House Democratic leadership has reached an agreement with Republican counterparts on the remaining committee ratios for this term, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) announced Sunday.
Jeffries made the announcement in a letter to colleagues reviewed by the Washington Examiner. Republicans control the House 222-212, which is identical to the majority Democrats had in the last Congress. Jeffries explained in the letter that the deal was “consistent” with how committees were divided when Democrats were in control.
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“These ratios are consistent with an inversion of those from the prior Congress where Democrats held a similarly sized majority, notwithstanding a few changes in overall committee size,” Jeffries wrote.
Democratic membership on the House Armed Services, Budget, Foreign Affairs, Judiciary, and Small Business committees for this Congress, according to the letter, will be a “direct inversion” from when the party had the majority in the last session. On the Armed Services Committee, for example, Democrats and Republicans had a respective 31-29 split in the last session, which will now flip with the GOP in the majority.
The letter went on to reveal that some committees would change in size, including the Oversight, Transportation, and Education committees.
News of the agreement comes days after House Republican leadership announced committee appointments for this Congress, which included reassigning Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who had been stripped of her assignments on the House Education and Labor Committee and the Budget Committee in February 2021 over her prior embrace of conspiracy theories. Greene forged close ties with House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) in the years that followed and was rewarded with assignments on the higher-profile Homeland Security and Oversight committees of the Congress.
Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ) also had his assignments, which he similarly lost in 2021, reinstated.
Decrying both lawmakers’ committee removals as Democratic power grabs, McCarthy repeatedly vowed in the lead-up to the 2022 midterm elections that he would yank Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) from the House Foreign Affairs Committee if Republicans retook the majority. He has not shared his plans regarding Omar’s future on the Education and Labor Committee, which Greene was pulled from.
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In addition to Omar, McCarthy has said he plans to remove Reps. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and Eric Swalwell (D-CA) from the House Intelligence Committee, in which Schiff serves as top Democrat.
The House Democratic leader made no mention of specific lawmakers in his Sunday letter, though he did state, “It is my expectation that no returning member of the House Democratic Caucus will involuntarily lose a seat related to an existing committee assignment, except for the House Committee on Ways and Means, as previously anticipated.”
