What Byron Donalds can do with his new committee role

At 6 feet 2 inches tall and 275 pounds, Representative Byron Donalds has always had stature. He’s just never had the power that goes with it, spending his first term as a member of the small, but vocal House Freedom Caucus fighting against a then-Democratic trifecta in Congress and the White House. Now, that’s all about to change.

After standing as one of the key holdouts in his caucus’ campaign against House Speaker-elect Kevin McCarthy last week, Donalds, a Florida Republican, recently revealed McCarthy moved to place him on the Republican House Steering Committee, presumably replacing McCarthy ally and Freedom Caucus rival Representative Mike Rogers of Alabama, who announced his resignation from the committee on Monday.

The symbolism of the move is clear.

The House Steering Committee is responsible for numerous facets of how the caucus operates, helping establish a legislative agenda and directing which members serve on which committees. The optics are also significant, with McCarthy swapping a loyalist—who notably lunged at fellow Representative Matt Gaetz after he forced a 15th vote on McCarthy’s speakership late Friday night, with a rival amid a number of rules changes amenable to his biggest critics.

“Early on I gave Kevin the benefit of the doubt,” Donalds told Fox News‘ Maria Bartiromo in a Sunday morning interview after he was asked about his decision not to support McCarthy. “But it came pretty quickly clear to me that we were getting nowhere. And so, at that point, it was saying, ‘OK, how long is this going to go? What’s this going to play out like?’ And so it was really about trying to make sure that we can get people to the table in order to construct a framework that everybody in our conference can get behind.”

Donalds’ new role will give him the opportunity to do that, he said, adding that he wants to use his role to ensure the “entire conference,” and the entirety of the ideological spectrum of the GOP will be represented through all committees in the new Republican Congress.

“The nature and culture of Washington D.C. is that the members are actually really separated from each other. They don’t really get a chance to talk a lot and engage a lot unless they take specific interest,” Donalds said Sunday. “I think having more voices on more committees is actually going to help the Republican conference and Congress overall so we can clear up a lot of the misconceptions about policy ideas and political points and actually do the right thing by the American people through a truly deliberative process that is open.”

How much influence he’ll have on the process is an open question. Though the steering committee is divided by region (ensuring a relative democratization of power), the speaker of the House and the House majority leader have a combined six votes, per the House rules. And the larger the state, the more influence its delegation has on the committee. In the 115th Congress, for example, Texas alone had two representatives on the steering committee, while states like Idaho and Maine shared a delegate with places like Wyoming, Maryland, and Puerto Rico.

However, there are signs the conference is taking a rightward tilt. In one of its first votes Monday, the committee voted to deny the comparatively moderate Texas Republican Congressman Dan Crenshaw’s bid to chair the House Homeland Security Committee in-favor of the far-right Tennessee Congressman Mark Green, who lost his 2017 effort to become former President Donald Trump‘s U.S. Army secretary after revelations of a number of controversial remarks he’d made about transgender people.

That in itself, Demand Progress analyst Daniel Schuman says, represents a significant swing in how the committee once operated.

“In recent years, the steering committee has been almost entirely dominated by leadership,” Schuman told Newsweek on Monday. “So by adding members of the Freedom Caucus, or adding more members of the Freedom Caucus and removing other folks—which is what they’re doing—it re-centers the way power is exercised depending on the numbers.”

Schuman said the number of concessions McCarthy has made, including the role members of the Freedom Caucus now play in the party’s operations, represents the start of Congress’ shift into something resembling a coalition government, where multiple interests have a say in policy. Not only will McCarthy need to navigate his party’s rivalry with Democrats, he noted, but the newly installed speaker also must contend with the hostile forces within his own party who could stymie his agenda—or be forced to make a devil’s bargain with Democrats to thwart them.

“This is like brilliant political work on behalf of the Freedom Caucus,” Schuman added. “They’ve been ignored and overlooked for the last decade, at least in terms of like power. And they have found the point of maximum leverage exchange, granting McCarthy his deepest desire to become speaker in return for getting these procedural and personnel changes. Now we will have to see whether this is enough for them to maintain that control.”