The late Rep. Donald Payne Jr. (D-Newark) was laid to rest in Newark today after tragically dying on April 24, but his seat in Congress won’t be filled for at least several months – leaving New Jersey with reduced representation on two important committees and Washington Democrats down a seat in a closely divided House.
Payne, who served in the House for eleven-and-a-half years, sat on two committees at the time of his death: the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee (or T&I for short) and the Homeland Security Committee. On T&I, Payne was the ranking Democratic member on the Railroads, Pipelines, & Hazardous Materials Subcommittee.
Both of those committee seats will now be filled by the Democratic Steering Committee, and it looks like New Jersey may not retain either. Six of the state’s Democratic House members confirmed to the New Jersey Globe that they do not intend to seek to fill Payne’s committee assignments this session and plan to stick to the seats they currently hold; a seventh, Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-Wyckoff), declined to say what he will do.
That doesn’t mean that New Jersey will go without representation on the two committees entirely, however. Rep. Rob Menendez (D-Jersey City), who represents a district that neighbors Payne’s, already holds a seat on both committees, while Reps. Tom Kean Jr. (R-Westfield) and Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis) sit on T&I as well.
But as Menendez noted, Payne was by far the most senior member of the New Jersey delegation on either committee, which gave him stature and influence that more junior members wouldn’t have.
“He was a trusted voice on [T&I], and was one of the main reasons that you’ve seen some of the improvements over the last couple of years,” Menendez said. “When you have bills like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law passed here, having someone like Don shepherd those through and make sure the resources are coming back to New Jersey is of critical importance. On a substantive level, on a bringing-resources-back-to-New-Jersey level, it’s definitely a loss for the state.”
Menendez said Payne was also an invaluable voice on the Homeland Security Committee, which has been in the news frequently this year thanks to the impeachment of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Congress’s broader debates over border security. Payne had chaired a Homeland Security subcommittee back when Democrats were the majority party.
“Especially in this iteration of Homeland, where it’s becoming largely partisan, he was never afraid to call out Republicans when they went too far,” Menendez said. “It’s an important dynamic, because they’ve used the committee for a sham impeachment of Mayorkas; they’ve used it for H.R. 2; and Don was there every step of the way making sure that we were calling them out for their extremism.”
Menendez himself could, in theory, take Payne’s ranking member spot on the Railroads, Pipelines, & Hazardous Materials Subcommittee – on which he’s also a member – but Democratic leaders may choose instead to go for someone with more than half a term of experience in Congress.
Payne’s death also means that New Jersey has lost its most senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC); while his successor in the majority-Black 10th district is likely to also be Black, they won’t retain his nearly 12 years of seniority in the caucus. (Payne’s father, Rep. Donald Payne Sr., was New Jersey’s first Black member of Congress and served as chair of the CBC from 1995 to 1997.)
And most pressingly from a national perspective, the absence of a solid Democratic vote for between five and eight months makes it that much harder to block Republican priorities in close votes.
After a New York Democrat recently elected in a special election takes office, the House will stand at 217 Republicans and 213 Democrats, with five seats (including Payne’s) vacant. If every member is in attendance, a united Democratic caucus only needs two Republican defections in order to force a tied vote and sink a bill or amendment – and it’s relatively rare for every member to be in attendance, so sometimes the threshold could be even lower.
Those kinds of incredibly close margins make every member’s vote, or lack thereof, critically important. In fact, last month, a bill amendment disallowing warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens failed on a tied 212-212 vote; Payne was unconscious from his heart attack at the time, and thus couldn’t vote. (There’s no telling how Payne would have voted had he been present, though, since the amendment did not break down cleanly on partisan lines.)
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries and other top House Democrats, then, have substantial reason to want Payne’s seat to be filled as quickly as possible, but New Jersey’s lethargic special election schedule is an obstacle to that.
If Murphy were to call a special election today, the lengthy preparation periods before both the primary and general that are mandated by state statute mean that a new member likely couldn’t be elected and sworn in until September or October. And Murphy might choose not to call a special election at all, or call one that coincides with the November general election, delaying filling the seat even further.
(Since Payne is unopposed in next month’s Democratic primary for a full term, local Democratic committeemembers in the 10th district will meet over the summer to choose a replacement nominee who would take office in January 2025, at which point all committee assignments will be reshuffled. Any potential special election would only apply to the remaining months of Payne’s current term.)
Whenever the seat does come before voters, Democrats are near-certain to hold it; it’s the most Democratic district in New Jersey and one of the bluest in the nation.
In the meantime, Payne’s staff will remain on the House payroll and the office will continue to perform casework for constituents. Residents of the 10th district who have a problem that they’d have taken to Payne’s office before the congressman died will still be able to do so.
But in order for the 10th district to have a full voice in Congress again – to have a voting member on the House floor, and to have someone taking spots on important committees – a new, duly elected representative will have to be sworn in. It will be a little while.