Plenty of people know that John F. Kennedy served on the House of Representatives committee that oversees the District of Columbia. But Garrison Nelson is among the few who can tell you, without peeking on the Internet, how many years Kennedy served on that panel: six.
The University of Vermont political scientist also knows how long John McCormack served on the House Ways and Means Committee before being chosen as majority leader (10), and he can say with certainty how many committees the Senate had before its 1921 reorganization (71).
“I’ve got all this information just swirling around in my head,” says Mr. Nelson, who comes by his encyclopedic knowledge honestly. He and a co-author, Charles Stewart, just completed Committees in the U.S. Congress 1993-2010 (CQ Press, 2010), a comprehensive account of who served where during the past 17 years. It is the latest book—and maybe the last—in a seven-volume history of U.S. Congressional committees. Thirty-five years in the making, Mr. Nelson’s collection lists every committee assignment ever made—about 140,000 of them.
He became interested in committee appointments while working on his dissertation in the 1970s. Many of the Congressional leaders of the day had followed similar committee paths on their ascent to power, and Mr. Nelson wondered whether the same patterns had existed throughout American history. He visited the Library of Congress, where he learned that the committee records were scattered and incomplete. When he suggested that he might try to find and organize the documents back to 1789, the librarians said that would be impossible.
“They told me it was too much work, too much information,” he says. “After that it became kind of an obsession.”
The Committees in the U.S. Congress project at times drove Mr. Nelson into a financial hole and left him wondering whether he could turn the mound of material into a complete work. But his stubbornness sustained him, and he eventually produced a career-defining series.
These days Mr. Nelson answers persistent questions from reporters, many of whom want to discuss the political ramifications of a forthcoming or recent election. He rarely finds such questions stimulating because they don’t take advantage of his nuanced perspective on Congress.
Point taken. But what does Mr. Nelson predict for Congress in next week’s election?
A Republican takeover of the House of Representatives seems likely, he says. But unlike the 1994 switch—which he says was mostly a reaction to unethical practices in Congress—this year’s election will reflect voters’ dissatisfaction with President Obama.
And don’t expect the kind of radical changes in the committee system that occurred 16 years ago, when Speaker Newt Gingrich eliminated several panels and renamed others.
“John Boehner doesn’t cast himself in the heroic mold of Newt,” Mr. Nelson says.
While the information contained in his committee records has transformed the way researchers quantitatively analyze Congress, Mr. Nelson also thinks there are human stories in the endless lists of committee members.
“With this kind of information, you can watch as careers unfold,” he says. “You see the moment someone in the House is put on one of the big-three committees: Ways and Means, Appropriations, Rules. That’s the moment they’ve been brought into the inner circle.”
Mr. Nelson says he sometimes wonders whether knowing so much about one subject can skew his perceptions. “My exams, my multiple-choice questions are brutal,” he says.
And he’s probably correct: Expecting his students to know that it was John F. Kennedy’s failure to vote on the Mutual Security Act of 1952, even after speaking on the bill, that drove House leaders to banish him to the low-prestige D.C. committee just might be a little unfair.
Nelson’s Index
Among the political minutiae that swirl in Garrison Nelson’s head:
- Years separating House Speaker Tom Foley’s re-election loss and the previous instance of a speaker’s defeat: 132
- House speakers from Massachusetts, the most of any state: 8
- African-American senators since Reconstruction ended in 1877: 4
- House speakers who have been victims of stabbings: 1 (Frederick Muhlenberg, the first speaker, was stabbed by his brother-in-law in 1795 for casting a tie-breaking vote. He lived.)
- House Democrats on the Select Bipartisan Committee to Investigate the Preparation for and Response to Hurricane Katrina, the only one of 1,700-plus committees with “bipartisan” in its title (and the least bipartisan): 0.
