On Twitter, I advocated for three simple committee-system reforms for the House that I believe would strengthen Congress as an institution. This generated some interesting discussion. Let me go into more detail on each proposal, and add some concluding thoughts about the current politics of reform.
Election of Committee Chairs
The first reform proposal was to change how committee chairs are elected. Currently, committee chairs are elected by the majority party caucus (ranking members by the minority party caucus). It was formerly the case that the parties would abide by strict seniority rules – essentially, the longest-serving majority party Member on a committee would become its chair automatically. But today, the caucuses hold internal elections and seniority is not a dispositive factor. What has become the overriding factor is the ability to bring in money for the party. If you can rake in the big bucks for your party, you have a better shot at becoming chair. It’s a pretty silly racket: plum assignments within the House doled out on the basis of who is best at begging big donors for cash.
Changing how committee chairs are elected has the potential to change this dynamic, though it wouldn’t necessarily eliminate these kinds of perverse incentives. The reform proposal would be to subject committee chairs to the same process by which the House elects its Speaker. So, each party would put forth nominations, and the entire House would take a vote on who should be chair of the committee under consideration. A united, disciplined majority party could still put in place whoever it wanted, just as it does with Speaker. And if it wanted to do so on the basis of the ability to “dial for dollars,” so be it. But it would be a public vote, rather than the result of secretive caucus procedures and negotiations.
And if the majority party were not united, and multiple candidates for each committee emerged, there could be the potential for choosing someone based on policy rather than politics. If all candidates were subject to a public floor vote, the question of how each candidate would lead the committee would become much more salient. For this reason, I would advocate for a “question time” period before the vote, where Members would be permitted to ask the candidates questions. Then there would be a public record of what each committee chair hoped to accomplish, and (presumably) greater accountability if they failed to live up to stated promises.
In extreme cases, a majority party candidate might appeal to the minority party for votes (assuming a fractured majority party). If, say, an extremist faction is refusing to support their party’s candidate, that person could cut deals with the minority party to assure his or her election (i.e. promise to advance certain bills or certain topics). If a moderate faction balked at its party’s candidate for being too extreme, they could try to band together with moderates of the other party to elect a more centrist candidate. Either way, I think the procedure here would tend to drive the discussion toward the center and away from the extremes. Candidates would have to appeal to the entire House, not just one party. They would have to publicly articulate an agenda for the committee. And hopefully, committee chairs would become more institutional in their outlook, rather than partisan.
Committee Access to the Floor
The second reform would be to give committees greater access to the floor of the House. Theoretically, this is unnecessary, as committee chairs have numerous tools under the standing rules to get their legislation to the floor. The problem with all of those methods is that they are procedurally cumbersome. Take, for example, Calendar Wednesday – a 1909 reform specifically designed to provide a path for committee chairs to bypass the Speaker and the Rules Committee and bring bills directly to the floor. Committee chairs can still use this procedure, but their bills would come up under the most liberal form of “regular order” – more open than the most open rule from the Rules Committee – and thus subject any bill to a near-infinite number of procedural motions and possible obstruction tactics. Committee chairs these days wouldn’t know where to begin in terms of defending their bills from this onslaught.
So this reform proposal would essentially give committee chairs the same kind of power currently exercised by the Rules Committee: the ability to bring up a bill via a special order of business resolution. This procedural method of disposing of House business has been used to the exclusion of virtually every other method for over a century, and is therefore one that the membership is already quite familiar with. Whether you would want to grant committee chairs every power currently exercised by the Rules Committee is an open question. I could see good reason for restricting this authority in some ways – for example, by mandating that some form of open rule be used. Thus, committee chairs could get their bills to the floor without the need for “permission” from House leadership, under a familiar structured process, but one that would generally provide more opportunities for rank-and-file Members to participate in the process.
Finally, this would be an effective way of watering down the authority of the Rules Committee without actually removing any of its formal powers. Majority party leadership could still use the Rules Committee to bring agenda items to the floor. But it wouldn’t have exclusive authority to do so, and thus would lose much of its leverage in terms of setting the agenda. Committees (and by extension committee chairs) would have a far greater say in protecting their bills from interference by leadership – along with greater responsibility for ensuring timely passage of such legislation. Under current rules, the Speaker becomes the focal point for determining legislative success. If a bill goes down on the floor, it’s clearly the Speaker’s fault. Under this reform, however, committee chairs would largely bear this responsibility, thus spreading power (and responsibility) around the House to different institutional actors.
Restructuring Committee Jurisdiction
The final reform proposal would be to restructure committee jurisdictions. Under current rules, committees have jurisdiction over defined subject areas (for example, the Committee on Veterans’ Affairs, naturally, has jurisdiction over veterans’ issues). But there is an awkward split between jurisdiction over authorizing legislation (regular standing committees) and appropriating legislation (subcommittees of the Appropriations Committee). Authorizing committees have essentially withered as the Appropriations Committee has been granted more and more waivers to appropriate for unauthorized programs. The dividing line between establishing/overseeing Federal programs and allocating money for such programs has effectively been erased.
This reform would make that erasure complete and create new committees that had “cradle-to-grave” jurisdiction over their slices of the Federal bureaucracy. The same committee would be in charge of creating/re-authorizing Federal programs with authorizing legislation (at the front end of the process), allocating money to be spent on such programs, and (at the back end) conducting oversight to determine how those programs are doing. That cycle would occur every year, allowing committees to set goals and make adjustments as needed.
Consolidating jurisdiction in this way would create much more powerful committees, able to exercise authority much more directly over programs under their jurisdiction. Under current rules, a Federal program might be under the jurisdiction of several authorizing committees and a separate appropriations subcommittee. In addition, the full Appropriations Committee, the Budget Committee, the Rules Committee, and House leadership would all have significant influence over how any given program is managed and how resources are allocated. There are simply too many cooks in the kitchen – allowing Members and committees to avoid responsibility. The end result is to funnel all power and responsibility to the top.
More powerful committees would also provide a counter-balance to executive overreach. A cabinet secretary today can play one set of congressional actors against another, or appeal directly to House and Senate leaders. A Congress that channeled its power through committees with direct control over department polices and budgets would be in a much better position to resist such efforts. In negotiations between executive branch departments and the legislature, Congress would be closer to speaking with one voice on any given issue.
What These Reforms Accomplish
Taken together, these three reforms would mark a significant change in how the House does business. The committee system has played a central role in House operations for almost two centuries, and reinvirogating that system is the first step in reforming House procedures. Expanding the power of committees would have ripple effects that address a variety of institutional problems. They are all interlocking pieces of the same puzzle:
Decentralizing Power: We are currently at a high-point in terms of centralizing power in the House – the Speaker and the Rules Committee control all. Devolving power down to committees would decentralize this power, and put more responsibility on the shoulders of committee chairs. Members would have many more access points to advance their priorities. The House would no longer be ruled by a cadre of leaders at the top. Power would be distributed more equitable, and thus make the House more (small-d) democratic.
Getting Back to Work: Restructured and newly-empowered committees would have a fairly well-defined mission from the outset: getting the House back to work. The fact of the matter is, there is a huge backlog of legislating that Members have been punting on for years, if not decades. In particular, authorizations have lapsed in numerous areas, and hundreds of millions of dollars are appropriated each year for programs that have undergone no significant scrutiny. The Federal government is vast, and it requires constant oversight. Committee chairs with real power over their areas of jurisdiction would be more incentivized to conduct that oversight to ensure that their slice of the Federal government is working smoothly.
A Return to Regular Order: Members constantly decry that lack of regular order in the House. Too many decisions are made using ad hoc procedures – special rules that are sprung on Members at the last minute, whose effects are difficult to discern. Bills are dropped with virtually no time to read them. These reforms would provide a predictable path for legislation – a truly regular order – that was consistent and invariable. Members would be able to easily track the progress of legislation through committees, onto the floor, and into conference with the Senate.
More Opportunities for the Rank-and-File: As noted, committees would get expanded access to the floor by copying Rules Committee’s authority to file special orders. But that authority can be restricted to prevent “closed” rules and other heavy-handed procedures that the Rules Committee has used to deny rank-and-file Members opportunities to debate and offer amendments. Insisting on only open or modified-open rules as part of this reform would open up the process to rank-and-file Members and allow them to truly represent their constituents.
Budgeting: These committee reforms, particularly regarding jurisdiction, would naturally tend to simplify and strengthen the budget process. The House would essentially be carved up into sub-units, each exercising responsibility over one slice of the budget pie. The budgeting process thus becomes much more transparent, as committees would basically be under an obligation to advance one primary bill per session – the appropriations bill for their slice of pie. These reforms dovetail with another reform usually mentioned in the budget context: namely, restructuring the Budget Committee to consist of the chairs and ranking members of each standing committee. Thus, the same people setting the top-line budget numbers at the beginning of the session would be the same ones responsible for the enactment of the underlying appropriations bills.
Bipartisanship and Compromise: No procedural reform can (or should) guarantee a particular policy result. If the political will is not there to pass a certain kind of bill, no amount of creativity in process can generate it. Nevertheless, these reforms generally tend to increase the institutional nature of committees of the House, and decrease their partisan aspects. Committee chairs would be elected by the entire House, and would thus be less creatures of party than they currently are. More amendment opportunities for the rank-and-file would decrease the ability of extreme factions of either party to leverage their votes to block proposals favored by those in the political middle. There would be many more natural opportunities for Members to reach across the aisle – opportunities that partisans would not be able to take away.
Accountability: Expanded committees would put more power in the hands of committee chairs, but as noted, would greatly increase their responsibilities too. When power is concentrated at the top, those not included in the inner circles feel no pressure to do the hard work of legislating, and will certainly feel more at liberty to be uncompromising and “play hardball” (the only way to exert any influence on the process). Under these reforms, committee chairs would no longer have the luxury of standing on the sidelines and letting “leadership” take the blame because they would become part of that leadership. A larger group of institutional actors would thus feel an obligation to guide particular bills to the floor. Rank-and-file Members, as well as the public, would be better positioned to evaluate whether those actors are fulfilling their duties.
Capacity: Empowering committees would likely incentivize Members to invest more in institutional capacity. Powerful committees with new authorities and new obligations would obviously need more staff, more resources, and more capacity generally to accomplish their goals. The House desperately needs to invest in itself. These reforms could provide the impetus to make those needed institutional investments.
Political Considerations
Finally, I will end with some observations on the politics of this type of decentralizing reform. Some are skeptical that either of the two major party caucuses within the House would ever agree to a system that decentralized power away from party leaders and opened up more opportunities for rank-and-file Members (including those in the minority). The House is simply too polarized, they say, so every Member’s natural instinct is to band together with fellow partisans and concentrate power at the top – where it can be most effectively deployed against the machinations of the other party.
I would offer three possible answers to this critique. The first is to point out that the parties are not actually all that unified. There are major disagreements within each party, and a variety of factions and sub-groups that have been throwing their weight around. There is an inkling that perhaps business could be done differently – that the benefits of placing virtually all power in the hands of party leaders do not, in the end, outweigh the costs of ceding procedural rights and influence over the process.
Second, I would point to the growing sentiment in both parties that party leaders are more of a liability than an asset. Republicans these days routinely discuss coups against their elected leaders, and effectively caused the resignation of Speaker Boehner. Many Democratic candidates are shying away from Nancy Pelosi, and one member of House Democratic leadership was recently ousted in a primary. However the election in November turns out, it seems likely that the House will contain many more Members who have no particular reason to defer to party leaders or cede to them outsized powers. In some ways, formally decentralizing power in the House makes the choice of party leaders less fraught, i.e. support for a weakened party leader would be less of a commitment to a particular agenda or ideology.
Finally, I would argue that the current committee system is so broken, so lifeless, that the normal pull of institutional inertia is basically absent. There are currently no strong committee chairs jealously guarding their jurisdiction against interlopers. There is no real working system, with invested interests, that would have to be swept aside. No one in the House has been serving long enough to recall when “the system” worked as it was supposed to. This analysis might exaggerate the situation somewhat, but the fact remains that there’s never been a better time to pursue this kind of broad reform of the committee system.
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