It’s a normal day on the House floor when the top Democrat and Republican on the House Oversight Committee are yelling. It’s not normal that they’re on the same side and what they’re yelling about is a post office.
On Wednesday, amid all the topics that Oversight Chair James Comer and ranking Democrat on the committee Jamie Raskin could be spiritedly discussing on the House floor — investigations into Joe Biden, the Hunter Biden pardon, Donald Trump, the president-elect’s controversial nominees, continuing resolution negotiations, sweeping reconciliation bills, disaster aid, a farm bill extension or any other number of topics — it was a bill to name a Corpus Christi post office after Captain Robert E. “Bob” Batterson that had the two men hot and bothered.
“That’s causing a lot of rancor,” Raskin said. “It’s causing a lot of division. We don’t want this whole thing to blow up.”
At issue was whether the entire Texas delegation had signed on to name the post office after Batterson, a World War II veteran who was at Pearl Harbor and passed away last year at the age of 102.
By tradition, post office naming bills require an entire state’s delegation to co-sponsor the measure before it’s brought to the floor — something Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett hadn’t done because, she told NOTUS, the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Michael Cloud, hadn’t approached her about it. (Cloud’s office disputed Crockett’s claim, providing an email to NOTUS showing Cloud’s staff had reached out to Crockett’s office about the bill, and that Crockett’s office responded.)
Raskin didn’t want a small oversight like that to hold up the legislation.
“We don’t want it to be said that this is the first Congress in decades that can’t even name a post office after someone,” Raskin said, arguing that failure to christen this post office after Batterson would “plunge us into a race of mutually assured, postal-naming destruction.”
Comer, who also didn’t want to hold up the bill over the co-sponsorship issue, just said, “hopefully,” it would not “ever happen again in the future.”
Ultimately, the bill went forward and passed by voice vote.
That Democrats and Republicans would be riled up over a post office naming bill — and that they would almost fail in this most basic duty — is a perfect microcosm for Congress at the moment.
Even before the House passed 21 more bills naming post offices on Wednesday, postal nomenclature legislation was on track to account for more than a third of all bills that became law in the 118th Congress. The count is currently 28 of 75 new laws. By the time this Congress ends in a few weeks, post office naming bills will likely account for more than half of the legislation signed into law.
It’s a particularly striking statistic, considering previous Congresses have passed more than double the number of postal bills. The number reached its peak in the 110th Congress, when 109 post office measures were signed into law.
But it’s not that the 118th Congress is passing more bills renaming post offices; it’s that they’re doing less of everything else.
“It certainly doesn’t fit our Schoolhouse Rock assumptions,” said Kevin Kosar, a former research manager at Congressional Research Service who has previously written on naming post offices.
“What you learned in high school civics was Congress was a place that big issues get debated and voted upon, and some you win, some you lose, and ultimately legislation is going to move on these matters,” Kosar said.
“You turn on the C-SPAN now, and you see nothing but post office namings in the House. And you look at the Senate, and you see nothing but procedural votes on executive branch and judicial nominations,” he said. “And yeah, it’s a little disheartening.”
The act of naming post offices has been a frequent scapegoat for complaints that Congress isn’t focused on serious legislative matters.
When John Boehner took the speaker’s gavel at the start of 2011, he vowed to limit the time the House spends on naming post offices.
“With all the challenges facing our nation, it is absurd that Congress spends so much time on naming post offices, congratulating sports teams and celebrating the birthdays of historical figures,” Boehner said in 2010.
“It’s time to focus on doing what we were sent here to do,” he added.
But as Congress has struggled to do much of anything else, post office naming bills have become more and more of the day-to-day operations in the House. During the first two years of Donald Trump’s first term as president, it became an easy way to inflate the number of measures he signed into law. A total of 84 of the 425 bills that became law were to “designate” a postal facility.
Last month, Speaker Mike Johnson nodded at how post office naming bills had become one of the last uncontroversial acts in Congress.
“No one is ever going to get 100 percent of what they want,” Johnson told The Washington Post, “unless you’re naming a post office in your district.”
Congress has had the authority to name post offices since 1967. But for decades, only a handful of naming bills passed every Congress. That changed in the 2000s, when 46 naming bills passed in the 107th Congress. The number shot up to 89 the following Congress.
Kosar said he has a few theories around the spike.
For one, many members and offices had little knowledge of the procedure until CRS started releasing reports outlining the process, led by his boss, Nye Stevens.
Kosar also attributed the surge to the moratorium on earmarks in 2010 under Boehner. With members unable to directly send money back to their districts, naming a post office after a community member was a cheap work-around to please the folks back home.
“It’s one of these phenomenons where what’s good for an individual member may not be good for the institution as a collective whole,” Kosar said. “If you have every member trying to pass something to please a niche member of their electorate, you do that hundreds of times, it adds up to a scene where you have this collective body that’s just engaged in, like, turning out tchotchkes instead of the great matters of war and peace and national budgeting.”
The majority of the names brought forward for a post office are veterans. Congress has traditionally waited 10 years after someone’s death until naming a post office after them, though even that practice has fallen by the wayside. Officially, you just have to be over 70 to have a post office named after you. Former President Jimmy Carter’s post office will come up for a vote on Thursday, for instance.
But the noncontroversial status of naming post offices is also fading. Some members have made a big show in recent years over voting against this sort of legislation, from post office naming bills to congressional gold medals. But others have started going after specific figures.
When poet Maya Angelou came up for a vote in 2016, nine Republicans voted against her.
Rep. Andy Harris said he believed Angelou supported communism.
On Wednesday, Harris also didn’t co-sponsor the naming of a post office after his former colleague from Maryland, the late Rep. Elijah Cummings.
That post office renaming has been years in the making. Rep. Kweisi Mfume, who was friends with Cummings for 42 years and took over his seat, said he promised Cummings’ family shortly after his passing that he would name a post office in his predecessor’s honor.
“I’ve been working to make sure that there was not any opposition to the bill. I felt good about that, and I felt good also that so many of Elijah’s former colleagues on both sides of the aisle wanted to support it,” Mfume told NOTUS.
Even without Harris’ support — which is typically a requirement — the bill passed because of Comer. (Cummings was also chair of the Oversight Committee in 2019, when Comer was a member of the committee.)
But as the practice accounts for more of what Congress does, some members want to end the power altogether. Rep. Matt Rosendale introduced a bill at the beginning of this Congress to shift the responsibility of post office naming to the states.
“I don’t think Congress should be wasting their valuable time naming post office buildings and doing the research to find out what kind of people that are being recommended for the namings of those buildings,” he told NOTUS.
Rep. Tim Burchett said he hears arguments from conservatives about eliminating the system, but he disagrees.
Burchett had never introduced a post office bill before Wednesday, but he wanted to honor his friend, civil rights leader Rev. Harold Middlebrook, who is 87, while he was still alive. The bill passed unanimously by voice vote on Wednesday afternoon.
“I just think it’d be cool for him and his wife and his girls to drive by there, and that’s something forever,” Burchett said.
“And that’s not helping me politically,” he said. “I can honestly tell you that somebody will bust my ass for not naming it after a Republican.”
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Katherine Swartz is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.