How party leaders change Congress

Democrats and Republicans are electing new leaders for their parties in the U.S. House and Senate as a new era begins with the replacement of Speaker Nancy Pelosi. How much did Pelosi change Congress? How are new leaders likely to corral their factions and set a new tone? Matthew Green finds that many of the dynamics of party factions and leadership elections remain consistent. Still, there are novel situations, including the simultaneous transition of three top House Democratic leaders and demands for caucus rules changes in the Speaker election. We also evaluate this Congress and anticipate a divided government.

Guest: Matthew Green, Catholic University

Studies: Newt Gingrich, Choosing the Leader

Transcript

Matt Grossmann: How Party Leaders Change Congress? This week on The Science of Politics. For the Niskanen Center, I’m Matt Grossmann. Democrats and Republicans are electing new leaders for their parties in the US House and Senate. As the new era begins with the replacement of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, how much did Pelosi change Congress? How are the new leaders likely to corral their factions and set a new tone, and how should we judge this Congress on productivity and look forward to divided government? This week I talked to Matthew Green of Catholic University. He’s an author of the new book, Newt Gingrich: The Rise and Fall of a Party Entrepreneur, as well as Legislative Hardball on The House Freedom Caucus, and Choosing the Leader on Leadership Elections in Congress. He finds that many of the dynamics of party factions and multi-dimensional leadership elections remain consistent, but there are novel situations including the simultaneous transition of three top House Democratic leaders and demands for caucus rules changes in the speaker election. Here’s our conversation.

So Nancy Pelosi has left the leadership now after a long tenure as speaker and Democratic leader, so how would you compare her style and accomplishments to those of Newt Gingrich you just wrote a book on?

Matthew Green: So Pelosi and Gingrich do have some similarities. They certainly, I would say, for the first nine or 10 months of Gingrich’s speakership, so 1995, he ratcheted up a lot of accomplishments and exercised a lot of power. So when people say, well, Pelosi is a very influential speaker, are there any others who’ve been as influential as her? I think it’s fair to say that the first nine or 10 months of Gingrich’s speakership, he was also a very effective and influential speaker. The difference is that it was like concentrated for Gingrich. So his first nine or 10 months, he’s doing an insane amount of things, passing the contract with America in the House, restructuring committees, hand-picking members of committees. He’s becoming a national figure that’s a rival to the president. But then things start to go downhill when he’s got a deal with difficult divisions within his party and negotiate major agreements with the president of the opposite party and with the Senate.

Pelosi, she has had successes throughout her experiences as speaker, as well as a minority leader. And one could argue that those successes are ones that were at least as important legislatively. I think it’s probably safe to say that in terms of legislative successes and legacy that Pelosi has had a more successful speakership than Gingrich did. And there’s a number of reasons for that. Style is part of it. One thing that’s interesting about that occurred to me preparing for this interview was that one of the things that Gingrich railed against was machine politicians, the Democratic Party is a corrupt machine, machine politics are bad, and Pelosi comes from the legacy of machine politics, and Rand basically a political machine in Baltimore. And that is, in large part, a lot of the skills she developed or learned from her father served her really well as speaker. If Gingrich had perhaps been a little bit more open to the way that a machine works, he might have been more successful as a speaker than he was.

Matt Grossmann: So people talk as if Newt Gingrich left a permanent mark on the institution and changed how it operated. Has Pelosi left a permanent mark or is Gingrich’s permanent mark overrated?

Matthew Green: So one of the things that people say about Gingrich is that he transformed the House to make it a more centralized partisan institution. I think a more accurate way of putting it is that he added a major building block to that foundation. The process of that transformational process of the house to become more partisan and more centralized in leadership had started before Gingrich and it continued after him. You can trace it back quite a ways, at least as far as Jim Wright who was speaker of the House after Tip O’Neill, he served from 1987 to 1989. And Jim Wright exercised power as speaker in a way that we now just take for granted, but at the time was seen as fairly revolutionary or certainly going beyond the norms of what speakers could do. Gingrich added a lot to that. He did so in a number of ways, and part of it was exercising a lot more influence over committee assignments, putting term limits on committee chairs, which actually had been there before him.

But he continued that tradition to ensure that committee chairs couldn’t be as powerful as they had been under Democrats. And certain things that Gingrich did that weren’t necessarily changes to the rules but the way he exercised leadership, choosing certain individuals to be chairs even though they weren’t next in line in seniority, this view that the speakership should be that degree of a micromanager and who gets opportunities and how the House operates. That’s something that was fairly new that Gingrich introduced that we now accept to a degree, Pelosi doesn’t necessarily do that, but we understand that speakers have their favorites and that if you want to be chair you can’t be on the wrong side of the speaker, for example. So Gingrich added a lot of those things and then Pelosi added more of them.

Some of the things that she did, increasing the number of staff that are in leadership offices, emphasizing not just loyalty to the party but personal loyalty as a precondition for getting things that you might want from leadership and from her specifically having a lot more influence over the legislative process, what bills come to the floor, even sometimes the contents of bills. So this is a long answer I’m giving to your question, but I think it’s safe to say that this has been a trend that has started since the 1970s, 1980s that we can look to individual speakers as playing a part in that trend, but it’s really more than just one person, it’s more than just Pelosi or more than just Gingrich. It’s a bigger development that’s been happening in the House that sees more power concentrated in leadership and less power for the rank and file and less power for committees and committee chairs.

Matt Grossmann: So Pelosi wasn’t willing to go alone, she helped to bring along with her Steny Hoyer and Jim Clyburn to leave the leadership enabling the rise of three new members to the top positions in the Democratic House. It’s also a large generational change, the new leaders are much younger than those that are leaving. So are there any precedents for this kind of mass leadership change, and how does this one compare to past moments of generational change?

Matthew Green: It’s not unusual for a leader of a party in the House or Senate to step down and anticipate that there’ll be someone new who takes their place, maybe someone who’s younger of the next generation, but to have two or three doing it simultaneously, I can’t think of another time, certainly in modern House history where that happened. Certainly not voluntarily anyway. So it’s very, very unusual, and I think it was really remarkable that they were willing to do that. So Pelosi and Hoyer did it, Clyburn I think is actually still going trying to be in leadership in some capacity, but he is stepping down as a whip. I would love to be a fly on the wall for that conversation and figure out how that was done because Pelosi and Hoyer have had a rivalry that goes back many, many years, so it’s hard to believe that Hoyer would do it simply because Pelosi said you need to step down.

Chances are there was some conversations that were going on over a fairly long period and also maybe each individual leader, certainly Pelosi and Hoyer were thinking, we’ve been here for a long time and perhaps it is best that rather than I stick around, say in Hoyer case, and try to be the next Nancy Pelosi and step into her position as minority leader, that maybe I’m also ready to go. So I don’t know why this happened, but it really is a remarkable thing to see more than one leader of a party step down simultaneously and then have their positions be replaced by the…