Episode 14: Who’s the Boss of Congress?
(photo by Kitty Felde)
For all practical purposes, the Speaker of the House is the boss on Capitol Hill. Should something happen to the President and Vice President, the Speaker assumes the Oval Office.
The Speaker is also the boss of members of Congress from the political party that holds the most seats in the House of Representatives. In the Fina Mendoza series, Republicans are in the majority party. Papa is a Democrat. So Papa’s boss would be the Minority Leader.
The Speaker and the Minority Leader are elected at the start of each new session of Congress by members of their own political party, called a caucus.
The duties include directing their party’s strategy for getting legislation passed. It’s also their job to make sure there are enough votes to make it happen. They get a little counting help from a handful of members known as “whips.” (Fina insists that she could never be a whip, since she hates math.)
It’s also up to leadership to decide which members from their party get seated on which committees. And who gets removed from a committee. Some committees are considered more desirable than others. Sitting on the Financial Services Committee, for example, can attract contributions from banks and other financial institutions.
(House Rules Committee, photo by Kitty Felde)
The Speaker and Minority Leader are also in charge getting their members re-elected.
In 2021, an off year for elections, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy raised $13.2 million in campaign contributions. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi raised $12.3 million. Holding the purse strings gives them an enormous amount of power. Leadership decides which candidate to share funds with and who to punish. They can also make personal appearances to help raise funds for selected candidates.
(photo by Kitty Felde)
So if Papa makes his “boss” angry, he could be thrown off a committee, his proposed legislation could get stalled, or he could get little or no help in his re-election.
The fiction inspired by the facts:
In Episode 14 of The Fina Mendoza Mysteries, Congressman Arturo Mendoza scolds his mother for participating in an immigration protest at the U.S. Capitol - and then going on TV to talk about it. This at a time when he has been appointed to a bipartisan group negotiating immigration reform legislation.
“You have to let me do my job,” he tells Abuelita. “Talking to TV reporters makes that impossible. Do you know how upset leadership was when that TV interview aired? I got called into the Minority Leader’s office like I was an eighth grader caught smoking in the boy’s bathroom.”
He also refers to the Minority Leader as his “boss.”