The Daily Signal - Behind the Scenes of How Congress Really Works, Series Pt. 3

Episode Date: September 1, 2023

Committees and hearings play a critical role in the operations of Congress. But how are members assigned to committees? And do congressional hearings actually advance legislation and investigations? Kyle Brosnan, chief counsel for The Heritage Foundation's Oversight Project, goes beneath the surface in today's edition of "The Daily Signal Podcast" to explain how Congress really works and the critical role Capitol Hill staff play in those operations. (The Daily Signal is the news outlet of The Heritage Foundation.) Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Siddell podcast for Friday, September 1st. I'm Virginia Allen. Today is the third and final installment for our series on how Congress really works. And we're pulling back the curtain on committees and the purpose of hearings today with Chief Counsel for the Heritage Foundation Oversight Project, Kyle Brosnan. And Kyle, you have had multiple stints working on Capitol Hill. You've also worked for the Trump administration. talk for a moment first, if you would, just a little bit about some of the roles that you had on Capitol Hill. Sure, and thank you very much for having me.

So I started as an intern as an undergraduate. I worked for a congressman from New York in his personal office, answering phones, doing the mail, helping out with letter writing, stuff like that. And that's sort of where I got hooked for wanting to work on the Hill. So I returned to the Hill in law school where I served as a law clerk to Senator John McCain on the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. My last year of law school and shortly after graduation, and after the Republicans took the Senate back after the 2014 elections, was lucky enough to get hired on as a council for the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee under Senator Ron Johnson when he started his chairmanship there. Worked for him for about four years. Went into the Trump administration at both Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Health and Human Services, mainly responding to congressional oversight.

So preparing for hearings and answering letter from the executive branch side. And then after the Trump administration went back to Capitol Hill as chief counsel for the permanent subcommittee on investigations for Senator Johnson there for the last Congress. And I joined Heritage here in February. And we're very glad to have you. And it's great to have someone with your expertise who has been in the weeds of Congress, who's been in the weeds of committees and hearings and understanding how all those things work. So I'm really glad that we get to dive into that with you today. We had Clint Brown on the show yesterday to talk a little bit about the passage of bills and spending and how that works on a congressional front. But let's start today by talking a little bit about committees.

Give us the big picture. What is the point of congressional committees? So the point is that Congress has a very wide jurisdiction. They have a lot to do on their to do list as the Article 1 legislative branch to write laws for the country. So what the committees do is help Congress focus on a particular subject matters for legislation. And so House and Senate rules will create committees and give them what's called legislative jurisdiction. And basically those committees will have the authority to write laws that touch on topics within their jurisdiction. And typically the members of those committees are drawn from people.

that have subject matter expertise in their backgrounds or through their work in Congress. And so, for example, the Armed Services Committee is charged with writing laws affecting the Department of Defense, the military. That's why you see a lot of veterans on that committee and representatives that represent military installations and stuff like that. And so when a piece of legislation, a bill is introduced by a member, the parliamentarian will refer that bill to a committee for the legislative jurisdiction that it has. And so the committee will then sort of amend that bill and work it through the committee process before it's then referred to the full floor for consideration and of a potential vote.

They also have oversight jurisdiction, investigatory jurisdiction as well. But all of the sort of rules of the road and what each committee can and can't do is laid out in the House and Senate rules. Okay, okay. So it's a key stepping stone for bills passing and becoming laws that you have committees. They receive them. They look at them. They do more of the parsing out. there are often quite a lot of back and forth of maybe a member has presented and said,

you know, I want this specific bill, maybe related to agriculture and how farmers operate in some capacity. But then, you know, someone in a neighboring state who's also on the committee says, well, that's really going to harm folks in my district. So can we change it in this way? What are, what does some of that back and forth look like? So oftentimes you will see members introduce bills that get referred to committees that they serve on. Okay. Because they will have a much more leading role in sort of formulating the policy as it goes through the committee process. Now, it happens all the time, too, that people will write bills that get referred to other committees,

and then the staff will have to work with the committee staff of that committee to advocate for the policy or work with the staff to get it passed eventually. But more often than not, successful pieces of legislation tend to be written by members that are on the committee that is pushing through the legislation. Okay, that makes sense. And how do members get assigned to their committees? Do they have any say when they're elected to Congress of, I would love to serve on this committee? And is that heard? So, yeah, so each House and Senate has different rules and each party has different rules. So speaking for as Republicans, as a Republican conference, you're sort of they rank committees as sort of A and B committees. And you're only allowed to serve in the Senate, I believe, on one A committee. So that's the really powerful. committees. Think Senate finance, the tax running committee, the Senate Judiciary Committee,

the Senate Help Committee, a banking committee, stuff like that. And then so most members will put in for an A committee or a couple of eight committees and seek a waiver, and then they'll also be allowed to serve on, you know, lesser, lesser committees, B committees that don't have sort of the big powerhouse jurisdiction behind it. So senators will typically serve on anywhere between three and five committees apiece. House members, since there's more of them, will tend to to serve on only one or two, maybe three in the rare instance. And so the committee assignments are doled out at the beginning of every Congress. The leaders of each parties will typically determine who sits on what committee.

And the makeup of the committees are determined by the size of the majority of whomever controls each chamber. And so Republicans now hold the majority in the House, so they will have more Republican members on House committees than Democratic members. members, Democrats control the Senate, so there'll be more Democrat members on committees than Republican members. But the margins were also determined by the majority. So last Congress from the Senate was 50-50, there was actually an equal amount of senators

on each committee from each party. And so they devised the rule. Leader McConnell and Leader Schumer came to an agreement on passing legislation for tied votes through the committee process to sort of keep the operations running. But the membership is determined, you know, the number of. for each side to determine by the size of the majority in each chamber. Interesting. How many committees are in the House and how many are in the Senate roughly?

Probably around a dozen apiece. Okay, okay. You know, plus or minus five. But they tend to sort of overlap. Okay. They have Judiciary Committee is in both chambers and they will oversee, you know, criminal law, the courts, immigration. The Senate Finance Committee is the tax writing committee. So that's sort of spread across a couple of committees at Ways and Means Committee in the House,

but they might have some financial services jurisdiction as well. There's generally banking committees. There was a big reorganization after 9-11 with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. So now there's a separate Homeland Security Committee in the House, whereas in the Senate, they combined the Homeland Security Committee with the Oversight Committee, so that's all housed in one. There's two agriculture committees. There's, again, the House's financial services, it's Senate banking. housing, houses energy and commerce, which affects all of health care.

The Senate equivalent is the Help Committee, Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions. And so it's sort of an acronym word salad to figure out sort of what the Senate equivalent is to each House committee, but there is overlap on all of them. Okay. Okay. Now, you mentioned some communities being much more powerful than others. Is there one committee that everyone wants to be on? maybe finance, that if there's one committee to be on, that is the committee. So I think it depends a lot on each individual senator's background.

Generally speaking, finance is a desirable committee, but for folks with a big legal background, right? So, you know, the Judiciary Committee would be a target. So I think somebody like Senator Cruz, who's, you know, a former Supreme Court Kirk and Solicitor General of Texas, or Senator Hawley, who's another former Supreme Court clerk, where they're in their bailiwick, right in their, or Senator Leagues, as well as well, you know, the best legal minds we have in the Senate are going to want to be on the Judiciary Committee because they're charged with things like confirming judges, including Supreme Court judges,

running criminal law, running immigration law. And so you need somebody with a very strong legal background, you don't need it, but it would be, it's helpful. It's helpful to have that on a committee, like the Judiciary Committee. If you have someone with the banking background or financial services background, they'd be very well suited on the banking or the Financial Services Committee. But in the Senate, definitely finance judiciary help for the Health Committee or probably three big target ones. Okay, okay. Now, committees, of course, hold hearings, sometimes on a very frequent basis, sometimes less frequent, depending upon the committee.

What role do hearings play in the legislative process? So there's a couple of sort of buckets I'll put hearings into. The first is to sort of have, you know, policy hearings. So they'll have, you know, we are debating a bill that does, you know, ABC. Is it good for the country? You know, a question that the legislative branch should be asking. And what they'll do is they'll bring policy experts, including, you know, folks from the Heritage Foundation up, to discuss sort of the benefits or the drawbacks of how a particular piece of legislation has been written,

or other factors to consider in implementing a policy. Second is more oversight, but it's related to legislate, is they will call up the head of an agency. So the Homeland Security Committee will call up DHS Secretary of Mayorkas to see and assess how the secretary is enforcing immigration laws. And if he's not doing a good job, which he obviously isn't at this point in time, they will hold him accountable and consider whether we need to pass new laws to tighten immigration enforcement.

or, you know, alter the funding that the agency receives. Stuff like that. And then the third kind of bucket I have is sort of investigatory or releasing information. So all of these committees have oversight and investigatory jurisdiction. Many of them are conducting longer-term investigations into, you know, misfeasions or malfeasants in the federal government or misfeasance or malfeasions by a private company. And they'll hold a hearing to sort of release that information to inform debates of determining whether or not new laws need to be passed. So the House Transportation Infrastructure Committee, for example, did a very big investigation into the Boeing 737 Max crashes. So they got millions of documents from Boeing, called the CEO up to testify, and sort of revealed the results of their investigation,

questioned the CEO of the company about that, and then assessed whether or not legislation was needed to sort of fix the problems they found there. How much do you think hearings move the ball forward, whether it's on a piece of legislation or it's on. an investigation versus how much is that ball moving forward happening behind closed doors? So on the investigatory front, a lot of it is a staff-driven endeavor. I personally don't think that the sort of show trial hearings move the ball well unless you sort of do the legwork on the back end to sort of prove your case and present it. you know, bringing up witnesses and questioning them before you have documents, for example, does not lead to a good hearing because the witness can just evade,

and then your members kind of just look foolish up there. And so the way I like to structure my investigations when I was on the hill is to do a ton of legwork behind the scenes, request my documents, send my subpoena, sometimes publicly, sometimes quietly, conduct my interviews with witnesses and sort of lay the traps. potential perjury traps or sort of make the case behind the scenes, write the report, and then release the report with the hearing and sort of make the case through the hearing with the witness. And sort of you could have a friendly witness that kind of corroborates what you find in your

investigation or you could have a hostile witness who may disagree, but at least, you know, you'll have the legwork done to sort of back up your point. And so the hearing becomes more so the ceiling of the deal as opposed to the impetus or part of maybe the proof. Right, yeah, for a long-term investigatory hearing, certainly. On sort of shorter-term oversight hearings, you know, if there's an emergency, like border security, you need to get the witness in the chair immediately, that might move the ball because, you know, if there's a crisis happening, then certainly speed is very important.

You know, but then again, there's also just legislative and policy hearings as well that the experts come up, and those are fruitful because if, you know, if the committee is seeking or exploring bipartisan legislation to fix something, then bringing the experts in and discussing the benefits and drawbacks of the policy certainly have its benefits and can and does move the ball. Yeah, that makes sense, having the right opportunity to have that public format. What is something that you wish more people understood about how Congress really works that you think most people just aren't aware of?

That's a good question. I think that the staff does a ton of work behind the scenes that the general public doesn't necessarily sort of know about. It's not all done by the member. It's not all done by the member. A ton of it's done by the staff. So if you're holding a hearing, for example, and you're in the majority and you're sort of the lead staffer on it, you may have three witnesses that testify. But you have to, at least the way I did it was I would vet anywhere between. five and 10 witnesses and hear their story, kind of talk through what they want to say,

and then present options to the chairman and say, hey, you know, here's the 10 people we talk to. I think these three would be good, but here's what other ones of, you know, other people would say, it's up to you who you want to call. But that requires, you know, hours upon hours on hours of legwork behind the scenes to sort of, you know, get to the point to where it's ready to go on TV. And so it's the best job I've ever had on the Hill. I love it. I love this, but it's a lot of hours. Your families make a lot of sacrifices and sort of your service to the country here. And, you know, you're kind of nameless and faceless and sort of underappreciated kind of behind the scenes, but that's what we sign up for. And so it's, there's a lot of sausage making to get to the point of what the public sees on C-SPAN is probably what I would say. Yeah, yeah. Well, Kyle, thank you so much for your time today. Thanks for your expertise for your willingness to serve both on Capitol Hill and now.

here at the Heritage Foundation. We really appreciate it. Thank you very much for having me. And for all of our listeners, thanks for being a part of our How Congress Really Works podcast series. If you didn't catch the previous two episodes, make sure you go back and listen to our episodes on Wednesday and Thursday. And if you have never gotten a chance to listen to our evening show, make sure that you check that out. It's right here in the same podcast feed. We're every day around 5 p.m. We bring you the top news of the day. Those are the headlines that you don't want to miss. And also, take a moment to subscribe.

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