Where the House Democrats Went Wrong
FREED, BRUCE
FRAGMENTING THE MAJOIRTY Where the House Democrats Went Wrong BY BRUCE FREED Bruce Freed reports on Congress for the Congressional Quarterly. Liberal Democrats eagerly anticipated the...
...A written "bill of rights" also defined the make-up and jurisdictions of subcommittees...
...treated the nation's military forces as his own private bailiwick from his position as chairman of the Armed Services Committee...
...In the past, the House could check an activist President simply by blocking legislation he wanted...
...And each subcommittee was permitted to hire a staff person, so that it could develop its own expertise and independence in handling legislation...
...You have subcommittees expending great energy protecting their turf," says Norman J. Ornstein, a political scientist at Catholic University...
...Dingell is also dealing with other full chairmen as an equal on energy legislation, notably Al Ullman (D.-Ore...
...In the House now, nobody is trying to find out what members think...
...Many of them would have attained their positions even under the old system because they had accrued enough seniority...
...Liberals persuaded the caucus to meet regularly and give members the right to place The New Leader items on the agenda...
...In fact, the two men are pursuing quite different energy policy approaches and have haggled over jurisdictional conflicts...
...In addition, it was decided that the Speaker would name the Democratic members of the Rules Committee (the House's legislative traffic cop), subject to caucus approval...
...Accountable to one one in Congress, they packed subcommittees with friends and, along with a coterie of like-minded senior representatives on both sides of the aisle, decided what legislation would reach the floor...
...The caucus has accidentally been used for controversy rather than finding the parameters of members' views...
...had a hammer lock on tax and health insurance legislation for the 16 years that he controlled Ways and Means, and L. Mendel Rivers (D.-S.C...
...At the same time, Democrats approved a rule that no individual could head more than one legislative subcommittee, opening the way for 16 Congressmen elected since 1960 to get such positions for the first time...
...Nevertheless, some House Democrats, including several strong backers of the reforms, were upset because the vote took place before the House International Relations Committee had a chance to fully consider the request...
...Thus, Harold D. Cooley (D-N.C...
...Of the 142 House subcommittee chairmanships, 108 are held by Democrats elected since 1958...
...The new structure needs an integrating mechanism," observes Representative Richard Boiling (D.-Mo...
...The next months, hoping to frighten liberals away, they demanded a debate and vote on a resolution favoring a constitutional amendment to ban busing...
...Ironically, in large part their problems have been caused by the reforms liberals have pushed through over the past six years...
...It seemed off to an auspicious start in February 1975, when it instructed Democrats on the Rules Committee to order out two oil-depletion amendments...
...former DSG leader and the new chairman of the House Agriculture Committee...
...That year, too, the caucus created the Committee on Study, Organization and Review, under the chairmanship of Julia Butler Hansen (D-Wash...
...Despite the effect all of these changes have had on he House, however, they have not produced the united legislative program liberals envisioned...
...Many joined the Democratic Study Group (DSG), an organization formed in 1959 by moderates and liberals to increase their legislative clout...
...Indeed, the record of the 94th Congress to date confirms that once the liberals got their hands on the levers of power, they demonstrated they did not have the collective will to use them...
...A decade later, when Richard Nixon's victory threatened a resurgence of the finally declining Dixiecrat-Republican congressional coalition, DSG liberals revived the House Democratic Caucus...
...Dubbed the "Ways inated policies...
...Others, once sympathetic, fear the pendulum has swung too far...
...Their party would have a 2-1 majority...
...Another is Speaker Carl Albert, an amiable fellow who is well liked yet has failed to provide firm leadership...
...The rules today tend to be unbalanced because they pare the power of the committee chairmen but place few restrictions on that of the subcommittee chairmen," declares Thomas Foley (D.-Wash...
...But the caucus, the Speaker and the Steering and Policy Committee are not playing their roles...
...Similarly, at Interstate and Foreign Commerce, the Energy Subcommittee chairman, John Dingell (D.-Mich...
...But now they have real strength...
...Meanwhile, the institution that has benefitted most from the often frantic reform activity of the last half-dozen years, the subcommittee, seems to be contributing to the chaos...
...They've fragmented the House and its committees," an influential Southern moderate congressman complains...
...You have fights between the health subcommittees on Interstate and Foreign Commerce and on Ways and Means, the energy subcommittees on Commerce and Ways and Means, and between Bella Abzug's Government Information and Individual Rights Subcommittee and Don Edward's Civil and Constitutional Rights Subcommittee...
...was more amenable to change...
...They gave everybody a piece of the action...
...A third disappointment is the Steering and Policy Committee, looked to in early 1975 as a possible executive committee of the caucus...
...There was even talk of making the Congress a branch of government equal to the Presidency...
...What we have here is a case of the younger members institutionalizing their power," explains Walter Kravitz, former staff director of the House Budget Committee...
...Since the Carr debate, caucus supporters have been on the defensive...
...one of the truly perceptive men in the House...
...This enabled them to begin undercutting the committee chairmen and the seniority system, and to initiate one of the greatest power shifts in recent House history...
...The following January, acting on the report presented by the Hansen group, the caucus decided the House Democratic Committee on Committees could consider factors other than seniority in proposing nominees for chairmanships...
...One repercussion has been disputes of the kind only full committees used to engage in...
...And last September conservative Democrats, capitalizing on the disenchantment, succeeded in having caucus meetings opened to the public...
...Instead, as they returned from their midterm break in January of this year, House Democrats found themselves bogged down and deeply split...
...Until the self-oriented liberals reform themselves, their vision of Congress as a full partner in government will remain only a pipe dream...
...Liberals turned back the resolution, but only after a damaging one-hour verbal conflict...
...They worried about the caucus becoming too overbearing, telling committees how to draft bills and committing members to take positions that would be unpopular back home...
...But today the Democrats in the House are in disarray because they lack tight discipline and leadership...
...The conservative Dixiecrat-Republican coalition managed to do that during Franklin Roosevelt's second term and in John Kennedy's brief Administration...
...Three once-powerful committee chairmen were deposed, automatic caucus votes were mandated for new chairmanships, and the power to make committee assignments was shifted from Democratic members of Ways and Means?who had held it since 1911—to the more liberal Steering and Policy Committee...
...Echoing those sentiments, a former member of Interior notes that the committee exists at present in name only: "It has become balkanized, with its subcommittees taking on lives of their own...
...has taken the lead on that issue away from committee chairman Harley O. Staggers (D.-W...
...Moribund for 50 years, it was seen as a ready-made instrument for shaking up the House...
...This has resulted in the scrap5 ping of plans to develop Democratic positions on such issues as energy...
...Few will sacrifice any of their freedom to let newly reorganized party institutions—the caucus, the Speaker, the Steering and Policy Committee—strengthen the bonds of party loyalty, as the DSG theoreticians intended...
...Still, caucus stagnation is not the only cause of Democratic ineffectiveness in the House, the party's overwhelming numerical superiority notwithstanding...
...We've spread the action by giving subcommittees more power and making it possible for members to play more active roles on them," laments a representative who fought for modernization, "but there's nothing at this point to coordinate what all these bodies are doing and place some controls on their growing independence...
...set up a Steering and Policy Committee to assist the House leadership in establishing party priorities...
...Spurred on by 75 freshmen, most of them liberal and activist, the reform drive reached what was to be its climax in the historic party caucuses of December 1974 and January 1975...
...Finally, each committee with more than 20 members was required to set up no less than four subcommittees...
...Between 1958-70, though, 293 new Democrats were elected to the House—younger men and women who chafed at the system that froze them out of power...
...The trouble is, the pieces are so small that now no one has anything to chew on...
...For these dismantled the old order, but failed to replace it with an effective new one...
...An important reason for this would appear to be that the caucus, the supposed new center of leadership, has fallen into disrepute as the place where Democrats could thrash out their differences and shape coordwas not binding...
...using a rule that allows any 50 members to petition the caucus into session, forced a special meeting to take up his resolution against the Ford Administration's request for new military assistance to Indochina...
...In part, the House's breakdown may be attributable to the New Politics liberals—products of the '60s and early '70s when liberalism emphasized participation, a reassertion of the goal of equality and an almost paranoid suspicion of authority...
...I don't think this was really conscious, but it's there...
...dominated agricultural policy, Wilbur D. Mills (D.-Ark...
...In 1973, the caucus went on to require secret votes for selecting committee chairmen if one-fifth of the Democrats requested them...
...So is the fact that the current freewheeling, unpredictable approach to legislative matters has been costly in terms of accomplishments...
...The resolution, adopted 189-49, and Means rule," the change was specifically aimed at the tax-writing panel, which had operated without subcommittees during Mills' tenure...
...From the end of World War II to the early 1970s, conservative committee chairmen called all the shots...
...But then in early March freshman congressman Robert Carr (D.-Mich...
...Many of the New Politics liberals place a premium on legislative egalitarianism, rather than on handling business efficiently or developing the cohesion needed to cope with the growing power of the Presidency...
...Each member wants to "do his own thing...
...and guaranteed at least one major committee assignment to every member...
...Militant reformers respond that they have brought "participatory democracy" to the House, making it more responsive to the public will...
...a powerful ally of the old guard, whose replacement, Carl Albert (D.-Okla...
...Liberal Democrats eagerly anticipated the convening of the 94th Congress in January 1975...
...The process was aided by the retirement in 1970 of Speaker of the House John W. McCormack (D.-Mass...
...head of Ways and Means...
...They would pass sweeping progressive legislation, including national health insurance, a loophole-plugging tax bill, and consumer, energy and antirecession measures...
Vol. 59 • April 1976 • No. 8
