This blog serves my Congress course (Claremont McKenna College Government 101) for the spring of 2025.
ABOUT THIS BLOG
I shall post videos, graphs, news stories, and other material there. We shall use some of this material in class, and you may review the rest at your convenience. You will all receive invitations to post to the blog. (Please let me know if you do not get such an invitation.) I encourage you to use the blog in these ways:
To post questions or comments about the readings before we discuss them in class; To follow up on class discussions with additional comments or questions. To post relevant news items or videos.
There are only two major limitations: no coarse language, and no derogatory comments about people at the Claremont Colleges.
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)
The conference/caucus holds separate elections for leader/speaker,whip, and other posts. The people holding these jobs are often intraparty rivals. They work together, but warily.
He tried to teach his young assistants to read men—“Watch their hands, watch their eyes,” he told them. “Read eyes. No matter what a man is saying to you, it’s not as important as what you can read in his eyes”—and to read between the lines: more interested in men’s weaknesses than in their strengths because it was weakness that could be exploited, he tried to teach his assistants how to learn a man’s weakness. “The most important thing a man has to tell you is what he’s not telling you,” he said. “The most important thing he has to say is what he’s trying not to say.”
1. Pick any bill from the 118th Congress. Explain its fate. Instead of giving a mere chronology, tell why the measure moved or stalled. What had happened to previous versions? Which groups or blocs backed and fought it? Did the administration take a position? Which strategies and tactics did its friends and foes use? Even if it failed or stalled, did it prompt the passage of a similar measure in a different form? Look at parliamentary strategies, major amendments, and roll calls. Again, you should explain the outcome, not just describe the process. Some possible topics:
2. Pick pending legislation that has not yet passed either house. Write a memo to its prime sponsor detailing a plausible strategy for securing its passage at least in one chamber. (One example might be a proposed constitutional amendment.) In your answer, consider all phases of the legislative process and take account of the influence of interest groups and the administration. And of course, remember the tight partisan balance in each chamber.
Get background from a source such as CQ Magazine where you may find the partisan breakdown of roll-call votes.
Essays should be typed, double-spaced, and no more than five pages long. I will not read past the fifth page.
Submit papers as Word documents, not pdfs or Google docs.
Cite your sources with endnotes in standard Turabian format. Endnote pages do not count against the page limit.
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 -- especially errors that I have noted on previous papers. Return essays (again, as Word documents, not pdfs) to the Sakai dropbox by 11:59 PM, Friday, March 7. I reserve the right to dock papers will one gradepoint for one day’s lateness, a full letter grade after that.
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 mislead voters, but it is taboo to lie to fellow pols.
"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.
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!
Remember for the assignment: Do not rely only on member websites: search for interviews
The Almanac of American Politics 2022 does not have the latest data on House districts. The lines may have changed and members might now represent districts with different numbers.
Holy sh*t. Senator Bennet absolutely annihilated RFK Jr. and exposed him for what he really is—an anti-vaxxer crackpot and grifter. In the pre-Trump era, this would have been the end of his nomination, and he would have withdrawn immediately.pic.twitter.com/Mmu6Ic23Vn
.@SenatorHassan's comments about her own child get at something that's rarely discussed when we talk about Kennedy's anti-vaccine industry and the "autism warrior moms" that power his movement. It's predatory and diverts resources from actual research and treatments. pic.twitter.com/ULxiM4ligS
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.
"Well-bounded": Membership and leadership in the House has been increasingly walled-off. Incumbents tend to serve longer and leadership positions go to the most senior incumbents
"Internally complex": House functions have been regularized and specialized: committees, leadership, staff.
Universalistic: The House now follows impersonal, universal decision criteria rather than particularistic criteria. "Precedents and rules are followed; merit systems replace favoritism and nepotism" (p 145) When the House makes a judgment about a contested election, the decision rests on the case's merits, not on partisan lines.
"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
From Article I, section 2
Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons.
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.
Consequences of the Three-Fifths Clause. From William Lee Miller, Arguing About Slavery:
Five of the first seven presidents were slaveholders [Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, Jackson], for thirty-two of the nation’s first thirty-six years forty of its first forty-eight, fifty of its first sixty four, the nation’s president was a slaveholder. The powerful office of Speaker of the House was held by a slaveholder for twenty-eight of the nation’s first thirty-five years. The president pro tem of the Senate was virtually always a slaveholder. The majority of the cabinet members and — very important — of justices of the Supreme Court were slaveholders. The slaveholding Chief Justice Roger Taney, appointed by slaveholding President Andrew Jackson to succeed the slaveholding John Marshall, would serve all the way through the decades before the war into the years of the Civil War itself; it would be a radical change of the kind slaveholders feared when in 1863, President Lincoln would appoint the anti-slavery politician Salmon P. Chase of Ohio to succeed Taney.
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 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:
Pick any current member of the House or Senate. Tell how this member has explained her or his position on one of the following: DOGE, the Israel-Hamas War, the Ukraine War, abortion, or immigration. With reference to Davidson, ch. 5, analyze how this explanation reflects both the member's constituency and her or his place on Capitol Hill.
Pick chapter 3, 4, or 5 of the Davidson book. Write a brief postscript to update the analysis. That is, what events of the past year should materially change the authors' analysis when they write the next edition?
Essays should reflect an understanding of class readings and discussions. Many resources, including CQ Magazine are at Library/Databases/CQ Library. Consult other sources as well. See, among others:
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).
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 Sakai dropbox for this class by 11:59 PM, Friday, February 7. (If you do not use Sakai, 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.
