Defying the experts that predicted that the Democrats would pick up between 12-25 seats in the 2006 midterms, they picked up a shocking 38 seats. Seemingly safe seats in Arizona, New Hampshire, Idaho, and Wyoming fell into the blue column.
The new victors were a Kiddie Corps, half of them under 40. “We were young, we looked weird. I can’t even believe we got elected,” Patrick Murphy (PA-08) would say two decades later.
This new generation of Democrats offered a new image for their party. Far more than their senior colleagues in the House, they understood the social trends and beliefs that had typified the previous 6 years. Most of them opposed the war in Iraq. Most of them were uncompromising in their opposition to neo-conservatism.
Few were true populists. They were college-educated and professionally credentialed. “We were the veterans of the Iraq War and Katrina, not the Cold War,” said Heath Schuler (NC-11). “We were products of the internet, not of television, not of print. We were products of computer politics, not courthouse politics. And we were reflections of Clinton as president, not LBJ.”
The Katrina Babies stripped power from the party kingpins, removing Rahm Emanuel from his position as head of the DCCC, and denying Ike Skelton his chairmanship of the Armed Services Committee. Bucking the old bulls was easy because the Class of ’06 owed little to the Democratic bosses. “We didn’t expect a lot of the Katrina class to win,” remembers John Spratt (D-SC). “We just put them on the ballot to have a Democratic name there.”
They were more likely to have been part of the anti-war movement than of the organized labor movement, and few were creatures of the party establishment. One new member, from the suburbs of Philadelphia, was Lois Murphy (PA-06), then a 43-year old lawyer. She would eventually rise to the Education chair.
The Katrina generations’s most visible success came almost immediately after their election. Like the 1994 class, the Katrina babies forced a change of majority control in Congress: Republicans had been in charge in the House for twelve years at the time. The fresh faces forced a change within the caucus, which had long featured a power structure built on seniority and dominated by so-called “New Democrats”.
All but a handful of the freshmen lent their votes to the pre-existing reform movement within the House Democratic Caucus. This forced the committee barons to kowtow, seeking rank-and-file votes to stay in power. This irked Rep. Jane Harman of California, the Intelligence Committee chairwoman. When she addressed the gathering of freshmen, she called them “boys and girls.” She later lost her chair by 19 votes, with all but a few freshman votes going against her. In all, only three sitting committee chairmen were deposed, but others got the message.
“The [Katrina babies] set an example for other classes by striking out as individuals and developing their own power centers,” said former House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer of Maryland. “They became independent and they didn’t become beholden to the leadership.”
Perhaps nothing typified the spirit of the new class more than their early revolt against an effort to deny Rep. John Conyers his position as Chairman of the Judiciary Committee. Democratic leaders were initially reluctant to open an impeachment inquiry, thinking that the public had elected them, not to relive the last six years of brutal partisanship, but to usher in a new era of progress and comity. The freshmen allied with the Congressional Black caucus in a revolt, threatening Speaker Pelosi’s position. The ensuing investigations were so damning that they led to first Dick Cheney’s resignation, and then following his pardon, the introduction of articles of impeachment against President Bush.
After Senators Snowe, Specter, Warner, Hagel, Graham, and McCain indicated their intention to support conviction, Bush resigned.
This article was adapted from a retrospective on the Class of 1974.
