Chris Nehls: Hi, this is Chris Nehls with the American Governance Institute. Thanks for joining us again. I’m here with Professor Jason Roberts at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is one of the co-authors of a great new paper that includes some reform recommendations for the House called Renewing the House of Representatives: How a More Participatory Legislative Process Could Benefit Both Members and Leaders.
This was put out by Protect Democracy United and R Street. And Professor Roberts provided some of the historical perspective that is in the paper. You can go over to congressionalrenewal.org to download the paper if you’re interested, and I’ll try to remember to put a link in the, the transcript of this podcast if you’re interested in reading it.
But, um, figured we’d take some time today to chat with Professor Roberts about the history of House rules and how we got to the situation we’re in where things are pretty locked down and members are very frustrated. That’s certainly been the case in the past in the House. And it’s important to remember as we go into the next Congress that the rules have changed dramatically over time, and Jason knows a lot about that, so we’ll start there.
So thanks for joining me.
Jason Roberts: It’s a pleasure to be here.
Nehls: You crammed a whole lot of, of context into a, a short section, which is very hard to do. And you did it exceedingly well. So, I appreciate that work. And one of the things that you are trying to get across is that there have been these pendulum swings back and forth between really strong leadership control and decentralization in the history of the House, and that these things have been the result of member frustrations and, the need to set agendas by leadership, and the- these two things have kind of been in tension over time.
So why don’t we just start there and talk about how that cycle has worked in congressional history, at least going back to the post-bellum period.
Roberts: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I mean, immediately post-bellum, the House was very chaotic, didn’t have a lot of order to it at all. And that really changes under the speakership of Thomas Brackett Reed of Maine. He was at his heart a majoritarian, and he really went to the mat to put a series of majoritarian reforms. He got rid of this thing called the disappearing quorum, where the minority party would be present in the chamber and not voting in order to deny the majority the ability to do business. He ends that and really starts the process of using special rules that we think of today, and just really fundamentally made the House a majority rule institution for the first time.
That then carried on under one of his successors, Joseph Cannon of Illinois. Cannon was known as a czar, as was Reed, and Cannon took this even further. He appointed the committees. He was chair of the Rules Committee. He really tried to lead the House like a dictator, and eventually that came back to bite him. A group of Republicans allied with some Democratic friends of theirs and stripped him of many of his powers in the early part of the 20th century.
And that was really the last time we had as strong of a central leadership control as we have now. We sort of, muddled through something called the king caucus era, where Democrats tried to rule through their caucus and that didn’t work particularly well. Then most of the 20th century, you have a very divided Democratic majority party between their Southern component and their Northern component, and they just weren’t really interested in, in centralizing power in the leadership because they had such diverse interests.
And we really don’t see that pick up again then until the 1970s.
Nehls: Great. Yeah. So what, what changes came about in the ‘70s then?
Roberts: Well, there’s a couple things going on. A little bit before that, you start to see northern, more liberal Democrats come into the party and say, hey, this, this system’s not working for us. The southerners control all the committees because of the seniority system. They control the Rules Committee. We have a majority in the caucus for things we wanna do, and there’s not really an outlet for us to do this.
So, they begin to agitate for change, and you see this, some of this happens in the ‘60s. You see the, the expansion of the rules committee to weaken the power of Judge Smith of Virginia. But then it’s really in the 1970s that this takes off, and when they start voting for committee chairs by secret ballot, and that takes away the strong grip of seniority and really starts to get to make sure that the people in leadership in the party are gonna have to be responsive to what a majority of the caucus wants.
Nehls: Actually, let, let me just back up, because you have these great graphs in the piece where you talk about the committee era what folks have been calling the textbook Congress in, in political science. And you look at it, and it’s much more productive in terms of passing bills. It’s always a kind of a tricky metric if the number of bills equals productivity. And we can bicker about that another day. But you’ve got a tremendous amount of bills being passed in the, in the ‘40s and ‘50s and ‘60s. And then it kind of reverses itself later on, and the bills get longer and more complicated in other areas. But, they’re pretty short in the committee era.
So let’s just talk about how I think I got a little ahead of ourselves. What were some of the strengths of that committee-driven system in terms of what we would think of as a productive Congress or an active Congress?
Roberts: Well, the committees had real power. They could report legislation out in their area of expertise. Also, the seniority system really incentivized people to become experts. Once you got on a committee, you could stay there indefinitely. It was up to you to leave or not. There were no term limits like we see today. And so it was predictable that you could move up just by staying around, and if you knew you were gonna be on a committee for the long haul and you were gonna have influence in that area, becoming an expert in that area made a lot of sense.
And so members could say, hey, I’m gonna learn a lot about this policy area and try to make a difference here.
It also distributed the workload across these committees. Part of the problem today is everything tries to run through the leadership, and there’s just not enough capacity in the leadership to handle the entire policy agenda. When it was more distributed, it was just a, a, a just a more efficient way of, of managing the flow of legislation.
Nehls: Right. We always have the, the worry that- in the lack of capacity, you get outside groups or lobbyists basically coming in and, and helping out, providing the kind of auxiliary capacity. Do you think that bears out in terms of the, the current situation?
Roberts: Yes. I mean, you, you sometimes hear lobbyists say that it’s hard to go talk to people on the Hill because they don’t know what’s going on. They know more than the people they’re trying to lobby. So there’s just not the incentives today for members to develop that deep expertise that there was in the seniority system.
Committee chairs rotate every few years. I can understand the argument for that, but it really disincentivizes the development of long-term expertise.
Nehls: Yeah. we’ve talked about this on the podcast before about you have the tension within the liberal and conservative wings of the Democratic Party in the the ‘60s over civil rights and other kinds of economic rights issues. And you end up, with the liberal majority of the Democratic caucus deposing the conservatives and then changing how the speakership is kind of oriented.
This is something that you’ve written about before academically: what’s been going on since the mid, the early ‘70s in terms of how the minority’s been able to respond to this regime.
Roberts: Yeah, so there’s really two parts of this. There’s what the majority party D…
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