Wisconsin legislators short on experience
State has no committee chair in US Congress
When Jim Sensenbrenner retired last month, Wisconsin’s congressional delegation lost 42 years of experience.
When Paul Ryan retired two years ago, out went the speaker of the House.
When Tom Petri retired six years ago, 36 years of seniority went with him.
When Dave Obey retired 10 years ago, a congressional titan four decades in the making was gone.
For a state that has provided Congress with more than its share of elders and power brokers, this is an unusual moment.
For the first time in a quarter-century, not a single congressional committee chair hails from Wisconsin.
The average tenure of Wisconsin’s 10 federal lawmakers is now less than eight years, making this the state’s least experienced congressional delegation in more than 60 years.
At the end of 2010, the members of Congress from Wisconsin combined for a staggering 196 years in office (meaning the average member had served 20 years). Today, they have a combined 79 years on the job.
The change is especially striking on the Republican side. The state’s five GOP House members have served six years (Glenn Grothman), four years (Mike Gallagher), two years (Bryan Steil), less than one year (Tom Tiffany) and about a month (Scott Fitzgerald).
Only two U.S. House members from Wisconsin have served more than 10 years: Democrats Ron Kind (24 years) and Gwen Moore (16 years). A third Democrat, Mark Pocan, has been in office eight years.
Does this mean Wisconsin is powerless when it comes to getting help from Congress?
No. Its two senators, Republican Ron Johnson and Democrat Tammy Baldwin, are starting to build seniority in their second terms, and Baldwin sits
on the appropriations committee, which has the power of the purse. In the House, the state’s three most senior members all belong to the majority party (the Democrats) and serve on powerful committees: Appropriations (Pocan), and Ways and Means (Kind and Moore).
But it does mean that when it comes to one of the traditional paths to influence in the U.S. Capitol — longevity — Wisconsin’s congressional delegation is lacking compared to previous decades and compared to Congress as a whole.
“The only ‘gray beard’ now is Ron Kind,” Sensenbrenner said in an interview last month shortly after he left office. The 77-year-old Republican had the second-longest tenure in the House when he retired.
Asked what this lack of seniority means for the state’s influence in Congress, Sensenbrenner said, “it depends upon who has an ‘in’ with leadership… and knows how to present things to leadership.”
Congress has become less senioritydriven as party leaders have centralized control and taken power away from committees. Unlike Democrats, Republicans impose term limits on its committee chairs, meaning longevity is not as critical to becoming a committee chair when the GOP is in the majority. That’s how Johnson became a committee chairman in his first term.
Top: Republican U.S. Reps. Mike Gallagher, left, and Glenn Grothman. Bottom: Republican U.S. Reps. Bryan Steil, left, Scott Fitzgerald, center, and Tom Tiffany. JOURNAL SENTINEL FILES
“Seniority isn’t the most valuable commodity in the world,” the retired Obey said in an interview, noting that he vaulted over more senior Democrats when he became chair of the powerful appropriations panel, which made him a singular force in steering federal funds back to his state in the era before earmarks were eliminated. But not all veteran lawmakers see that as their role, or are effective at it, he said.
You can “mistake longevity for effectiveness,” Obey said. But while seniority isn’t everything, “is certainly something,“he said.
Whatever you think about the merits of experience versus “new blood” in Washington, longevity still figures into how Congress works, from formal power (chairmanships) to legislative knowhow and relationship-building.
“Seniority is important,” said Tom
Schreibel, Sensenbrenner’s longtime chief of staff. “Wisconsin has been very blessed on both sides of the aisle to have senior members to ascend to chair or ranking member (meaning the top member of the minority party on a committee).”
Wisconsin’s long history of leaders
Wisconsin has gone through cycles of seniority and clout in Congress, boasting a long list of committee chairs over the past 50 years.
That includes Democrats Henry Reuss (House banking chair), Clem Zablocki (House foreign affairs chair) and Bill Proxmire (Senate banking chair) in the 1970s and 1980s; Democrat Les Aspin (House armed services chair) in the 1980s and early 1990s; Democrat Obey (the top House Democrat on appropriations from 1995 to 2011); Republican Sensenbrenner (who chaired the House judiciary panel from 2001 to 2007); Republican Ryan (who chaired the House budget panel and then the ways and means committee between 2011 and 2015 and was House Speaker from 2015 to 2019); and Republican Johnson (whose six-year tenure as chair of the Senate homeland security panel just ended).
Others, such as Democrat Herb Kohl, Republican Petri and Democrat Bob Kastenmeier, used their seniority and committee assignments to serve Wisconsin’s parochial interests on things like dairy policy, transportation funding and research money for the University of Wisconsin.
The collective longevity of the Wisconsin delegation peaked in the decade of the 2000s, when Kohl and Russ Feingold were piling up seniority in the Senate, and Ryan, Baldwin, Kind, Sensenbrenner, Petri and Obey represented the state in the House.
But with House Republicans Petri, Ryan, Sean Duffy and Sensenbrenner all leaving office over the past six years, the delegation lost 108 years of seniority, leaving Grothman the most senior House Republican from Wisconsin — at a mere six years.
The last time Wisconsin Republicans had so little seniority was at the start of Sensenbrenner’s long congressional career, back in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Sensenbrenner was first elected to Congress in November of 1978. A month later, Wisconsin’s only returning House Republican, Bill Steiger, died at 40 of a heart attack. That made Sensenbrenner and Toby Roth the state’s most senior House Republicans the moment they took office, and Sensenbrenner remained so for the next 42 years. Petri was elected to fill Steiger’s seat and served 36 years.
Some of the state’s current junior lawmakers could go on to long careers.
But it seems unlikely that any of them will match Sensenbrenner or Obey or even Petri in longevity, which requires taking office at a young age, desiring a long career in Washington, having no ambitions to run for other offices, and winning endless elections across shifting political eras.