The gerontocracy gets a big test

Politico

4 hours ago

SENIOR MOMENT — Keep an eye on the internal election in the House Democratic Caucus next week — it will have far bigger stakes than it might seem.
The race to be the top Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has important near-term political ramifications since the victor will serve as the foil to Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) on a panel that has seemed as interested in investigating former President Joe Biden's age as current President Donald Trump.
But there are also significant institutional implications. The contest will be a test of the future of the seniority system which has been a key feature of how Congress has governed itself for centuries.
There are four Democratic contenders, two congressional veterans in their 70s and two congressional newcomers in their 40s.
The old guard are 70-year-old Rep. Stephen Lynch (D-Mass.) was first elected to Congress in 2001 and 76-year-old Rep Kweisi Mfume (D-Md.) who has spent 15 years on Capitol Hill in two stints nearly 25 years apart. The upstarts are 47-year-old Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) and 44-year-old Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), both of whom were first elected in 2023.
The candidates will first try to make their case Monday to the House Democrats' Steering Committee, which will make a recommendation for the full caucus to ratify on Tuesday.
At a time when, particularly among Democrats, there is a circular firing squad over issues surrounding age in the aftermath of Biden's presidency and failed reelection campaign, the idea of a system that benefits the old over the young, has drawn scorn in some quarters.
After all, some progressives are still embittered over the fact that 74-year-old Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.) beat out 35-year-old Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) for this position at the end of the last Congress, shortly after Connolly was diagnosed with cancer. Connolly, who was first elected in 2008, had a positive prognosis at the time. However, within months the cancer proved untreatable and he stepped down as the top Democrat on the committee in March. The Virginia Democrat died in May.
Seniority, the concept that the longest tenured member of a committee should be its chair, is not written in any formal congressional rules. It's as much a custom whose strength has ebbed and flowed. It only rigidly determined who became a committee chair for a little over half a century —- the period from the overthrow of the iron fisted Speaker Joe Cannon in 1911 to the post Watergate era in 1974, when rebellious House Democrats ousted three veteran committee chairmen, the youngest of whom was 73.
Since then, the seniority system has held increasingly less sway on Capitol Hill. Republicans have imposed term limits for committee chairman whereas Democrats have proved increasingly willing to oust older chairmen who are viewed as enfeebled or simply inadequate.
Yet the notion of seniority still has a certain persuasive power in internal debates. As former Rep. Emanuel Celler (D-N.Y.) argued in an essay 60 years ago (written when he had served a mere 38 years in the House and was in his sixth year as chair of the House Judiciary Committee) argued 'the seniority criterion for selecting committee chairmen has the added virtue of being objective. It automatically eliminates the intrigues, deals, and compromises that characterize election campaigns.'
It does, though, inherently favor those members in safe seats who face little opposition in primaries or general elections. In the mid 20th century, this made seniority a bugaboo among those reformers in the Democratic Party who wanted to push progressive legislation, particularly on civil rights. After all, the Democrats most likely to be easily reelected year after year were conservative white southerners. Now though, in the third decade of the 21st century, those members of the caucus who most benefit from it are members of the Congressional Black Caucus, who are often in safe districts, many of which are protected from gerrymandering as well by the Voting Rights Act.
The question is whether seniority's appeal will continue to dwindle on Capitol Hill next week in the vote. It wouldn't be the first time that Democrats have rejected the committee's most senior member to lead it —- Lynch has already been passed over twice and is considered likely to be rejected yet again. But, of the two top contenders, the difference between passing over Lynch for a veteran like Mfume or newcomers like Garcia and Crockett is significant.
House Democrats have elected a number of less tenured members of their conference to top committee slots in recent years but going with Garcia or Crockett, who are only in their second terms in Congress, would set a new benchmark for doing it and further mark the transformation in how congressional power is accumulated and held.
After all, for generations, the surest path to power on Capitol Hill was a slow and steady apprenticeship before finally wielding a gavel. More and more, that's not the case.
Instead, as Congress has become an increasingly enervated legislative body, the value of playing 'the inside game' has diminished. Seniority's value was that it served as the most objective available proxy to determine legislative gravitas. It was never exact but it was better than the alternatives. No alternative has since emerged for the imperfect system of simply relying on length of tenure. In a social media age, legislative gravitas isn't the only thing that matters anymore — cable news hits and viral posts, both of which are valuable currencies today, can be measured far more precisely.
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