Steven Ross Quoted in The National Law Journal on Evolution of House General Counsel’s Role

The National Law Journal has quoted Akin Gump congressional investigations practice co-head Steven Ross in the article “‘Acrimony Between the Branches’: How the Trump Lawsuits Could Shape Future House Legal Fights.” The article looks at the evolution of the House general counsel role and how it could become a more “regularly used weapon” in the future.

According to the NLJ, the current GC, Douglas Letter, and his team have been involved in at least 31 federal lawsuits since January 2019. That includes 14 where the House is an amicus, in addition to an impeachment investigation and trial—a significant increase compared with Letter’s predecessor.

The article notes that the office reports to the Bipartisan Legal Advisory Group (BLAG), a group of the five highest-ranking members of the House including the Speaker. That means whichever party controls the chamber typically has majority rule of the BLAG, which authorizes the counsel’s office to take legal action on its behalf.

Ross, who served as House general counsel from 1983-1993, said when there were splits within the BLAG on which cases to take up, it wasn’t necessarily along partisan lines. “If there was going to be one defining characteristic as to where people landed on a lot of those issues, it tended to be between the people in the legal group who were lawyers versus the people in the legal advisory group who were not,” he said.

Ross also feels that the workload the general counsel’s office sees is inherently cyclical, with a natural ebb and flow. He told the NLJ, “To me the level of acrimony between the branches right now is a wave rather than a tide.”