Committees in Congress

by Christopher J. Deering, Steven S. Smith

This completely updated, third edition provides a comprehensive examination of the origins, development, and current status of the committee and subcommittee systems of the Senate and the House of Representatives. Reform failures of the 103rd Congress; new rules and structural changes; and dramatic events surrounding the first Republican Congress in 40 years are covered.

259 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1984

Reviews

[Ericka Clou · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this in my graduate classes in Legislative Affairs because apparently a took a whole course in Committees in the House and Senate. This book explains how the committee system has grown more powerful through time, but reforms in the 70's weakened power in the committees and increased party leadership and partisanship.

According to Deering, Maltzman’s theory of autonomous committees would have been more accurate in the past (see Maltzman's theories in Competing Principals: Committees, Parties, and the Organization of Congress), and the theory of the close relationship with the party system holds truer now. The Legislative Reorganization Act of 1970 was a major reform effort that ended powerful committee chairs and senior members being able to forestall structural and procedural changes that undermined their authority.

In 1994, “The Contract with America” Congress pushed through a lot of reform for the House Committee system, but some seemed intended purely to increase the power of Republican Speaker of the House Gingrich. Gingrich succeeded in imposing the term limits on committee chairs. During those two years, Republicans put a lot of freshmen in positions of leadership. Republicans were able to take more power for party leadership and chamber leadership. Speaker Gringrich gained influence in the committee assignment process.

Subcommittee chairs in the House are more difficult to get because of how many members there are, and are more powerful than Senate Subcommittee chairs. In the House, subcommittees have become tied to party leadership and more rank-and-file members have gained positions instead of only the most senior members. In this way, they have taken power away from the full committee leadership. (In contrast, Senate subcommittees do not write legislation and the full committee never defers to them.) In the House, the majority leaders and bill sponsors manage bills more, and committee leadership power has declined.

Deering also discusses the “negative power” of a committee which is the ability to do nothing at all, which is a somewhat familiar topic, as the public used to always complain that Congress does nothing, for example on the existentialist crisis of global climate change.

If you work on the Hill it is important to be wary of losing individual power to the party system. Those who work for political parties, or party leadership, need to be wary of losing party voting loyalty to the power of committees and committee chairman. And those who work for special interests, while generally appealing to the committees that have jurisdiction over their relevant issues, may seek to exploit the power struggle by appealing to party leadership now that it is stronger in the post-Contract reform era.

[Alex Nelson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fairly decent "intermediate" textbook on committees. Although the authors present three hypotheses for the purpose and functionality of committees, it seems only discussed in the first chapter and nowhere else. (Nowhere else explicitly, I suppose arguably it is implicit in chapter 3 while discussing the different "types" of committees.)

The third edition has far less on the history of committees in the US. The authors cite their second edition for a thorough review of the subject, which seems odd to me.