The powerful House Rules Committee will have new leadership in the 119th Congress, both publicly and behind the scenes.
Earlier this month, Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., claimed the Rules gavel after the retirement of Rep. Michael C. Burgess, R-Texas.
Committee staff director Jennifer Belair will soon follow Burgess out the door when she takes on a new position as senior vice president of government affairs at lobbying firm Atlas Crossing.
Starting in February, the committees’s majority staff will be headed by current deputy Steve Waskiewicz.
Belair will bring with her 15 years of experience on the Hill, which started when she saw a flyer for House internships while walking home from Latin class at Texas A&M University. She applied and landed an internship with the House Judiciary Committee. Despite describing herself as “maybe the least political person working in politics,” that first role left her hooked.
She got her first view of the Rules Committee while staffing former Rep. Doug Collins, R-Ga., and then Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, who is often credited with reshaping the panel during his leadership. Belair went on to work for Rules Committee Republicans during the tenures of four subsequent chairs: Jim McGovern, D-Mass., Tom Cole, R-Okla., Burgess and Foxx.
Belair briefly left Congress in 2018 to serve as managing director of congressional and external affairs for the Millennium Challenge Corporation, a foreign aid agency, but returned to Congress the following year.
Looking back on her time with Rules, Belair says the committee itself has not changed so much as the amount of attention paid to it.
“The Rules team has remained largely the same,” Belair said. “The attention to the work of the Rules Committee has significantly changed. There is so much more attention now to what we do.”
The makeup of the committee has shifted during her tenure as well. Rules has historically been known as “the speaker’s committee,” and it could be reliably counted on to feature majority members who would go along with the speaker’s agenda.
That’s changed somewhat in recent years with the arrival of panel members like Chip Roy, R-Texas, or former member Thomas Massie, R-Ky., both of whom have shown a willingness to buck the party line.
When Belair first arrived, “the expectation was clearly set — the idea of voting against the rule would have been unheard of,” she said. “But the Rules Committee has evolved and now reflects the political climate that we’re in a little bit more.”
Belair, who has three young kids, also noted the challenges of being a mom while working full time on the Hill.
“I was the only professional staff member I knew of who was a female who had more than one little kid, so there was no sort of model or road map for me to know that it can be done,” she said. “The team here has always been really supportive, but some days it felt impossible.”
She hopes the move to the private sector will offer a chance to spend more time with her family as well as new professional opportunities.
Foxx offered high praise for Belair.
“It takes one meeting with Jennifer Belair to realize she’s in a league of her own,” Foxx said in a statement. “Her professionalism and high standards have steered the Committee on Rules into a successful new era.”
The post Top Rules Committee staffer heads to the private sector appeared first on Roll Call.
