Opposition to Democratic chairmen shrouded in secrecy, despite reform

Dissatisfaction with a few controversial committee chairmen in the Senate Democratic conference will be kept largely secret despite rules reform requiring them to stand for reelection every two years.

The Senate Democratic conference adopted rules at the end of January requiring chairmen to stand for reelection at the start of each new Congress.

{mosads}But the rules still heavily favor incumbent committee leaders.

The Senate Democratic Steering Committee, which is largely controlled by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.), will continue to recommend appointments for chairmanships.

Those recommendations will now require automatic ratification through a secret-ballot vote by the Democratic conference, according to Senate Democratic sources familiar with the reform.

But the results of the election will remain mostly secret, according to two Senate Democratic sources familiar with the matter.

Only the Democratic leader and the chairmen themselves will know how many colleagues registered disapproval with a chairman, according to a Senate Democratic source.

The point of the reform, which was pushed by junior senators such as Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), was to give lawmakers a way to express dissatisfaction if a chairman is not meeting their expectations.

“If I’m a committee chair and let’s say 10 or 12 people vote against me, I’m going to wonder: ‘What am I doing wrong?’ I might start asking around,” said a Democratic senator who supported the effort.

The rest of the caucus will only know that a chairman faces broad opposition if a majority of the conference votes against him. In that case, the unpopular chairman must step down, opening the post for a successor.

In recent years, the recommendations of the Senate Democratic Steering Committee have rarely received ratification by the entire conference. The old rules required Democratic senators to hold a secret-ballot vote just to authorize a second secret vote to approve the chairmen.

A senior Democratic senator said the caucus hadn’t actually voted on chairmen in years.

“It hasn’t been that way since George Mitchell was majority leader,” said the lawmaker, in reference to former Sen. George Mitchell (D-Maine), who served as majority leader from 1989 to 1995.

Reid has controlled the appointment of chairmen.

The Steering Committee “doesn’t even make the recommendations, the majority leader does,” said the senator.

Senate Democrats are still in the midst of debating changes to their conference rules. The proposal to subject chairmen to election by secret ballot was the most significant reform.

New procedures for selecting committee chairmanships were approved in advance because Reid and Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) wanted to announce the organizing resolution for the 112th Congress.

The resolution named committee chairmen and committee membership.

Reid managed to settle a disagreement between Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) over who should chair the Senate appropriations subcommittee with authority over homeland security. Both claimed a right to the gavel.

Landrieu will serve as chairman and Lautenberg will fill the post of vice chairman.

Homeland Security is the only appropriations subcommittee with two leadership positions, according to a roster of assignments issued Friday.

The question of which committee chairmen were the targets of the reform push was a topic of intense speculation last month.

Some aides said it was Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D-Mont.) because of lingering distrust over the deal he cut with Republicans over tax cuts in 2001; others said it was Senate Homeland Security Chairman Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.), who endorsed the Republican presidential nominee in 2008. The name of Senate Banking Committee Chairman Tim Johnson (D-S.D.) was also floated.

A spokesman for Lieberman said the rumors of dissatisfaction with his chairmanship are unfounded.

“There was a secret ballot to ratify the slate of chairmen and Sen. Lieberman was approved by the caucus. Sometimes an unnamed ‘aide’ will hide behind a cloak of anonymity to make a completely false and unfounded allegation,” Lieberman spokesman Marshall Wittmann said.

It’s difficult to know with any certainty which chairman the junior senators might be dissatisfied with. Publicly they insisted they did not intend to pressure any particular chairman, and even privately, they argued it was an issue of good governance and not an act of vengeance.