The Top Line
This week’s edition dives into some key happenings in Congress and beyond. First up is the Senate Republican leadership elections, where there’s a power struggle as factions try to control the timing of the vote to control its outcomes. In the House, Republicans are also gearing up for leadership elections, while House Democrats have uncontested top spots. Jared Golden is trying to bring back the Blue Dogs coalition in the House, which could be a savvy move if he can keep the group united to take advantage of a divided political landscape.
On the tech and transparency front, the Supreme Court of Mexico is using AI to help the public understand court decisions, which is interesting because an authoritative source is using technology to provide summaries of key information. We also celebrate GovTrack’s 20th anniversary, a key tool for tracking Congress, and cover the ongoing digitization of the U.S. Congressional Serial Set to improve access to committee records. Other highlights include concerns about Congress’s security amid potential threats and a look at how using a different lens for budget scoring can change the outcomes for debate over various policies, such as immigration.
Factions
The Senate Republican power struggle is ably summarized by Ursula Perano in POLITICO’s Inside Congress newsletter, reporting the date of Senate GOP leadership elections are not yet set while “some on the right flank” are pushing to delay voting on future leadership. The first rule of voting is you hold the vote when you think you can win, so this provides a useful state of play. POLITICO has done a good job of digging up senatorial dear colleagues arguing for various changes in the conference rules. We’ve aggregated links to those letters here. Punchbowl reported the Senate Republican conference election is currently scheduled to take place the week of November 11, likely the 13th or 14th, and will take place via secret ballot.
House Leadership elections. House Republicans plan on holding their leadership elections the week of November 12th; incoming freshmen will be in town November 12-22, per Punchbowl. House Democrats have not yet decided when to hold their elections. Unlike their GOP counterparts, the top three Democratic leadership spots are uncontested, with competition for the role of vice chair and a few other open spots.
Senate Democrats are anticipated to hold their leadership elections in early December.
Jared Golden seeks to revive the Blue Dogs in the House, as Garrett Downs explains in POLITICO. In a narrowly divided House, it is a power-savvy move, but only if you can hold the coalition together and prevent free-riders. That requires internal secrecy, binding votes, a formal organization, the clever exercise of group leverage for individual benefit, and a willingness to punish dissenters. Ruth Bloch Rubin explained how Blue Dogs made in-between-ism powerful in the 1990s in her book “Building the Bloc” in the chapter “making moderates matter.” Ultimately, any centrist-y group must be willing to kill Democratic proposals and join with the Republicans.
Thank you, Wade
House Legislative Counsel Wade Ballou resigned from his position, effective November 3, 2024. Warren Burke will succeed him. The Library of Congress published an interview with Ballou this past week. Ballou served in the office of Legislative Counsel, which drafts laws for members of Congress, since 1983. He has served as Legislative Counsel since 2016. Only eight people have held that role, and he served with four of them.
I’ve known Wade for more than a dozen years, and you will not meet a nicer or more thoughtful person. His service on the Congressional Data Task Force, building the Comparative Print Suite (which shows how a bill would change the law), and modernizing legislative drafting has led to a transformation of the work of the House of Representatives and favorably affected parliaments worldwide. He is always thoughtful about preserving the human element while simultaneously modernizing the technology that supports lawmaking.
Artificial Intelligence and Lawmaking
The Supreme Court of Mexico is using artificial intelligence to answer questions from the public about decisions made by the high court, including providing summaries and analyses of the cases before it. The website, Sor Juana, is in Spanish, but you can ask your questions in other languages. Select a case on the left (selecciona el asunto) and ask away. So far, the website answers questions about particular cases, but they told me they plan on widening the model to ask questions about black letter law and a series of cases. There’s significant work behind the scenes to validate the answers given to the public and train the AI to avoid hallucinating. More info (in English) from Mexico Business News.
Parliaments and evidence-based lawmaking was the focus of a conference hosted in Rome this past week. I wasn’t able to attend, but I did find myself nodding along to the precis: “A parliament’s ability to prepare and conduct evidence-based scrutiny of government-introduced draft laws is also hugely dependent on government legislative planning and coordination quality.” The OECD Library has a report on how countries in the Balkans scrutinize draft laws, and I’m wondering if we have a similar overview of how things work in the US.
Congressional security
Former President Trump and his allies have been assiduously laying the groundwork for another coup attempt. POLITICO works through the implications for Congress, including for member security, organizing the House of Representatives under a Speaker for the 119th Congress, and instigating chaos to prompt a contingent election.
Don’t expect much help from Sen. McConnell. Despite his privately-expressed personal distaste for the former president, “we are all on the same team now.” This is a chance to re-up my favorite article on Sen. McConnell, written by noted historian Christopher R. Browning, who described McConnell as the gravedigger of democracy.
The US Capitol Police have shuffled around their IG reports webpage, shifting the order in which the reports are published and adding some of the dates the reports were released. Reports are now listed in order of report number by year, with audit and investigative reports separated. This is a useful step towards organizing the webpage. It would be helpful to include the reports by title that are not yet publicly available (with a notation of their unavailability), for these reports to be published on oversight.gov, and for the establishment of a listserv or some other notification system so that interested parties can be notified when new reports are leased.
Improving continuity of Congress is the subject of a blogpost by Joshua Manuel Bonet.
Public access to legislative information
Happy birthday, Govtrack. For two decades, Josh Tauberer has run GovTrack.us, the premier non-governmental website for the public to monitor the work of Congress. Serving one million unique visitors each month, Govtrack was the first website to provide public access to legislative data in a structured format (APIs), the first to have stable URLs, the first to publish a unified calendar for House and Senate hearings, the first to allow users to receive legislative alerts, the first to identify related legislation, the first to send a newsletter on what’s happening this week in Congress, the first to publish every law enacted by Congress, and more.
Its main competition at the start was THOMAS, the Library of Congress’s former website that for much of its existence was unwilling to innovate, respond to requests from the public, or publish data in a useful format. Fortunately, the Library now has Congress.gov, an elegant website that offers the vast majority of the services previously provided by GovTrack, including empowering other websites to use its data.
Anyone familiar with the congressional technology development cycle knows that GovTrack’s proof of concept for various capabilities was essential to stoking demand and de-risking their development and incorporation into Congress.gov. Josh played a key role in 2007 and in 2011 to encourage the Library to become a data provider, and he has been a key participant on the Congressional Data Task Force since its founding. (Check out this old C-Span clip.)
It is amazing what Josh has been able to run in his spare time, funded largely out of his own pocket. But Josh knows what all of us in civil society know: for this kind of project to endure, it needs stable funding and institutional backing. I’ve long been afraid of what would happen if he stepped in front of a bus. To that end, Josh hopes to eventually retire Govtrack and have it be replaced/succeeded by Congress.gov. In fact, he’s been threatening to retire the site for years. But first, there’s a few features he’d like to see.
Serial set. GPO announced the Law Library of Congress has digitized and GPO has provided metadata for another 3,000 volumes containing the historic official collection of reports and documents of the United States Congress, known as the serial set. For anyone who ever has wanted to find an old committee report – if you read this newsletter, it’s probably you – the serial set is where you find them. (Or you can pay for access, but they should be free and provided online by the government, right?)
The collection goes back to the year 1817 – here are all the volumes currently available – and so far 7,000 volumes have been scanned and another 11,000 are remaining. The Federal Depository Library Program is keeping track of the status on this handy dashboard. Per GPO, the entire effort is expected to take at least a decade to complete, but as of press time I could not get a clear answer as to when the clock started – or when it’s expected to end. The project was announced in 2019. I would hope that the digitization would prioritize more recent volumes, but I think the focus has been older volumes.
The destruction of the US Capitol and generally shoddy record keeping prompted the creation of the serial set. Earlier documents are known as the American State Papers and appear to be available from the Library of Congress. Note that the serial set doesn’t include committee prints and hearings. Wikipedia has a surprisingly good page on the history of these documents.
Dynamic scoring
A new Brookings paper analyzes how policy making would change if the Congressional Budget Office and the Joint Committee on Taxation were to include dynamic scoring as part of their budgetary analysis. Among its authors are a former head of CBO, a former chair of the Council of Economic Advisors, and a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research.
When CBO and JCT analyze legislation, they model some but not all of the likely economic outcomes. Generally speaking, they ignore the “likely effects on levels of labor, capital, productivity,” as well as any feedback effects from those changes. Providing this information consistently and in the timeframe that policy makers would want can be challenging, but the authors argue it is possible in some areas.
In most circumstances, the effect on the aggregate economy is sufficiently small that dynamic scoring can be ignored by policymakers. However, the effect on the budget estimate for a proposal can be significant.
For example, the authors play through the costs/benefits of increasing immigration for highly skilled immigrants. A conventional analysis takes into account the costs of federal benefits for which immigrants are legally eligible, such as health care insurance. However, it does not include the income and payroll tax revenue generated. This can have a huge effect. Take a provision in the America Competes Act that would have increased the availability of green cards. The conventional score said the provision would cost the federal government $3.1 billion over ten years. But when you include the expected increase in population, employment, and taxable income, it is estimated that it would actually generate $110 billion in revenue over the same period.
This issue plays out in other areas as well, although they are not explored in the paper at the same level of detail as immigration. The authors suggest that CBO/JCT would need to do significant work to build models that could then be applied on a more rapid basis to various kinds of analyses. They also explain that expanding dynamic scoring will involve “tradeoffs regarding time, resources, accuracy, and comparability.”
CBO’s methodology has been concerning folks across the political spectrum for some time. Matt Yglesias wrote in Vox in 2015 that dynamic scoring has been used as a trojan horse for conservatives to make dubious claims about tax cuts. He does not argue that dynamic scoring is faulty, but rather “many conservatives want these budget estimates to say that large tax cuts will have a relatively small impact on the deficit — or even that they make the deficit smaller. These are ideas that have little support in the academic literature, but have been important to conservative politics for decades.”
A 2023 article in the American Prospect lays out concerns with the rules under which CBO provides its estimates as well as the assumptions that go into the estimates. As the TAP article lays out, CBO scores are perceived as emphasizing “the costs, though not the benefits, of major legislation.” There’s also the politics around CBO scoring, which is what Yglesias pointed to.
The new Brookings paper steps gingerly around the tax cut questions, pointing to where a limited expansion of dynamic scoring at the microeconomic level might provide legislators with more information that they would want to know about the likely consequences of their policies. So long as the CBO score is a guide to policy makers and not a procrustean barrier to policy making, this can be a good thing.
Staff pay and numbers
House Democrats pay junior staff significantly more than Republicans. On average, Democratic staff assistants earn 12% more, legislative correspondents earn 11% more, legislative assistants earn 2% more. Republican chiefs of staff earn 3% more and deputy chiefs of staff earn 4% more, according to Legistorm.
What should be done to address staffing issues? A 2021 House IG report recommends pay parity with Executive branch salaries. This includes: (1) building in an annual COLA component to the Clerk-Hire calculation of the MRA; (2) developing pay banding for key member office positions; (3) linking the staff salary cap to SES level II salary changes. The report also recommends immediately increasing the number of permitted permanent staff to 25 (it’s currently 18), and ultimately eliminating the statutory limits on staffing in Member offices.
The report does not address committee staff, but Zach Graves and I recommended a 30% increase in staffing for House committees in our recommendations to update the rules of the House of Representatives.
Executive branch
The Open Government Federal Advisory Committee will hold its inaugural substantive meeting on Wednesday. You can attend in person or virtually. For more about the committee, visit their website. Wish me luck. 🙂
It’s time to fire or discipline SEC Inspector General Carl Hoecker, recommends the Integrity Committee of the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency (CIGIE). You know it’s bad when other inspectors general recommend your firing. The Integrity Committee concluded “IG Hoecker abused his authority … and engaged in conduct that undermines the independence and integrity reasonably expected of an IG, including a lack of candor.”
Odds and Ends
Three proposals to optimize the House calendar, from the Bipartisan Policy Center. “Our proposed 2025 House calendar provides for 20 additional full session days and 18 fewer travel days.” BPC also proposes block scheduling, which if used would have “reduced the potential for conflicts during the 118th Congress by 85%.”
Kevin Kosar corrects the record for the Washington Post, which overlooked civil society’s longstanding efforts to fix Congress when a recent column myopically focused on the work of a former Post business reporter. My research suggests that Congressional reform often is most successful when the press pays close attention and gets the details right.
I suspect that he would approve more of Paul Kane’s recent opinion piece, at least to the extent that moments of change, such as this one, provide an opportunity for reform.
What’s in your information diet?
