Musical Chairmanships

BooMan games out where the Democratic Senate leadership will go with trying to fill the shoes of the late Sen. Kennedy.

Understanding the congressional committees is real inside baseball stuff. But it matters a lot who controls which committees. For example, the fact that Max Baucus is the chair of the Finance Committee is greatly complicating Obama's efforts to pass a health care reform bill. Now that Teddy Kennedy has passed on, the Senate is about to embark on a game of musical committee chairs. How it plays out will have consequences, so I want to run through it for you.

You may have noticed that Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) ushered the health care bill through the Senate Health, Education, Labor, & Pensions (HELP) Committee. He did that both because he was Kennedy's best friend and because he is the second highest ranking member of the committee. That means that Dodd has the first right of refusal on taking over the chair of HELP. That must be an attractive choice because Dodd's reelection prospects are looking quite sketchy due to the fact that he was the chair of the Senate Banking Committee in 2007-8 and didn't do anything to avert the financial meltdown. Taking over HELP will allow him to move on, and attract the support of teachers, nurses, and other members of labor movement. If health care reform passes, he'll be able to take a lot of the credit.

But Dodd is vulnerable in 2010, and things get a lot more complex and complicated. Traditionally, the full committees have one chair, and a Senator is not traditionally allowed to chair more than one full committee. Dodd could jump to HELP from Banking, and from there, things get messy.

To summarize, Dodd and Lincoln are two of the most vulnerable Senate Democrats who will be facing the voters in 2010. Dodd can help himself by moving from Banking to HELP. If he stays at Banking, he helps Lincoln by letting her get a hold of the chair of Agriculture. If Dodd leaves Banking, the duties there will fall to either Tim Johnson (bad) or Jack Reed (good). And Kennedy will be replaced by either Dodd, Harkin, or Mikulski (all of whom are satisfactory).

And, no, we can't make any difference in how this shakes out. It's all inside baseball.

We'll see how it shakes out, and I wholeheartedly agree all this does matter, like BooMan says, you have to look no further than Max Baucus to see that.