Leadership and Parties I

Georgia Senate race as a case study of the intersection of electoral politics and party leadership.

• The DCCC has a similar blacklist
• NRCC says it does not blacklist ... but it does.  
• Ditto DSCC

Women in Congress (Straus ch. 14)


Matt Glassman, who co-wrote and co-edited Party and Procedure in the United States Congress, teaches in our Washington Program. He talks about congressional leadership, starting around 18:00:



Two layers of power in Congress:  the party system and the committee system.

"I'm an appropriator, see. That's one of the places I was forged."  -- Nancy Pelosi

Love him or hate him, Mitch McConnell is very effective.

Elections Have Consequences: Impeachment

Hill leadership

• House
• Senate

Theories of party government (Davidson 146-149) and Edmund Burke:

In all bodies, those who will lead, must also, in a considerable degree, follow. They must conform their propositions to the taste, talent, and disposition, of those whom they wish to conduct: therefore, if an assembly is viciously or feebly composed in a very great part of it, nothing but such a supreme degree of virtue as very rarely appears in the world, and for that reason cannot enter into calculation, will prevent the men of talent disseminated through it from becoming only the expert instruments of absurd projects!

Speakership Elections (Straus 45)

Factions and Intraparty Caucuses (Straus ch. 13) and Member Organizations

Note:  even majorities of the president's party may split with the administration agenda.  See Democrats on trade in 1993 and 2014.