Oversight and legislative activity concerning Pacific Island territories of the United States: a balancing of partisanship and autonomy

Abstract

Five territories of the United States, plus the District of Columbia, send six non-voting delegates to the United States House of Representatives. While these delegates lack a vote to pass bills, they can serve on committees and advance to subcommittee chair, a position that facilitates Island representation via oversight and legislative activity concerning the federal agency with jurisdiction over territory policy. But aspiration to institutional power requires acceding to the partisan rules and norms of the House; hence, a tension arises between territorial representation and party loyalty. Majority parties under unified government minimise oversight of the executive branch in favour of legislative activism, while Island territories value oversight regardless of party power. Accordingly, under unified government, delegates are less likely to serve as subcommittee chairs than under divided government when their party does not control the executive branch. Once chosen as subcommittee chair, they pursue greater executive oversight than a chair with full voting privileges, while exercising party discipline by curbing oversight activity under unified government. This trade-off is an adaptation to empire in exchange for a degree of representation and authority within the metropole.

Keywords:

• United States’ territories
• territorial delegates
• oversight activity
• legislative activity
• American Samoa
• Guam
• Northern Mariana Islands
• United States

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Michele Pope and Brian Barnes of the Loyola Law Library for archival assistance. Thanks also to Matthew Dull, Erinn Lauterbach and David King for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this article which was presented as a paper at the 2017 annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, Illinois, United States, 6–9 April.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Most recently, Congress granted the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands a non-voting delegate in 2008.

2. Compiled from Volden and Wiseman (2014); download data, Center for Effective Lawmaking (2017).

3. Their lack of decisiveness was re-affirmed in the three Congresses – 103rd, 110th, and 111th – in which the House Democratic majority changed the chamber rules to allow delegates to participate in Committee of the Whole proceedings, with all the powers granted to other members, such as voting on bill amendments, except that, in the event their votes proved decisive, a re-vote would occur in which they could not participate (Lewallen, 2017).

4. Note that the Office of Insular Affairs’ jurisdiction does not include Puerto Rico. Several resident commissioners have served on subcommittees responsible for insular affairs, though none have chaired it.

5. The District of Columbia, granted three presidential electors by the 23rd Amendment, is not under the jurisdiction of the Office of Insular Affairs, and no delegate from the District of Columbia has served on the Natural Resources Committee or its predecessors (as long ago as the 93rd Congress).

6. Only three of the 21 non-voting delegates who served between the 93rd and 113th Congresses were Republicans. They served, on average, two terms, while the average Democratic delegate served 4.5 terms.

7. Download data, Center for Effective Lawmaking (2017).

8. Prior to the 98th Congress, the reporting of oversight and legislative meeting activities in the biennial House Committee reports was inconsistent, such that some subcommittees recorded meeting days, while others did not.

9. This content analysis approach necessarily excludes field inspection trips and other meetings not clearly associated with either oversight of the executive branch’s actions or activities in direct pursuit of the Congress’ elastic clause responsibilities.