The topic of this episode is, “Delegates to the House of Representatives: who are they and what do they do?”

My guest is Elliot Mamet. He is a Postdoctoral Research Associate and Lecturer at the Princeton School of Public and International Affairs. Previously, he served as an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow. Elliot holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from Duke University.

Also important to note is that Dr. Mamet spent time working in the office of Washington, D.C. delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton. All of which makes him a great person to ask the question, "Delegates to the House of Representatives: who are they and what do they do?"

Kevin Kosar:

Welcome to Understanding Congress, a podcast about the first branch of government. Congress is a notoriously complex institution and few Americans think well of it, but Congress is essential to our republic. It’s a place where our pluralistic society is supposed to work out its differences and come to agreement about what our laws should be, and that is why we are here to discuss our national legislature and to think about ways to upgrade it so it can better serve our nation. I’m your host, Kevin Kosar, and I’m a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank in Washington D.C.

Welcome to the podcast.

Elliot Mamet:

Thank you, Kevin. It's great to be here.

Kevin Kosar:

Let's start with a really simple question. Listeners are all too familiar with the fact that the House typically has 435 members. But they also have delegates. How many delegates are there to the House of Representatives?

Elliot Mamet:

Currently, there are five delegates to the House of Representatives. They serve from Washington, D.C., Guam, American Samoa, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and the Northern Mariana Islands. There's also a Resident Commissioner—a non-voting member—from Puerto Rico. So there're six total non-voting members in the House.

Kevin Kosar:

Representatives in the House come from districts these days. Where and who do these delegates and non-voting members represent? And is represent even the correct term for what their role is?

Elliot Mamet:

The non-voting members of Congress represent Americans who live outside the several states. Throughout their entire history, they've represented people who don't live in states—whether that's in the federal enclave of the District of Columbia or in territories either on the path to statehood or not on the path to statehood. Today, they represent 4 million Americans. Of that group, 3.5 million live in the United States territories—those people are 98% racial and ethnic minorities—and the remainder are the residents of the District of Columbia who are majority black or Hispanic. So the delegates represent overwhelmingly non-white constituents, and they represent a group of Americans who lack the same citizen rights and lack political equality to those people living in the several states.

Kevin Kosar:

Now, on this program, there's been a number of episodes where I and a guest have talked about earlier Congresses—the Congresses at the founding, early 20th century, etc.—and non-voting representatives just didn't come up in the conversation. Are they a recent development, or have they always been with us?

Elliot Mamet:

Great question. The non-voting representative has been a feature since the earliest Congresses. The institution dates back at least to 1784 when a committee chaired by Thomas Jefferson suggested that territories prior to becoming a state would be able to send a delegate to Congress with the right of debating but not of voting.

That proposal was codified by the Northwest Ordinance, and the first delegate sent to Congress was James White of the territory South of the River Ohio, who was admitted to be a delegate to Congress in 1794. And since that time—with a single exception—non-voting members have sat in the United States Congress.

For much of American history, those delegates represented territories on the road to statehood. That changed in two different periods. First was in 1898 with the Spanish-American War, where the U.S. acquired so-called “unincorporated territories,” which were not destined for statehood, including Puerto Rico and the Philippines. Those territories were given resident commissioners, non-voting members of Congress. And second, in the 1970s, Washington, D.C., Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and American Samoa were given non-voting seats. Even though those places didn't seem like they were on the road to statehood, Congress thought it was a way to incorporate the voices of citizens living outside the states in the federal government. The most recent delegate added was the delegate from the Northern Mariana Islands. And last year, the House Rules Committee held a hearing on admitting a delegate from the Cherokee Nation, which has a right to a delegate to Congress under an 1835 treaty, so that issue is pending before the Congress—the Congress has not acted on that yet. But that just goes to show that delegates have been a feature of Congress since its earliest days and I think have played an important role in representing people living outside the states in our national legislature.

Kevin Kosar:

First I want to offer a comment, and then a follow up question. The first comment is for listeners: I want to underscore that we are talking about the House of Representatives. We're not talking about the Senate. We've not had these in the Senate.

But you mentioned earlier that delegates and non-voting members in theHouse were coming typically as a product of a territory being on the path to statehood. The 70s sounds like it was a qualitatively different situation or motivation and part of it sounds like an idea that if you are going to be Americans, then you have to have some sort of representation within the People's House in the name of fairness. Were there other motives in the mix there? Was it, “If we have them, perhaps this will boost the effort to move down the road to statehood,” or some other sort of factors that came to play?

Elliot Mamet:

Great question. So I have a project with Austin Bussing of Trinity University on the expansion of the delegate position in the 1970s. And what we find is that the overwhelming driver of that position was racial preferences. In other words, the delegate position was championed by civil rights organizers here on the mainland and advocates in the territories themselves as a way to give voice to Americans living outside the states. It was also blocked on racial grounds from conservative Southern chairmen in the House, for instance. The D.C. delegate position was also deeply tied to racial politics. D.C. home rule is often thought of as a product of the civil rights movement, and the D.C. delegate was a way to give this then-majority black city some sort of representation in Congress. So we argue that racial preferences were central to understanding why the four delegate seats were added in the 1970s.

I'll also say to answer your question, Kevin, politics mattered—political entrepreneurship mattered. One example of that was Philip Burton, the famous liberal leader in the Democratic Caucus. He advocated expanded seats for the delegates, both because he thought it was the right thing to do—it comported with ideas of political equality and civil rights—and also because it gave him increased power in the Democratic Caucus. He famously lost his leadership election to Jim Wright by one vote in 1976, and if it wasn't for the delegates, he would have lost it by more. His biographer said if Burton couldn't rule the Congress, at least he could rule the territories. And so he was very focused on territorial seats, both because he thought it was the right thing to do and as a way to gain power within the House.

Kevin Kosar:

Interesting. They're called delegates and non-voting members. They're not called repre