In our last post, we described the two primary drivers of Congressional dysfunction: over-centralization of decision-making, and lack of capacity. Party leaders have monopolized the procedural tools for considering legislation that should be available to all Members. And after decades of inadequate investment in its own capacity, Congress has deprived itself of the resources necessary to fulfil its role as a co-equal branch of government.
Here, we lay out the solutions; the opportunities (and challenges) of “democratizing” the House; the responsibilities that come with dispersed power; and how to bring the legislative and executive branches back into constitutional alignment.
(Most of the specifics here are drawn from our experience with House procedure, but the same general concepts apply equally well to the Senate.)
Decentralizing Power Away from Party Leadership
The overarching goal of House reform should be the decentralization of procedural power away from majority party leadership.
The history of the House reveals a periodic ebb and flow. Sometimes power is exercised primarily by the Speaker and other House leaders (such as the Reed-Cannon era 125 years ago, or our own Gingrich-Pelosi era); at other times, power is shared more broadly among the various committee chairs and rank-and-file Members (as was the case before the Civil War and again for much of the 20th century).
The pendulum has now swung fully to the side of centralized decision-making,
And while most Members appreciate party leaders coordinating an agenda and shielding them from difficult votes, they are also chafing under increasingly restrictive rules that give them few opportunities to advance their legislative goals. A more productive balance can be achieved through a better agenda-setting system and a revised committee structure.
Empowering Committees to Bring Legislation to the Floor without Party Leadership Interference
Committee work is still where most Members focus their energies, but that work can only be effective if committees themselves have the power to bring their recommendations to the floor without undue interference from party leaders. That is not the case today.
Over a century ago, the House faced similar challenges and invented the “Calendar Wednesday” procedure, which provided committee chairs with guaranteed access to the floor to expedite committee business. But the promise of that procedure never fully materialized due to its cumbersome procedures and vulnerability to obstruction. As a result, it has rarely been used. A modernized agenda system as an incentive for committee action, tailored to current conditions, would do much to restore committees as the drivers of policy in Congress.
This modernized agenda-setting system should:
- guarantee floor consideration of committee-reported bills at the committee’s request;
- empower committee chairs to set the overall terms for debate and amendment; and
- protect committee products from unilateral alteration by party leaders.
To ensure that this approach does not just transfer a centralization of power from party leadership to committee chairs (who, of course, are also part of the leadership structure), the internal procedures of committees should be amended to allow bipartisan legislation favored by the majority of committee members to move forward without pre-approval of the chair.
Clarifying and Rationalizing Committee Jurisdictions
Empowering committees to set the House and Senate’s agendas, however, will only work if the committee structure is rationalized.
In the “Schoolhouse Rock” version of congressional procedure, bills are sent to different committees of the House based on jurisdiction, i.e. a farm bill goes to the Agriculture Committee, a military bill goes to the Armed Services Committee, etc. And while that basic idea is true, committee jurisdictions have not kept pace with the rapid changes that have taken place within the Federal government over the past few decades.
Committee jurisdictions are established in Rule X of the standing rules of the House, and they are a hodge-podge of ill-defined subjects and overlapping responsibilities. For example, the House Energy and Commerce Committee “has responsibility for matters including telecommunications, consumer protection, food and drug safety, public health and research, environmental quality, energy policy, and interstate and foreign commerce among others.”
Throughout the 20th century, the House would periodically revamp its committee structure to keep up with changes in the executive branch. The 1946 Legislative Reorganization Act streamlined and consolidated many committees based on Congress’s experience in World War II. The 1970s saw another major overhaul of the committee system, supplemented by smaller revisions in 1995. But since that time (apart from establishing a new Homeland Security Committee after 9/11) there has been no fundamental change to committee jurisdictions in Congress—even as self-driving cars, social media, cryptocurrencies, generative artificial intelligence, and other game-changing technologies continue to redefine the societal and economic landscape. What Congress needs is a new mapping of committee jurisdictions onto the existing structure of the executive branch.
The lessons of the 1946 reorganization of Congress are instructive. In his remarks on the plan, Senator Robert La Follette described the effort as one to “simplify the committee structure and, insofar as practical, to correlate it with the departments and agencies. of the Federal Government.” That kind of “correlation” has not been undertaken in many decades and would dramatically improve how Congress divides up its enormous workload. With clear, reorganized jurisdictions, committees can avoid unproductive turf battles and focus on comprehensive oversight of their slice of the Federal government.
This modernized committee system should:
- Move away from jurisdictions defined by vague and abstract subject matters and clarify in the Rules which authorization bills will be assigned to which committees and, ideally, which subcommittees.
- Clarify the executive branch contact for each authorizing committee and subcommittee, as well as each appropriations committee and subcommittee, for specific programs and offices.
- Balance clear and exclusive responsibilities over parts of the federal government with opportunities for cross-committee collaboration on issues that span departments and agencies.
Increasing the Number of Subcommittees and Clarifying their Scope
Committees themselves would also benefit from further subdividing their workloads into more manageable pieces, each overseen by a subcommittee.
In the 1970s, reformers pushed for a “Subcommittee Bill of Rights” to formalize procedures and empower subcommittees with defined jurisdictions.
An updated system of subcommittees would further bring power down to individual Members by allowing small groups of Members to take deep dives into specific parts of the federal government – and thus gain the expertise to ensure that each part is functioning as it should.
With a modernized system of committees and subcommittees, rank-and-file Members would have a plethora of opportunities to involve themselves in the details of the legislative process. Leadership roles would expand via the creation of new subcommittee chair and ranking Member positions. Committees with more procedural authority would guarantee that legislative work done in committee rooms has direct access to the floor. Overall, individual Members would have clear pathways to channel their legislative energies.
Preparing Individual Members to Assume More Responsibility
A less centralized House would give every Member opportunities to play a meaningful role in the legislative process. But the flipside is that this new freedom comes with new responsibilities. Members must be prepared for a cultural shift inside the institution that acknowledges both the privileges they enjoy as Members and the constitutional duties that come with that office.
The workload of Congress in the 21st century is simply enormous. The modern economy is incredibly complex, and the federal government bureaucracy that oversees it is so vast that it is difficult to wrap one’s head around even a portion of it. But if representative democracy is to have any meaning in the modern world, Congress must take on that challenge of appropriately dividing its labor and taking a closer look at each and every part of the executive branch.
Members come to Congress with many good ideas and are often eager to establish new programs to effectuate them. Though well-intentioned, this instinct tends to result in duplication and redundancy – layering new mandates on agencies that are already struggling to keep up with the old ones. For example, Members routinely come to Congress with sincere proposals to help workers prepare for better jobs or support people displaced by economic change. Those are worthy goals. But Congress has already created dozens of employment and training programs across multiple agencies, many of which serve similar populations with similar services. In 2011, GAO found that 44 of 47 federal employment and training programs overlapped with at least one other program. Instead of continuing the proliferation of redundant programs, Members need to learn what already exists (and what already works) so that they are not always reinventing the wheel.
That education should include:
- Reviewing the mandate, mission, and statutory authority of the agencies covered by the Members’ committees.
- Understanding how to review and evaluate appropriations bills, and how to draft and offer amendments in the current restrictive process (and hopefully, in the future, in a less restrictive “regular order” process in which Members can offer amendments without being filtered or censored by committee chairs or party leadership).
- Understanding how to conduct effective oversight of the agencies and programs in their committees’ jurisdiction, and how to leverage findings from oversight activities when drafting reauthorization bills.
- How to effectively engage with civil servant subject matter experts who administer these programs and have deep insights into opportunities for increasing efficiencies, increasing access among target populations, and accelerating the achievement of program outcomes.
Ideally, providing this education will:
- Increase the likelihood that Members will do the hard work of regularly reauthorizing agencies and programs.
- Decrease the likelihood of Members authorizing new programs that are duplicative of existing programs.
- Increase the likelihood that Congress gets back to regular order, with Congress re-focusing on traditional oversight and authorization activities rather than outsourcing decisions about what to fund to Appropriations subcommittees who have not conducted oversight of these programs and do not have the in-depth subject matter expertise.
This is the Right Time for Change
The types of changes described here (floor procedures that decrease party leadership’s ability to set the agenda and prioritize committee work and reorganized committee and subcommittee jurisdictions) are big lifts, and we do not underestimate the effort needed to enact these reforms.
The good news is that the current system is so broken and misaligned that the usual impediments to pursuing these types of changes are largely gone. Powerful committee chairs aggressively defending their “fiefdoms” are a thing of the past. Indeed, it is likely that many Members would support increasing committee power and clarifying jurisdictions.
Party leaders themselves should also welcome this effort to democratize the House and spread power more broadly throughout the institution. The current system requires the Speaker to personally negotiate the contours of every major bill that comes to the floor and round up the necessary votes from reluctant Members. With ultra-thin margins and fractious caucuses, this is a nearly impossible task, which is why we’ve seen a dramatic increase in failed procedural votes and failed bills (not to mention perennial threats to “vacate the Speaker”). Giving rank-and-file Members more agency in the process helps party leaders coordinate activity through political influence and persuasion, not heavy-handed procedural domination.
The First Step: Select or Joint Committee
The first step in undertaking this project is the establishment of new select committees in the House and Senate, or another Joint Committee on the Organization of Congress (similar to those established in the 1940s, 1960s, and 1990s). This has traditionally been the way Congress restructures and revitalizes itself, and though each reform effort has had its successes and failures, it is an effective model for developing these kinds of comprehensive reforms.
Such a committee must be given the tools to succeed: the resources necessary to hire expert staff, the independence to pursue substantive reforms, and the procedural prerogatives to bring its recommendations directly to the floor for up-or-down votes. Similar committees in the past have been hampered by charters that limited the scope of their activity and made them dependent on party leaders for floor access. It is vital that any new committee avoid these pitfalls if it wishes to succeed.
Conclusion
Congress is a living institution, continuously evolving and frequently reinventing itself. Over the past few decades, it has put more and more of its legislative work on autopilot – ignoring lapsed authorizations to fund programs with no oversight, and rushing through damaging continuing resolutions when spending bills become too difficult to pass. In doing so, it has ceded its constitutional authority to the other branches and cut our elected representatives out of the policy-making process. Congress needs to reassert itself – through regularized proceedings, decentralized decision-making, and increased capacity.
We would like to thank Max Spitzer, former Assistant Parliamentarian for the U.S. House of Representatives, for his expert guidance.