Committee in 1974 took their impeachment power very seriously, the Democratic chair of that committee worked with Republicans as well as Democrats on the process used and witnesses called in their impeachment hearings, and that Committee did get bipartisan support for recommending impeaching President Nixon. With the rise of partisanship over the past thirty years, we have instead witnessed two partisan impeachments, of Clinton and of Trump. What do you think, where do we go from here??

7) Re-Election. This is a new norm- members are expected to strongly want to get re-elected, so Congress is set up to help them get re-elected. Committee and floor business typically takes place only in the three middle days of the week, so members can fly home and talk to their constituents (and campaign). This failure to be full-time lawmakers living in Washington D.C. has meant that congress members do not socialize with each other as much as they used to; they often don’t live in Washington, they’re not in neighborhoods having members of the other party, their kids don’t play with those congress members’ kids. No wonder there is some hostility between members of different parties! A win at all costs mentality sometimes exists. The older generation of congress members were different. When Mississippi Senator John Stennis in his last re-election in 1982 was lectured to by a young campaign consultant about what he had to do to win, to win, the distinguished elderly statesman looked him in the eye and said, “Young man, you know, we don’t HAVE to win.” Stennis’ campaign theme had always been to “plow a straight furrow to the end of the line.”