Waxman's win leaves Gov't Oversight chair vacant

You can't chair two committees. Them's the rules.

So now that Henry Waxman has succeeded in wresting control of the Energy & Commerce Committee from John Dingell (a victory which Dingell has, in conciliatory fashion, congratulated Waxman), the chairmanship of the Oversight panel that Waxman led is up for grabs.

And even though the Waxman-Dingell contest appears to have undone the seniority system, it's alive and well in other quarters (and might not be as dead as all that, anyway, given that Waxman's hardly a newcomer to E&C). TPM is reporting that the chair of Oversight and Government Reform is likely to go to the next most senior Dem, Ed Towns:

We've now learned that Rep. Ed Towns of New York is the favorite to take over the House Oversight Committee chairmanship, as a potential rival has indicated he won't oppose Towns.

This is a sign that the new Dem-controlled government is taking shape in a mostly smooth fashion, sparing the House Dems another brutal internal fight after current Oversight chairman Henry Waxman ousted John Dingell from the Energy and Commerce Committee.

There had been press coverage and rumors that Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland might have run against Towns for the now-vacant chairmanship, but it looks like Cummings won't oppose Towns, after all.

"The Congressman has said from the start that he would be honored to serve as OGR Chair, but he respects that his CBC [The Congressional Black Caucus] colleague, Mr. Towns, is next in line," Cummings spokesperson Jennifer Kohl told Election Central.

No surprise there. The members of the CBC take the seniority system very seriously. It's as near a race-blind metric as has ever been used for these sorts of things, and at long last CBC members have done well by it. As a matter of principle, they continue to support it as against more subjective methods which would be more difficult to evaluate for bias, racial or otherwise.

It really would be rather unseemly for CBC members to have put in their time and be on the cusp of reaping their rewards, only to have the Democratic Caucus suddenly decide that seniority isn't really all that important after all. That'd be one hell of a can of worms to try to open. Any challenger to that order is going to have to confront that uncomfortable reality.

So as I said, no surprise that a challenge to Town is seen as unlikely, even if he isn't necessarily the first name that comes to mind when you're in the market for investigative pit bulls.