As Democrats take control of the U.S. House and Senate, Virginia may be a new focus of power in terms of being home to chairmen of influential committees.
Senator Mark Warner is in line to become chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Congressman Bobby Scott may be returning as chair of the House Education and Workforce Committee. Mark Rozell is dean of the Schar School at George Mason University, and he says committee chairmen have an outsized influence on Capitol Hill.
"It gives them a great deal of control over certain areas of the legislative process where they can push through legislation more successfully," Rozell says. "They can also be a stopgap against certain legislative ideas."
But are committee chairmen as powerful as they used to be? Rich Meagher at Randolph Macon College says they had more mojo in the era of the earmark.
"I don't know that we have quite the same kind of pork barrel politics that we used to have," Meagher says. "Like in the New Deal era, where having a powerful committee chairman meant they were bringing the bacon home to their district."
Warner's path to the chairmanship of the Senate Intel Committee is pretty clear, but Bobby Scott is facing some opposition. Democrats will be making determinations about who is leading which committees will be made in the next few weeks during the lame duck session of the 119th Congress.
