Committees

1. Committees PS 426 March 10-12, 2009 (note: parts of this presentation are drawn from Charles Stewart’s lecture on committees)

2. Wilson’s Famous Quote • “Congress in session is Congress on public exhibition, whilst Congress in its committee-rooms is Congress at work.” (Woodrow Wilson, Congressional Government (1885). However, Wilson was critical of Congress; he preferred parliamentary government.

3. The basics: What do Committees Do? • Study issues and provide expertise. • Hold hearings • Work out the details of legislation – write the actual language in “mark-up” sessions. • Channel ambition. • Provide for representation of groups. • Provide the institutional basis for credit claiming.

4. House/Senate comparisons • House more reliant on committees than the Senate. Senate does more of its work on the floor than the House. • House more specialized • The House must originate all tax bills, so this gives Ways and Means greater power as the first-mover. However, this isn’t always strictly followed. • Senators hold more committee assignments (3-5) than House members (1 or 2 generally).

5. Types of committees Joint committees are not very important, but conference committees are crucial for working out differences between different versions of bills that pass the House and Senate. Also ad hoc committees.

6. House Standing Agriculture Appropriations Armed Services Budget Education and Labor Energy and Commerce Financial Services Foreign Affairs Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs House Administration Judiciary Natural Resources Oversight and Governmental Reform Rules Small Business Entrepreneurship Transportation and Infrastructure Veterans Affairs Ways and Means Select Permanent Intelligence Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming Senate Standing Agriculture, Nutrition, and Forestry Appropriations Armed Services Budget Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Commerce, Science, and Transportation Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Foreign Relations Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Rules and Administration Intelligence Judiciary Energy and Natural Resources Small Business and Entrepreneurship Environment and Public Works Veterans Finance Select Indian Affairs Ethics Intelligence Aging Committees in the 111th Congress Joint Joint Economic Committee Library Printing Taxation

7. Membership • Party ratios • Renegotiated every Congress • There is a bonus given to the majority party • Special bonus for certain committees • House 254 D-178 R (3 vacancies) after the 2008 elections (1.43:1). Committee ratios range from 1.6:1 to 2.25:1 for “important” committees, 1.5:1 for most others • Approp: 37/23 (1.6), Rules: 8/4 (2.25:1), W&M: 26/15 (1.7) Budget 24/15 (1.6), Energy and Commerce (36/23) 1.56) • House Ag: 26/17 (1.53), Fin.Serv., 41/27 (1.52); Judiciary: 23/16 (1.44), Ed and Labor: 30/19 (1.57), Trans. 45/30 (1.5) • Senate: ratios are similar given the 58-41 division (1.41:1). Democrats have three more seats than Republicans on most committees. Four more on important committees.

8. How Committee members are chosen • Party committees make choices from requests submitted by members. • Formal and informal constraints • Property rights in committee assignments arose around the turn of the last century. Members can stay on committees if they choose to. • Allocation restrictions. Senate: “Johnson rule”: all junior senators get one “good” assignment before a senior senator gets a second. “A” and “B” committees. Senate Repubs create “super A” committees [bold, limit 1] • A: Agriculture, Appropriations, Armed Services, Banking, Commerce, Energy, Environment, Finance, Foreign Relations, Governmental Affairs, Judiciary, and Health, Education, Labor and Pensions [limit of 2]

9. Committee assignments, cont. • B: Budget, Ethics, Indian Affairs, Rules and Administration, Select Aging, Select Intelligence, Small Business and Veterans´ Affairs [may serve on 1] • C: Ethics, Indian Affairs, Joint Committee on Taxation (no limits on these). • House: Exclusive, Semi-Exclusive, Non-exclusive (Rs call them “Red” “White” “Blue”) Exclusive Appropriations, Rules, Ways and Means (plus Commerce for Rs). • Other way to categorize committees (more the way that members think about them): prestige, policy, constituency, and undesired.

10. Chairs • Seniority system: the practice of reserving the chairs of committees for the most senior member (on that committee) • Result of revolt against Joe Cannon • Senate: pretty inviolate, with bidding • House • Democrats in 1970s put chairs up to confirmatory vote by the caucus • Republicans • 1970s put ranking members up to confirmatory vote • 1994: term limits (6 years) plus vote of caucus • 2000: Affected virtually every chair • Would have come up again in 2006, but Rs lost control; Dems have not maintained the same rule. • Term limits of 6 years for chairs.

11. Subcommittees and Their Role • Subcommittees sometimes just smaller versions of committees. More specialized topics. • The congressional receptor for the “Iron Triangle” • Increasing importance of subcommittees • “Subcommittee bill of rights” in 1973 (House Dems) • Written jurisdictions • Members given rights to pick memberships and bid for chairmanships • More autonomy from the chair of the committee (could call meetings without approval of chair) • Minority party guaranteed some staff (reversed in 1995) • Hearing would be open, unless closed by a majority vote.

12. Committee Transfers • If members get stuck on a committee they don’t want, they can request a transfer at the beginning of new sessions. Classes of committees: prestige, policy, constituency, undesired. • If there are property rights in committee seats, then a transfer reveals a preference for the new committee over the old committee. • This gives rise to independent measures of committee value developed by Charles Stewart and Tim Groseclose (Grosewart scores).

13. Grosewart Scores for the House

14. In the news • Obama signs $410 billion FY 2009 spending bill. Dem. opposition last week temporarily stopped the bill – needed a continuing resolution to avoid a government shutdown. He was in a tough spot on earmarks. “Last year’s business.” Plenty of hypocrisy. Feingold and McCain have a bill to allow a limited line-item veto. Changes: members must post requests on web sites, 20 days for agencies to examine, competitive bids. • DC/Utah House seats: vote postponed, Dem. leaders vow they have not given up on it.

15. Source: Groseclose and Stewart (1998)

16. Hearings • Civics book perspective on hearings is incomplete • Information-gathering (substantive and political) • Build the public record • Symbolism • Establish jurisdiction • Put together by staff • Hearings rarely change the minds of members of Congress. My experience with the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Voting Rights Act hearing in the summer, 2006.

17. Changes Made by House Republicans after 1994 (most of these upheld by Dems in 2007) • Committees eliminated • District of Columbia • Merchant Marine & Fisheries • Post Office & Civil Service • Committee staff cut by 1/3 (but personal staff untouched) • 28 subcommittees eliminated and generally limited to 5 per commtt. • Subcommittee staff controlled by committee chair • Assignment limits • Proxy voting and rolling quorums banned • Committees must publish roll call votes on all bills and amendments • Meetings may be closed to the public only when absolutely necessary • All committees open to broadcast coverage & still photography • Multiple referrals eliminated • Speaker may still serially refer bills to different committees

18. Theoretical perspectives on committees • “Distributive” theories • Agenda setting • Gate-keeping (textbook refers to this as negative agenda power): the right of a committee to decide to keep an item off the floor if it doesn’t want action. Protected by germaneness rule and closed rules (therefore, less applicable in Senate). • Structure-induced equilibrium view • Committees provided the basis for making credible claims of credit (Mayhew).

19. Distributive theory, cont. • Easy to think of committees as providing “take it or leave it” propositions and being composed of “high demand outliers” • “gains from trade” – logrolling. • “deference” to committees • Supposed “self-selection” on committees • Problems with this view • “high demand committees” hard to sustain in a majoritarian institution. The Senate, especially, has ways around committees. Other ways around gatekeeping: discharge petitions, motion to recommit with instructions. • Empirical evidence mixed • Amendment opportunities galore

20. Informational View • Fundamentally different from other views • While “rational choice,” more in consonance with more traditional views. • Uncertainty over policy outcomes. Committees provide info to the floor. Committees will mostly be made up of people who have interests in those topics, but chamber will also want to have more representative committees: heterogeneous rather than homogeneous preferences. • How to test this theory vs. distributive theory?

21. Partisan perspective • Conditional party government – MCs will not delegate broad power to leaders if they are heterogeneous, only if they are homogenous. • Subcommittee bill of rights. Prevent committee chairs from blocking bills. Make committees more responsive to the party caucus (rather than the floor median). • Rules committee as the arm of the leadership. • Bypass committees – leadership task forces, bring right to the floor w/o committee consideration, post-committee adjustments, control of the appropriations committee. Increasingly important in settling House/Senate differences: bypass conference committees. • The “Hastert Rule” – would not bring a bill to the floor for a vote unless it was supported by a majority in his party (even if a large majority of the House supported it). • None of these things are consistent with distributive or informational theories.

22. Agenda control • Positive agenda power • Ability to push through legislation that is approved by the committee and opposed by others. Power is limited: have to rely on persuasion (information advantage), leverage from threats if others fail to cooperate, strategic packaging (logrolls), and dominance of conference committee. • Negative agenda power • Ability to stop legislation that is opposed by the committee.

23. Agenda control, cont. • Which of the previous examples are consistent with positive or negative power? • Other tools noted above applied to partisan theory: motion to recommit with instructions and discharge petition. Also closed rules as a mechanism for both protecting committees and supporting the party’s views. Suspension of the rules can be used as well, but typically only for minor legislation (needs 2/3 support).