The Patriot Post® · House Reform Can Start Now

The 112th Congress doesn’t convene until Jan. 3, 2011, but the leaders who run the House and the rules that govern how it operates will be decided largely this week. Republicans and Democrats will meet separately and create a steering committee with the power to decide committee assignments for their respective caucus in the House. They will also decide party rules for the new session, but the Republicans, thanks to their decisive election victory, will have the majority and the power to enact their own rules for governing the chamber.

The Constitution provides for the House and the Senate to enact their own governing rules, so on the surface this process seems to adhere to the intention of the Founders. In the House each member represents the will of their district, thereby allowing the body as a whole to function as the will of the people. Over the last several decades, however, a leadership caste has developed in the House that no longer reflects that intention. The authority of the legislative branch has become centralized in the hands of select party leaders who perpetuate their own power by stacking the steering committees with loyal members willing to do their bidding.

A recent report by The Heritage Foundation titled “Four Immediate Reforms to Change the Culture of Congress” examines this troubling trend in which the House leadership has gained significant power while the rank-and-file membership and the representative process have suffered. The report states, “Under a top-down system, congressional leaders and, ultimately, rank-and-file Members invariably lose touch with the public, no matter how well intentioned their motives may be.”

The best recent example of leadership run amok is the reign of Nancy Pelosi as speaker. She hand-picked committee leaders and members who would push her own particular pet issues; she bypassed committees entirely and wrote major bills through her office; she exerted undue pressure on rank-and-file members to get the voting results she desired; and she muted opponents by preventing them from offering proposals or amendments on the House floor. House leaders such as Pelosi have often used earmarks, favors and plum committee assignments to coerce members to support their agendas, rather than letting the legislative body as a whole formulate and enact the agenda. Of course, the Constitution ordains the bottom-up model, not the top-down one in use.

These abuses of power have led to a dysfunctional Congress that can’t seem to accomplish anything other than drive the country into the poor house. It’s no coincidence that the public’s approval of the legislative branch is at an all-time low. The strong desire for reform demonstrated by the Tea Party movement put the Republicans in control of the House and can provide an opportunity to turn this around. “Times of change in the majority party offer the clearest opportunities — and sometimes the only ones — to revisit and revise the internal rules that govern the Congress,” the report states.

The Heritage Foundation report goes on to list a series of reforms that can be enacted at the party caucus level to eliminate the “top-down” governing style of the House and promote greater responsiveness to the people. The first reform would be to allow the steering committee as a whole, rather than party leaders, to select committee chairmen and members. Furthermore, party leaders should not dominate the steering committee by holding allotments to multiple slots. The report notes that this “would allow rank-and-file Representatives to nominate and elect the controlling votes on each steering committee.”

The report also calls for term limits to apply to all House and party leaders. Currently, only the Republicans adhere to any term limits, but even then they apply only to committee chairmen and ranking members, not the speaker or other leadership positions. Additionally, Heritage recommends that committee sizes be capped “to avoid scenarios where committees wield a disproportionate amount of influence over the House.” For instance, the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure (74 members) and the Committee on Financial Services (71 members) each encompass over one-sixth of the entire House membership.

The Heritage Foundation reforms are recommended to both political parties, and they are meant to be the beginning of a series of reforms that the House could enact to make it a more deliberative body, less partisan and more accountable to the people. That’s probably exactly why they won’t happen, but the power lies in the new majority to set an example.