Crackup of the Committees
Richard E. Cohen
The National
Journal, Vol.
31, No. 31 Pg. 2210, July 31, 1999
From the scant
handful of major bills passed by the House and the Senate this year, one
unmistakable fact emerges: The congressional committees have lost their
long-standing pre-eminence as the center of legislative ideas and debates. During May and
June, for example, both the House and the Senate considered major gun control
proposals that were not written or reviewed by either chamber's Judiciary
Committee. Earlier this month, Senate
Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., after bowing to Democratic demands for
action on patients' rights, took the unusual step of selecting as the focus
of the floor debate a bill crafted by key Democrats. Republicans offered an alternative measure
that was initially prepared by a Senate GOP task force and was modified only
slightly by the committee with jurisdiction.
Meanwhile, key House committees are so splintered over their managed
care legislation that Speaker J.
Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., this week devided a plan to bypass them
altogether. Also in recent
days, both chambers have taken up major tax cuts that were cleared by the
tax-writing committees, but were not really the handiwork of a majority of
their members. The chairmen of the Publicly and
privately, ''there was virtually no discussion of the (tax) bill with members,''
complained moderate Rep. Michael
N. Castle, R-Del., who forced
last-minute changes in the House proposal.
''Everything has been fed to everybody.'' This ad hoc
legislating flouts the textbook model for how Congress makes laws. As generations of high school students have
learned in civics courses, legislation is supposed to result when thorough
hearings are followed by a committee review of alternatives in an attempt to
build consensus, and then by a second and third round of those same debates
on the House and Senate floors. Such a
framework was described more than a century ago by a respected political scientist
who initially framed his ideas as a ''Congress in
session is Congress on public exhibition, whilst Congress in its committee
rooms is Congress at work,'' wrote Woodrow Wilson in his classic 1885 study,
Congressional Government. ''Whatever
is to be done must be done by, or through, the committee.'' For most of
the 20th century, Over the past
30 years, however, committee power has eroded to the point where it now has
largely collapsed. In many respects,
this process has been both gradual and purposeful. It began during the era of Democratic
control and has been greatly accelerated by both parties during the past
decade. The death warrant for the old
system came in 1995, when Newt Gingrich, R- Ga., assumed power as House
Speaker. As part of his top-down
management style, Gingrich circumvented and intentionally undermined the
committee process by creating Republican task forces and demanding that they
write legislation reflecting his own views.
With Gingrich
gone, this legislative year began with promises that a more mature and steady
Republican majority would pay greater homage to committee perquisites. Upon taking over as House Speaker in
January, Hastert embraced a return to the ''regular order.'' More comfortable
than Gingrich with the committee system, Hastert promised to give the panels
free, or at least freer, rein to achieve his general goals. To be sure,
some of the same chairmen who meekly ducked decisions under Gingrich have
sought to impose their own marks on legislation in Hastert's House. ''There is a stronger sense that our
members are charting their own course,'' said a veteran House GOP aide. But Hastert often has found that implementing
his lofty goal of a return to legislating-as-usual hasn't worked out
smoothly. In the Senate,
Lott, now in his fourth year as Majority Leader, seems more settled in his
post and less inclined to create party task forces to guide the work of committee
chairmen. Nevertheless, Senate
committees, like their counterparts in the House, routinely find that they,
too, suffer because of their own ineffectiveness or lack of deliberation--or
simply are ignored by party leaders.
In both chambers, this has been the case in recent months with the gun
control, tax cut, and patients' rights legislation. A similar scenario is likely to develop
this fall on campaign finance reform. Democrats, for
their part, have been eager to criticize the Republicans for their continued
efforts to detour around the conventional committee process. ''It's an everyday occurrence now for committees
to lose control,'' said Rep. Martin
Frost of Even GOP allies
see little prospect for resolving the problem. Committees ''will become increasingly
irrelevant from the standpoint of legislation,'' veteran conservative activist
Gordon S. Jones wrote last September
in The World & I, a magazine published by The Washington Times. That judgment
may sound radical, but it is really only what has been obvious for some
time. Despite occasional bursts of
nostalgia from chairmen seeking to reclaim what they view as their due prerogatives,
the arrangements that Woodrow Wilson described are as dated as quill pens and
snuffboxes. And as the century ends,
the breakdown of the committee system has become a major factor in the chaos
that pervades Capitol Hill.
Congressional leaders repeatedly have encountered difficulties with
party-driven legislation that was hastily brought to the House or Senate
floor without a thorough vetting--or any attempts at bipartisan
compromise--among the experts at the committee level. Republican
leaders, said Frost, ''have danced on the edge several times and are flirting
with disaster. You can't always cram
for the final exam and get A's. Plus,
their incompetence emboldens our side to go after them.'' The increasing
use of the filibuster in the Senate is one indicator that objectionable legislation
is being scheduled more frequently for floor consideration, thus boosting
combativeness. In a paper presented
this month to a Capitol Hill conference on civility in the Senate,
congressional scholar Barbara Sinclair, a political science professor at the Moreover, the
disruptive nature of the current legislative process has left the Republican
majority struggling to effectively enunciate a party message. Consultant Steven Hofman, a House
Republican leadership aide during the 1980s who became a senior Labor Department
official in the Bush Administration, noted that in contrast to the congressional
GOP, President Clinton often ''produces a proposal and then goes to the
country to talk about it.'' Hofman contended: ''With divided government, narrow
majorities, and a cynical public, moving policy forward requires public
support. If I were a strategist for
Hastert, I'd bring in our committee and subcommittee chairmen to see how we
can engage issues with the country and have a dialogue.'' Although there
has been little serious discussion of institutional alternatives, the coming
years may dictate a search for new models of legislative order--no matter who
is elected President and who controls Congress. Baronies Under
Siege
Democrats
these days are well-positioned to criticize Republican operations, but they
had plenty of their own problems in running the House and Senate committees
while they held the majority. And the
Democrats were responsible for major changes in the committee system that
have had a lingering impact on the GOP-controlled Congress. For most of
the 20th century--following the Republicans' 1911 revolt against their
domineering Speaker Joseph G. Cannon,
who was called ''czar''--the majority party in the House under both Democratic
and GOP control gave the committees broad authority to dictate the
agenda. The seeds for the destruction
of that system were planted in the 1960s, when the mostly Southern and conservative
Democratic committee chairmen in both the House and the Senate resisted large
parts of President Kennedy's ''New Frontier'' program. The views of
most of these conservative Democratic chairmen ran counter to those of most
of their party colleagues, who wanted to increase the role of the federal government
on economic and social issues. But
during the early 1960s, Democratic congressional leaders lacked the muscle to
break the deadlocks that resulted. The old-style
Democratic committee barons changed course and went along with President
Lyndon B. Johnson's ''Great Society''
initiative only when LBJ's huge election victory in 1964 allowed him to
define the terms of debate the following year. Perhaps the best example occurred in 1965,
when Wilbur D. Mills, D-Ark., the masterful
consensus builder who chaired the Ways and Means Committee, abandoned his longtime
opposition to government-sponsored medical care for the elderly and took the
lead in painstakingly building a bipartisan coalition to enact what became
the Medicare program. ''Generally, the
committee system accommodated change,'' Hofman said. ''Committees knew where the wind was
blowing.'' Even in those
days, however, the committee system hardly functioned perfectly. Segregationist Chairman James O. Eastland, D-Miss., and other Southern
Democrats who controlled the Senate Judiciary Committee opposed civil rights
legislation so ferociously that Democratic leaders were forced to take those
bills directly to the Senate floor. Eventually,
President Johnson's popularity waned, and the coalition of Southerners and
cautious Northern Democrats who took their cues from the big-city political machines
regained control of the House and its committees. They engaged in a titanic struggle with
liberal Democratic reformers who demanded a more activist federal
government. The struggle continued
until after the 1974 election, when the ''Watergate babies'' eliminated the
final vestiges of the old system--including the iron-clad seniority rules,
closed-door deal-making, and Southern dominance among congressional Democrats. Another key step in 1974 was passage of the
Congressional Budget Act, which created an annual budgeting process that
supersedes the committees' role. What followed
was the democratization of the Democratic Caucus and of House committees:
Subcommittee chairmen gained vast new influence; junior members won seats on
the most powerful committees; party leaders--notably Speaker Thomas P. ''Tip'' O'Neill Jr., D-Mass.--became
national figures. With the
introduction of C-SPAN coverage of the House in 1978, Hofman said, ''members
viewed themselves as much more independent, through the use of modern communications
techniques.'' A prime early example was the move in 1982 by two young lawmakers--then-Sen. Bill Bradley, D-N.J., and Rep. Richard A.
Gephardt, D-Mo.--to craft a massive tax reform plan and sell it to the
nation. Slowly, reluctantly, the
old-style committee chairmen accommodated themselves to the changes. During the
Reagan years of politically divided government, important legislation was
written largely in informal settings outside of the committee process. This was the case with the crafting of Social
Security reform in 1983 and the so-called Gramm-Rudman-Hollings deficit
reduction scheme in 1985. In 1994, the
final year of the Democratic majority, the committee system collapsed under
the combined weight of its own decrepitude and the Clinton Administration's
legislative naivete. The Administration's
insistent demand for action on a costly, indigestible plan for national
health care coverage triggered the final, whimpering end: Neither House nor
Senate committees were able to produce credible legislative proposals. Transforming the
Way Congress Works
When the
Republicans took control of Congress in January 1995, armed with their
ready-made legislative agenda, the Contract With America, the committees
became all but superfluous. The document,
signed by nearly all Republican House candidates in 1994, committed a
Republican-controlled House to voting on 10 main planks and a variety of
sub-topics, ranging from balancing the budget to congressional term limits. What the
committee chairmen may have thought about those goals simply did not
matter. Gingrich was viewed by
colleagues, and saw himself, as the political revolution's paramount
leader. Members of the large and
feisty GOP freshman class in each chamber emphasized that they would oppose a
return of domineering committee chairmen of the type that had flourished
during the era of Democratic control. Especially in
the House, Republicans ''rightly sensed that their enemies were not just the
Democrats' policies, but also their prevailing policy-making structures,''
wrote In keeping
with the Contract With America's promise to ''transform the way Congress
works,'' House Republicans during early 1995 approved significant procedural
reforms to weaken the grip of committee chairmen, including a six-year term
limit for full-committee and subcommittee chairmen. (In the Senate, a similar six-year rule for
committee chairmen, which has received less public attention, took effect in
1997.) Other
significant changes that weakened the power of House chairmen include the
elimination of proxy voting in committees and the enhancement of the
Speaker's authority to refer legislation to committees. In addition, Republicans cut committee
staff positions by one-third in the House and by one- sixth in the
Senate. They also eliminated three
minor House committees and merged or eliminated several dozen House and
Senate subcommittees. ''The corporate
party leadership, and the Speaker in particular, gained substantial power at
the expense of committees and committee chairs,'' wrote Christopher Deering,
a During the
Gingrich years, Republicans also moved away from the Democratic majority's
practice of calling in federal agency officials for oversight hearings to
pinpoint bureaucratic failures. Rather
than focus on programmatic oversight, Republicans trained their committee
guns on investigative oversight to uncover scandal, especially among Clinton
Administration officials. Rep. Barney Frank of Massachusetts, a senior
Democrat on both the Banking and Financial Services and the Judiciary
committees who has been a Clinton loyalist during GOP investigations, said
that Republicans have spent less time in committees on programmatic oversight
because they oppose many of those programs in the first place. ''To blame an Administration for a program
not working, you have to believe the program should work,'' Frank said. According to
official records, the Democratic-controlled House committees issued reports
on 55 federal programs and related matters in 1991-92, while the comparable
total from the GOP majority in 1997-98 was a mere 14. Republicans concede that their cutback in
committee staffing has left them with few aides experienced in conducting
oversight. Indeed, the House Rules
Committee recently has been working with the Congressional Research Service
to assist Capitol Hill staffers in learning how to conduct program
oversight. The
committees' supervisory role also has been diminished by the Clinton Administration's
unusually aggressive efforts to deny or at least limit oversight. At a recent hearing of a House Rules subcommittee
chaired by Rep. John Linder, R-Ga.,
five House GOP chairmen recounted their difficulties in securing information
from the Clinton Administration. ''Trying to
get the facts out of this Administration is some trick,'' said Judiciary Committee
Chairman Henry J. Hyde, R- Ill., who
voiced frustration with White House responses to his impeachment inquiry last
fall. Linder said that the panel may
seek a House rules change to improve compliance with committee inquiries. The Bumpy Road
to Regular Order
The regimen of
the early Gingrich years gradually broke down following the unpopular federal
government shutdowns during the winter of 1995-96, the House reprimand of the
Speaker for ethics violations in early 1997, and an aborted coup attempt
against him in mid-1997. These
incidents crippled Gingrich, weakened his command of his leadership team, and
gave committees an opportunity to regain legislative primacy. Yet members
still complain of an absence of true debate and thoughtfulness in most
committee actions. ''The deliberative
process does not happen very often,'' said GOP Rep. Castle.
In recent
years, a growing number of members seeking to learn about issues have often
found committee hearings so stage- managed as to be useless, and these
members have stopped relying on the committees as a source for education and
deliberation. In one alternative
approach, small groups of members get together and call experts to their
offices for private discussions.
Likewise, the failure of many committees to promote serious debates on
issues has created pressure--especially in the clubbier Senate--for bipartisan
closed-door meetings in party leaders' offices. Moreover, the
past two years have seen recurring examples of committee chairmen on both
sides of Capitol Hill who have been unprepared for the task and have documented
their irrelevance by failing to act.
For instance, House Commerce Committee Chairman Tom Bliley, R-Va., has
become a prime target of criticism from his own party because his committee,
despite its broad jurisdiction, has had a very limited output during the past
four years. Bliley has
repeatedly failed to move managed care reforms because of disagreements among
committee Republicans on the scope of the legislation. With Bliley's panel deadlocked, the action
shifted several months ago to the House Education and the Workforce
Committee, which had been largely dormant on health care issues. Hastert this week said that he would follow
through on his private warning that if Republicans can't settle their
differences soon, he will bypass the committees altogether and bring one or
more ''patient protection'' bills directly to the House floor. Critics also
point to embarrassing setbacks that Bliley suffered in June, when his panel
took up the banking reform bill, on privacy and thrift-regulation issues. ''Bliley is out of his element,'' said one
House GOP leadership source. ''John
Dingell (the Michigan Democrat who is the panel's ex-chairman) runs circles
around him.'' The source, like other detractors, would not speak for attribution
about the chairman, whom they regard as thin-skinned. At other
times, committee chairmen have had problems when their views have run counter
to a majority of their party. For
instance, House Armed Services Committee Chairman Floyd Spence, R-S.C.,
sparked an uproar on July 1, when he made what is usually a routine motion on
the House floor to send the defense authorization bill to a House-Senate
conference committee. In doing so,
Spence backed what appeared to be an innocuous effort by committee Democrats
to ''recognize the achievement of goals'' by GOP
hard-liners seized the opportunity to launch another rhetorical attack on This incident
underscores a larger point: Congress's entire debate on Kosovo this spring
occurred largely outside of the committee process, again because of divisions
among Republicans on the key panels and weak leadership by their chairmen,
who couldn't settle differences.
Debate resulted chiefly when GOP leaders called measures directly to
the House or Senate floor. Rep. Tom Campbell, R-Calif., took the unusual
route of filing proposals under the 1973 War Powers Resolution in what became
a futile effort to force the House to take a position. On gun
control, which gained great urgency this spring following the high school massacre
in Hyde favored
action akin to the Senate-passed measure, but most of the predominantly
Southern and Western Republicans on his panel strongly opposed new gun restrictions. The Judiciary Committee lost control of the
issue, and House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, R-Texas, worked with Dingell to
produce a weak alternative; then the Rules Committee structured the House
debate to permit votes on various alternatives. In the end, the House rejected the Dingell
amendment and other gun control provisions, and instead approved several
steps designed to address moral decay and to expand juvenile justice
programs. Since then, procedural
objections have delayed efforts to craft a limited House-Senate
compromise. After the
House vote, DeLay proclaimed, ''I think the process moved very well.'' Likewise,
Rules Committee Chairman David Dreier, R-Calif., praised the GOP's handling
of the issue and blamed the failure on Democratic partisanship. ''It was a brilliant process,'' Dreier said
in an interview. ''It allowed the
House to work its will. . .
. I would have preferred a
different outcome. But we still may
get something in a conference committee.'' The most
successful House chairman under Republican rule has been Bud Shuster, R-Pa.,
the head of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, who has frequently
defied party leaders by pressing for public works spending that far exceeds
their budget plans. Shuster generally
has prevailed because--unlike other House chairmen--he works assiduously to develop
bipartisan consensus on his 75-member committee, and he is willing to
challenge current GOP dogma. ''He
embarrasses the leadership, but I admire the ways he gets things done,'' said
a victim of Shuster's exploits. Even when
House and Senate committees manage to handle their legislation in a relatively
routine fashion, they often face setbacks later in the process at the hands
of Republican leaders. For instance,
in resolving differences between two competing bank reform proposals before
House floor debate began, committee chairmen and other senior Republicans
dropped controversial amendments--one, from the Banking and Financial
Services Committee, to restrict redlining (refusal to do business in poor
neighborhoods) by insurance companies; the other, from the Commerce
Committee, to strengthen privacy of banking records. Neither
proposal was debated on the House floor, even though each was supported by
committee majorities that included Democrats and some Republicans. ''In each case, the Rules Committee
dictated the winner,'' charged a Rules Committee Democratic aide. Taxing Matters
The This spring,
the two committees behaved haphazardly when a bipartisan congressional
coalition of steel-industry allies demanded action on steps to limit steel imports. Most Ways and Means and Finance members
tend to oppose protectionist measures, so Republican leaders, having made
commitments for floor votes, circumvented the committees. Ways and Means reported a steel import
quota bill to the floor ''adversely,'' but the House approved it anyway. Then the proposal was placed directly on
the Senate calendar to avoid the prospect of committee delay; an attempt to
force Senate action was stymied on a cloture vote in June. The two
committees' handling of tax cut legislation this summer has been haphazard as
well. Ways and Means Chairman Bill
Archer, R-Texas, unveiled his bill to both committee Republicans and Democrats
on July 12--the day that Congress returned from its Fourth of July recess and
less than 24 hours before the panel began its debate. ''Tax
legislation is so complex that one word can change the entire meaning,'' said
Rep. Robert T. Matsui of Although Ways
and Means Republicans conceded that they, too, had little time to examine the
bill, many said that Archer had kept them informed of his general direction
and that the result included no real surprises. ''Most of us had a pretty good idea of what
was in it,'' said Rep. Rob Portman,
R-Ohio. ''You need to approach a tax
bill with a lot of discretion for the chairman to make tough choices. Otherwise, it leaks out by dribs and
drabs.'' In addition, members--especially those who do not sit on the committee--usually
don't focus on the details until the final days before the vote, Portman
said. ''A lot of things around here
don't get done until crunch time.'' But after Ways
and Means approved the tax package on a party-line vote, clusters of GOP
moderates and conservatives met and identified an armful of problems with
Archer's proposal. The issues ranged
from the proposal's failure to completely eliminate the ''marriage penalty''
on certain middle-income couples to excessive benefits for the wealthy by
means of a reduction in the capital gains tax rate and the phase-out of the
estate tax. Other Republicans complained
that the tax cuts did not leave enough money to restore the fiscal soundness
of Social Security and Medicare. ''People
don't understand this bill,'' Rep. Ray
LaHood, R-Ill., complained two days before the House floor debate. Republican
leaders were forced to postpone the floor vote by a day as they worked in a
last-minute frenzy to round up their dissidents. To appease GOP moderates, the leaders
agreed to condition the 10 percent, across-the-board income tax cut in
Archer's bill on a commitment to reduce interest payments on the public
debt. In addition, the Rules Committee
wrapped highly technical--and perhaps ineffectual--tax-policy changes to
Archer's proposal into the separate resolution setting the terms of debate on
the overall bill. In the end, on July
22 the House passed the tax bill, 223-208, with all but four Republicans on
board. ''The
Republicans are operating by the seat of their pants,'' complained Frost, a
Rules Committee Democrat. ''Either
they can't count, or they are not competent.'' Even a senior House GOP aide
complained that the tax bill was ''not deftly handled'' and that Archer had
placed party leaders in an awkward position because ''he didn't reach out to
many Republicans.'' Like Archer,
Senate Finance Committee Chairman William V.
Roth Jr., R-Del., unveiled his tax cut proposal after only limited exchanges
of views with other panel members--mostly by letter or through staff
discussions. ''He didn't have many
discussions with Senators,'' said Virginia K.
Flynn, Roth's spokeswoman.
''But he's been signaling for months what are his plans.'' Unlike Archer,
Roth included provisions that were designed to reach out to Democrats, two of
whom voted for the measure in committee on July 21. However, some Finance Committee Republicans
complained about Roth's details, even though they voted for his bill. Four of the panel's most conservative Republicans,
including Lott, offered an alternative modeled after Archer's proposal, but
it was defeated, 13-7. GOP leaders
hope to resolve House-Senate differences before the August recess. The effort to
finalize the tax legislation is sure to be a major headache during the remainder
of the session. But also still looming
is a related conflict that will probably prove the most difficult to resolve
--how to pass the 13 appropriations bills to finance federal operations in
fiscal 2000. Both problems stem directly
from policy assumptions laid out by the House and Senate Budget committees in
their budget resolutions earlier this year and approved on the floors in
April in nearly party-line votes. Although House
Budget Committee Chairman John R.
Kasich, R-Ohio, held listening sessions to seek the views of other
Republicans on his budget resolution, it has become apparent that many members
did not fully understand or embrace the consequences of the plan they
approved--which included the large tax cut, tight spending caps in keeping
with the 1997 balanced-budget agreement, and a ''lockbox'' that Republicans
said will direct $1.8 trillion of the budget surplus to the Social Security
trust funds during the next 10 years. ''The numbers
don't work out in the long run,'' Rep.
Fred Upton, R-Mich., complained on the eve of the House vote on the
tax bill. When Hastert privately
reminded the tax measure's GOP critics that they had supported the budget, Now Republican
members of the House and Senate Appropriations committees are desperate to
avoid a repeat of last year's budget endgame, in which Gingrich took control
of decisions. Complaining that their
pool of money is inadequate, they say that they will be forced to engage in
fiscal sleight of hand to meet the political prerequisites for enacting their
budget. Other Republicans, however,
bitterly respond that the free-spending Appropriations committees have gone
off the party reservation. In recent
weeks, House and Senate Republicans have deferred committee and floor action
on various appropriations measures because they feared that they lacked a majority
to approve them. ''We're suffering
from inadequate internal communications,'' said a House Republican aide who
has been actively engaged in the budget debate. ''When no one has a standard understanding
(of the spending legislation details), it's hard to grow the vote.'' Floundering to
Exert Control
Despite the
setbacks that House and Senate committees have encountered this year,
congressional Republican leaders contend that, with some exceptions, they
have restored legislative power to the committees. The leaders also emphasize their continuing
desire for a less active federal government and make clear that they would
not sanction a return to the old system of omnipotent chairmen. Republicans,
to be sure, have been handicapped by the nearly hopeless dynamics of the
106th Congress. They currently have
only five-seat control in both the House and the Senate, and they must
contend with a wounded Democratic President bent on reasserting his political
primacy and leaving a legacy of peace and prosperity. Their dual challenge is keeping their
diverse forces unified while confronting Democrats--especially in the
House--who have become increasingly confident that they will regain control
in next year's election. It is easy to
see why Republican leaders, when confronted with difficult legislation, might
surmise that the only way to exert control in the current climate is to move
decisively, without waiting for often-wayward committees to work their
will. For their
part, Gephardt and other Democrats have said that they will promote closer
party coordination with the committees if they regain the majority. At the start, at least, the Democrats'
desire to effectively manipulate the levers of power most likely would
override some of their past excesses.
But the prospect that most of the Democrats' House chairmen would be
strong liberals could soon pose the same kinds of problems that Republicans
have had since 1995. Few in the
House or Senate--or, for that matter, in the news media or academia--give
much thought to the committee system's problems. With most lawmakers spending only three or
four days a week in Filibuster
–Happy
As Senate
committees and leaders increasingly send party-driven legislation to the
floor, opposition forces have mounted a growing number of filibusters. Many of these filibusters have succeeded in
killing the bills, since Senate rules require 60 votes to invoke cloture and
limit further debate. By the 1990s,
according to Barbara Sinclair, a political science professor at the |