L:eadership and Some Life Lessons

• For Monday, Davidson, ch. 7.  
• Start thinking about which two committees you want to simulate.
• If you have not already turned in your writeup, think about the differences between congressional leadership and leadership in other contexts (esp. if you are in the leadership sequence)

What is leadership?  What is power?

• Transactional v. transformative
• Sources of power
• Knowledge of policy and procedure
• Understanding of what followers want
• Money
• Reputation:  fear and respect
• Influence on public opinion

A PS to McCarthy's fall: change in the MTV

So why did Kevin McCarthy fail? Michael Tomasky:

McCarthy’s pulverizing failure as a legislative leader stems from two truths: One, he cared little about policy; two, his word was no good. He’d say anything to anyone. If you’ve read enough political biographies, you know that “he was always as good as his word” is a common form of high praise that can be delivered across partisan lines. McCarthy was as useless and malleable as his word.

Lesson: Pols understand that they often mislead voters, but it is taboo to lie to fellow pols.

Narrow majorities require high levels of unity.

A vote from yesterday shows that procedural control can be precarious. 

Boehner: 

• "Pelosi had gutted Big John Dingell like a halibut she found floating around San Francisco Bay, then calmly sat back and had a cup of coffee afterward. His entrails were left on display for everyone in the House of Representatives to see- and to remember."
• The Mark Meadows story: "Yeah, I said, I'd forgive him. But I knew he was carrying a backpack full of knives-and sooner or later, he'd try to cut me again with them. Which, of course, he did.
• How did Boehner lead the fight against the House Bank?  (He had help.)
• How did Bachmann turn the tables?

Barber Conable, a moderate Republican from upstate New York, retired in 1984, and wrote a column reflecting on life in the House. Instead of looking at the upstarts with horror, he instead saw something very natural:

Old as I am, I recall being a "young turk" at one point and participating noisily in a successful effort to change House rules which the then Establishment found adequate. I learned a lot about the institution from the effort, vented my frustrations, and gradually became part of the Establishment myself. Youth presses age, provides a good deal of the dynamic and the dialogue, and eventually ages. Partisans may not like the tranquility of my view of these recent histrionics, but I find reassurance in the cycle of renewal.

Boehner on quitting (fall 2015):

LBJ AND LEGISLATIVE LEADERSHIP

The Johnson Network

• The Favor Bank

The Johnson Intelligence System

• One week after becoming president, LBJ mentions his long relationship with J. Edgar Hoover (ab at 19:00).

The Johnson Procedure

• Unanimous consent agreement -- functional equivalent of a House rule

The Johnson Treatment

• Caro on LBJ, the House, and the Senate

LBJ in Frank Underwood's office

 

The inside game and the outside game:  in LBJ's time in the Senate, the outside game scarcely counted.  

Gingrich and C-SPAN start to change things. 

• Newt v. O'Neill 1984 (start clip at 9:30)

Parties and Leaders

  Americans hate Congress but like their own Members.

For Wednesday, we shall discuss the history of parties and leadership.  Carefully read the Boehner excerpt on Canvas.

Hill leadership

• House
• Senate

Leadership Activities

• Legislation
• Whips and for real (Scalise is now majority leader)
• Communication:  Johnson and Thune
• Campaign Activity; Hill Committees 
• Literally "paying your dues"

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 

McCarthy concessions (Davidson, print ed., 144-146).

More on Wednesday about McCarthy's skill set.

After compromising with Democrats, McCarthy fell to MTV change that he had accepted.

And then came Mike Johnson

• Is party unity the same as party discipline? 
• The Cheney vote

Member Organizations

• Congressional Black Caucus
• Links to Off-Hill organizations: the CBC Foundation

Informal Groups

• House Freedom Caucus
• The Squad

Home Style and Hill Style

PRESENTATION ON DC PROGRAM

IN WRITEUPS, EXPLAIN THE MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU LEARNED ABOUT CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS

For Monday, Davidson, ch. 6

The House

Overview  -- the game

Gerrymandering: cracking, packing, merging, isolating

World War G in 2025-2026!

The gerrymander game

Race and education:  the four quadrants

Crossover districts

The Senate

Senate classes (2024 was a "class 1" election)

The vanishing of split delegations.  The 119th has just three:

1. Maine:  Collins (R) and King (I)
2. Wisconsin: Johnson (R) and Baldwin (D)
3. Pennsylvania: Fetterman (D) and McCormick (R)

Campaign Finance

"Hard money" contribution limits

Outside spending

 A local emergency and a national story:

In their home style (Davidson, 127-129 of paper ed. ), members try to convey

• Qualification
• Identification
• Empathy

Every single member has both a Hill style and a home style.

Take our own House member, Rep. Judy Chu

John McCain in 1993 showed that a fierce maverick can become very deferential when facing little old ladies:

 

AOC-DC questions Michael Cohen:



Consider the characteristics of NY 14 as AOC goes local:

AOC District Office

d

During non-pandemic times, different kinds of encounters take place at town halls:

 

Town halls can sometimes get testy. This week, for instance:

US Style -- one measure

Highest Percentage from Small Donors in the 2024 cycle

• Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA): 72.6% ($5.76 million)
• Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY): 69.9% ($10.60 million)
• Bernie Sanders (I-VT): 63.6% ($22.73 million)
• Jim Jordan (R-OH): 55.7% ($7.42 million)
• Eli Crane (R-AZ): 54.9% ($4.63 million)

For detailed breakdowns of individual candidate records, you can search for specific members on the OpenSecrets Large vs. Small Donations tracker.

Congressional Elections

Questions on the assignment?

Presentation Wednesday on the CMC Washington Program 

For Wednesday, Davidson ch. 5

Competition

Incumbents Usually Win -- House and Senate

House and Senate margins  

Control

Midterms Are Bad for the President's Party

Since 1994:  control is in play, majorities are usually narrow.

In 2024, GOP won the aggregate popular vote for the House.

The historical pattern:

Turnout

Demographics:  Rock the Vote in 2018 and 2020

Always lower in midterms.  Why?

The House

Overview  -- the game

Gerrymandering: cracking, packing, merging, isolating

World War G in 2025-2026!

The gerrymander game

Race and education:  the four quadrants

Crossover districts

The Senate

Senate classes (last year was a "class 1" election)

The vanishing of split delegations.  The 119th has just three:

1. Maine:  Collins (R) and King (I)
2. Wisconsin: Johnson (R) and Baldwin (D)
3. Pennsylvania: Fetterman (D) and McCormick (R)

Campaign Finance

"Hard money" contribution limits

Outside spending

First Assignment, Spring 2026

Answer one of the following two options:

Option 1

Chapter 3 of the Davidson book begins with a short vignette about Rep. Derek Tran to introduce its core themes of ambition and recruitment. Write a replacement opening vignette featuring a different House member who won a first term in the 2024 election. In your vignette:

• Identify one specific decision point in this member’s path to office (e.g., whether and when to run at all, which seat to pursue).
• Tell why you chose this particular member, and how this case highlights something that Tran’s vignette does not.
• Analyze how this member’s experience illustrates or complicates arguments in the sections “Becoming a Candidate” and “Nominating Politics,” citing at least two specific passages from the book. This part is most important.
• Briefly note one fact or episode you encountered in your research that would not typically appear in a textbook vignette but sheds light on this member’s recruitment or nomination. 

Do not simply summarize the member’s biography or election results. Your job is to write something the authors could plausibly adopt, and to explain why.

Option 2

Choose one current congressional leader (Johnson, Jeffries, Thune, or Schumer) and write a postscript to Chapter 6 of the Davidson book. Your postscript should:

• Identify one specific moment since January 2025 when this leader faced a choice that tested party unity, procedural control, or bargaining leverage.
• Quote and cite at least two specific passages from the chapter that are most relevant to that moment.
• Explain how the leader’s behavior confirms, complicates, or contradicts the theory of conditional party government.  This part is most important.

Use at least three primary sources (e.g., floor statements, press releases, leadership letters, official transcripts).  In a short concluding paragraph, quote one sentence from Chapter 6 that the authors might revise if they were writing the next edition. Justify your choice.

Essays should reflect an understanding of class readings and discussions. Many resources, including CQ Magazine are at Library/Databases/CQ Library.  You must consult other sources as well. See, among others: 

• Congress.gov
• Vital Statistics on Congress
• Congressional Research Service
• Pew Research Center data on Congress
• House
• Senate
• Biog Directory of US Congress 1774- present
• C-SPAN
• Census Reporter [to find a profile of a House district, enter "Congressional District" and then the number.  For instance: Congressional District 28 CA.

Read Strunk & White and my stylesheet (with links to model papers).

Watch my writing lecture.

The specifications:

• Essays should be typed (12-point), double-spaced, and no more than three pages long. I will not read past the third page. 
• Please submit all papers in this course as Word documents, not Google docs or pdfs.
• Cite your sources. Please use endnotes in the format of Chicago Manual of Style.  Endnotes do not count against the page limit. Please do not use footnotes, which take up too much page space.
• Misrepresenting AI-generated content as your own work is plagiarism and will result in severe consequences
• Watch your spelling, grammar, diction, and punctuation. Errors will count against you. Return essays to the Canvas dropbox for this class by 11:59 PM, Friday, February 13. (If you have trouble with Canvas, simply email me the paper as an attached file.)  I reserve the right to dock papers one gradepoint for one day’s lateness, a full letter grade after that.

Congressional History

 For next Monday, Davidson, ch. 3 and 4.

If you have not already done a writeup: Find one sentence in Chapter 2 you disagreed with. Quote it and explain why it does not fit how you think members of Congress actually behave today.  If you cannot find one with which you disagree, find one that an ideologue of the left or right would dispute.

Institutional Evolution:

• Bicameralism and House-Senate differences: impact of 17th Amendment.
• Size of the House and Senate (more below)
• Congressional Career and professionalism
• Staff
• Rules and Institutional Structure

"All of American history comes from the Civil War. It is the most important event in our history. Everything before it led up to it, everything since, everything, is a consequence of it." -- Ken Burns

"The past is never dead. It's not even past." -- William Faulkner

Akhil Amar on the Three-Fifths Clause:

The radical vice of Article I as drafted and ratified was that it gave slaveholding regions extra clout in every election as far as the eye could see - a political gift that kept giving. And growing. Unconstrained by any explicit intrastate equality norm in Article I, and emboldened by the federal [3/5] ratio, many slave states in the antebellum era skewed their congressional-district maps in favor of slaveholding regions within the state. Thus the House not only leaned south, but also within coastal slave states bent east, toward tidewater plantations that grabbed more than their fair share of seats. ... The very foundation of the Constitution’s first branch was tilted and rotten.

And not just the first branch. The Article II electoral college sat atop the Article I base: The electors who picked the president would be apportioned according to the number of seats a state had in the House and Senate. In turn, presidents would nominate cabinet heads, Supreme Court justices, and other Article III judges.

John Quincy Adams

• The myth of the whisper spot
• The Gag Rule

Territorial Expansion and Slavery

Calhoun denounces the "all men are created equal" line in the Declaration

Statehood -- Matt Glassman reflects:

The relevant constitutional provision is Article 4, section 3:

New States may be admitted by the Congress into this Union; but no new States shall be formed or erected within the jurisdiction of any other State; nor any State be formed by the Junction of two or more States, or parts of States, without the Consent of the Legislatures of the States concerned as well as of the Congress

That’s right. All it takes to create a new state is the passage of a federal law. Right now, assuming they were willing to use the nuclear option to abolish the filibuster for state admissions, any unified government could make Puerto Rico or DC a state, or (with the consent of the state leg) divide Texas (or Wyoming) into any number of states. With just a law. Irreversibly. And the constitution puts no population or land size constraints on the process either.

These three features of the statehood process—irreversibility, a low threshold for creation, and no population/size constraints on the creation of a state—made the statehood process incredibly destabilzing in the 19th century. Any majority, at any time, could rearrange the balance of power in the legislature and the electoral college. And it unambiguously exacerbated the slave crisis: so many of the major flashpoints over slavery between 1820 and 1860 involved the flawed statehood process: the Missouri Compromise, the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the Lecompton Constitution fight, even the Dred Scott decision. 

The book on violence in the antebellum Congress:

The title comes from this line, which provides the book's epigraph: In a letter to Senator Charles Sumner (MA) Rev. John Turner Sargent wrote that "blood would flow—somebody’s blood, either yours or Wilson’s, or Hale’s, or Giddings’— before the expiration of your present session on that field of blood, the floor of Congress.” 

Sargent was alluding to the burial place of Judas: "And the chief priests took the silver pieces, and said, It is not lawful for to put them into the treasury, because it is the price of blood. And they took counsel, and bought with them the potter's field, to bury strangers in. Wherefore that field was called, The field of blood, unto this day" (Matthew 27:6-8 KJV).

It was literally an atmosphere conducive to violence:

All this in a room that was hot, stuffy, and smelly. At the end of a typical day, with the galleries full and hours of body heat trapped in the chamber, [Benjamin Brown] French thought that reading aloud to members was like reading “with his head stuck into an oven.” ...  Ongoing whimpering from the floor produced another study, this one demonstrating that it was thirty degrees warmer inside than outside and that the chamber smelled of sewage from the basement. Visiting the new chamber not long after it opened, French wasn’t impressed. The idea of “shutting up a thousand or two people in a kind of cellar, where none of God’s direct light or air can come in to them . . . does not jump with my notions of living,” he groused. Thirty years later, members still declared the House “the worst ventilated building on the continent."

Professor Freeman explains how hard it was to research the violence (Start at around 9:30):

In 1856, Senator Sumner delivered his famous "Crime Against Kansas" speech. He attacked the absent Andrew Butler (SC), saying he had " a mistress . . . who, though ugly to others, is always lovely to him; though polluted in the sight of the world, is chaste in his sight—I mean," the harlot, Slavery."

Two days later, Butler's cousin, Representative Preston Brooks of South Carolina, responded:

The Drunk History version:

You can see the cane in the Old State House in Boston:

Fast forward

Senate 1925

Senate today

Threats are up

Dualities

The shooting and events in Congress.

For Wednesday: Freeman reading on Canvas                                                          
Some basics:

• Congressional pay ($174,000) and benefits
• Congressional staff titles
• Congressional staff salaries (find individuals here)

Two Congresses

• Article I of the Constitution and lawmaking
• Look back on staff titles       
• Burke's speech to the electors of Bristol ("Back to Burke" in Davidson, ch. 1)
• Delegate v. Trustee

Demographics and Descriptive representation

• Overview
• Graphics
• Age and Generation

Home style

"What you have to understand about my people is that they are a noble people. Humility is their form of pride. It is their strength; it is their weakness. And if you can humble yourself before them they will do anything you ask." -- Frank Underwood

In Home Style, members try to convey

• Qualification
• Identification
• Empathy

US Style:

AOC on Musk

Nancy Mace explains her vote against Kevin McCarthy

One major difference between the chambers is that few House members run for president, and seldom get far when they do. But a fairly large fraction of senators have gone for the White House:

• Michael Bennet (D-CO), 2020
• Cory Booker (D-NJ) 2020
• Ted Cruz (R-TX) 2016
• Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) 2020
• Lindsey Graham (R-SC) 2016
• Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) 2020
• Rand Paul (R-KY) 2016
• Bernard Sanders (I-VT) 2016, 2020
• Tim Scott (R-SC) 2024
• Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), 2020

Possible 2028 Candidates

• Ruben Gallego (D-AZ)
• Josh Hawley (R-MO)
• Mark Kelly (D-AZ)
• Ted Cruz (R-TX)

In the House, see

• Seth Moulton (D-MA), 2020
• Eric Swalwell (D-CA) 2020

Possibly Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)

Four Strategic Postures Since 2000 (House, by election year) 

                    Majority                              Minority 

In Party        Dems 08, 20                     GOP 06, 18

                    GOP 00, 02, 04, 16, 24      Dem 10,12,14,22

           

Out Party     GOP 10,12,14,22              GOP 08, 20

                    Dem 06, 18                        Dem 00, 02, 04, 16, 24