The House Afire

...The one-party districts which return the same member every two years have proportionately much more power than the districts where political competition is lively...

...that makes L. Mendel Rivers of Charleston, South Carolina (class of 1940) the House dictator on military affairs...

...In conjunction with the 100 members of the Senate, they pass the nation's laws, levy its taxes, authorize and appropriate its Federal expenditures...

...that gives George H. Mahon of Lubbock, Texas (1934) awesome power over the appropriations process, and that makes Wilbur D. Mills of Kensett, Arkansas (1938) the most influential man in America on matters of taxes, Social Security, health legislation, welfare programs, and import tariffs...

...Most chairmen have served in Congress for at least thirty years...

...For if the chairmen of committees owe their places not to their political parties but to the accident of tenure, then they can follow their own inclinations on legislative matters and disregard the platform pledges and legislative program of the party leaders...

...that places William M. Colmer of Pascagoula, Mississippi (1932) in charge of the powerful House Rules Committee...

...The most important committees—Ways and Means, Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, and Appropriations—hold the largest number of closed sessions...

...They will join a large and growing contingent of younger House veterans—Republicans as well as Democrats—who make no attempt to conceal their total dissatisfaction with the way the House conducts its affairs...

...These transactions raise grave issues," an unnamed House committee chairman told the Journal...

...The House debate on the Hathaway amendment provided some illuminating comments on the attitudes of House patriarchs toward the public's right to know about the public's business...

...The New York Times, editorial November 18, 1970 the country into a state of incoherent wrath they consider as none of their business...

...Good questions, and only the members of the House of Representatives can answer them...

...Seniority is a way of gerrymandering power inside the House...

...There they sit—435 members chosen by the electorate every other year in the most direct manifestation of popular sovereignty provided by the Constitution...

...The practice is rationalized on grounds that it prevents "raids on the Treasury," but the actual result, as Representative William D. Hathaway, Maine Democrat, has complained, is that "only the lobbyists have access to the members...

...The House Afire ERWIN KNOLL IF AMERICA still had a sense of humor, the House of Representatives would be its laughing-stock...

...The Ford Motor Company confirmed that it had been leasing Lincoln Continental sedans at $750 a year —about one-fifth of the going rate— to committee chairmen and other leading legislators...

...The Record, now subject to the members' privilege of "revising and extending" their remarks, often bears scant resemblance to what actually transpires on the floor, making no distinction whatever between comments delivered in the chamber and those inserted later by members who may not even have been in attendance...

...Among the major amendments that were offered but defeated on the House floor was one that would have modified the seniority system by requiring that committees elect their own chairmen from among the three most senior majority party members of the committee...

...The Government alleges that Dowdy accepted $25,000 to intervene in a Federal investigation of a Maryland construction firm...

...Self-scrutiny is not one of the strong suits of the House...

...Boggs denied the charge and Attorney General John N. Mitchell, citing a lack of evidence, refused to authorize signing of formal indictments handed down by the grand jury...

...In the House, sixteen of the twenty-one chairmen of standing committees are from small towns or rural areas...

...Representative Richard Boiling, the Missouri Democrat who has devoted his House career to reform—and, some say, ruined it by doing so—declared several years ago that the state of affairs in the House "would not be tolerated in the kitchens, faculty rooms, or boardrooms of America...

...The have-nots have always outnumbered the haves, I pointed out, but previous efforts at reform have been rebuffed...

...In fact, they can—and do—disregard all of the urgent national needs that fall outside the narrow confines of their parochial experience—the urban crisis, racial injustice, poverty, war...

...As usual, the liberals are divided...

...One of the greatest drawbacks of the seniority system is that it destroys party responsibility or prevents political parties from performing their campaign promises," George Galloway, who has probed deeply into the strange goings-on in the House, has written in Congress at the Crossroads...

...Its members would accept a military dictatorship in the leadership if it would spare them the unspeakable burden of voting yes or no on the war...

...H The favorite of the House establishment is Hale Boggs of Louisiana, the Democratic whip since 1962, but Sisk or Rostenkowski would also be acceptable to the old-timers...

...The retirement of John W. McCormack of Massachusetts, a member of Congress for forty-two years, a Democratic leader for almost twenty, and Speaker for most of the past decade, has opened the way for a once-in-ageneration realignment of the House leadership...

...Absolutely nothing can prepare you for the extraordinary difficulty of getting anything done...

...eighty...

...The long-standing scandal of the anonymous teller votes was finally brought to a head by enterprising peace lobbyists who sat in the galleries and compiled their own tallies as members passed up the aisles to be counted...

...This month the Ninety-second Congress convenes in circumstances that would seem to provide it with a rare opportunity to put its House in order...

...The 1970 reorganization act also nudged the House forward by providing for public disclosure of the votes cast by members when committees meet behind closed doors, permitting radio and television coverage of committee sessions, shortening the House's interminable quorum calls, and providing more time for the study of bills and committee reports before votes are ordered on the floor...

...The Wall Street Journal reported that Representative Seymour Halpern, New York Republican and the thirdranking minority member on the House Banking and Currency Committee, had received loans "far exceeding $100,000" from banks coming under his Committee's jurisdiction...

...Other members said they just didn't understand what Steiger was talking about...

...They have controlled the House—and therefore the allpowerful chairmanships—in every Congress but one since 1930...

...a limit on the number of chairmanships to be held by one member, and perhaps a proposal that chairmen be selected from among the three most senior Democrats on each committee...

...The Internal Revenue Service disclosed that Representative Martin B. McKneally, New York Republican defeated last fall after one term in the House, had filed no Federal income tax returns for the years 1958 through 1967...

...But a recent issue of Congressional Quarterly provided six closely packed pages of information under the heading, "Accusations of Wrongdoing During 91st Congress...

...Besides, it is very far away...

...I 'm just not going to get my hopes up again," another member said...

...In the opinion of most members, it will serve as a reliable indicator of the prospects for House reform...

...The DSG claims about 175 members among House Democrats, but when Representative Hathaway proposed an amendment to the legislative reorganization act that would have required committee members to vote in open session on the question of keeping their meetings closed, it was defeated 132 to 102...

...The leadership decides to what extent, if any, members may debate the issues on which they are to vote...

...The new Congress is bound to bring real House reform," one liberal Democrat told me a few weeks ago...

...H Liberals with close ties to organized labor are backing James G. O'Hara of Michigan...

...Arbitrary and undemocratic procedures are so much the rule that they are hardly noticed let alone seriously challenged...

...The fate of these recommendations in the Democratic caucus is in doubt...

...They guard their power jealously: in 1970, at least thirty-three members of the House— including seven chairmen of full committees^— also presided over more than one subcommittee...

...own man" and prove more responsive to their point of view...

...McCormack says he had no idea of what was going on around him, and those who know the retired Speaker believe him...

...The task force concluded, in its report last fall, that "the Republican Party could not afford to continue without a mechanism for avoiding the mistakes occasionally resulting from automatic operation of the seniority system...

...what's more, he added, the committee's hearing rooms are "already stuffy and crowded with staff and members...

...Last summer, the House voted without a word of discussion to reject the Senate's Cooper- Church amendment, which the Senate had debated for seven weeks...

...The Democrats, of course, have more at stake...

...Three—Provide its members with the opportunity of full and thorough floor debate...

...The real fight will come over the succession to Albert's post as Democratic leader in the House...

...If the Republicans, in their new caucus, were to adopt the recommendations of the Conable task force—and there are indications that they may—the Democrats would be under more pressure than ever before to make their own move against the seniority system...

...What makes it all so laughable, if anyone were disposed to laugh, is that the bondage of the House is selfimposed...

...they are "the most undramatic things on earth . . . there's nothing glamorous about them...

...Second only to seniority, secrecy undermines the democratic process in the House...

...But as a power in the House establishment—he has served since 1949—he is not likely to favor any radical departure from the chamber's traditional ways of doing business...

...It is not sanctioned by the Constitution, nor by law, nor even by the formal rules of the House...

...The observation was probably overdrawn, even in 1897...

...Or, if they don't, if the people can push them hard enough soon enough...

...We are therefore urging those who feel as we do to reserve their options on organizing the House next year until we organization will be proposed for implementation in the next session...

...But it wasn't, and breaches of ethics on the part of House members rarely are...

...The Congressional seniority system has no counterpart anywhere in the world...

...He has denied the charge...

...It makes the House incomprehensible to the average citizen and contributes to the growing distrust of elected officials...

...If they care...

...Almost a year ago, a group of Democratic liberals proposed the one course of action that might work most effectively to bring down the seniority system: a threat to vote with the Republicans, rather than with their own party, to organize the House in the coming Ninety-second Congress unless the Democratic leadership agrees to institute basic reforms...

...If the seniority system were scrapped, Speaker McCormack complained last year, "you'd have a revolution in Congress...

...Even societies that worship their ancestors don't make them chairmen of their committees," Allard Lowenstein has observed...

...No major new procedural reforms seem likely in the coming session...

...Thus: % Most of the younger, anti-establishment Representatives are supporting the candidacy of Morris K. Udall of Arizona, who unsuccessfully challenged McCormack in the House Democratic caucus two years ago...

...But Lowenstein was confident then—was positive, in fact— that the House was about to undergo a splendid transformation, that it would scrap its ancient rules and traditions, depose its gerontocracy, and become a responsive, effective legislative body...

...Representative John Dowdy, Texas Democrat, and a member of the House since 1952, is under Federal indictment on charges of conspiracy, perjury, and the use of interstate facilities to promote bribery...

...The House has the right to censure its members for reprehensible conduct that reflects discredit on the chamber, but no one in the House seems to know what kind of conduct—if any—would be sufficiently opprobrious to merit censure...

...The vote recording provisions of last year's legislative reorganization act made only a small dent in the House's assumption that the public—and even its own members—have no right to full access to its work...

...Liberals hope that with the departure of McCor ERWIN KNOLL is Washington Editor of The Progressive...

...The reform bill was, as The Washington Post commented, "a sort of down payment on Congressional reform," one that left untouched "the major sources of its inefficiency and loss of public confidence...

...It seems reasonable to suppose, nonetheless, that a way might be found to provide Representatives with ten or fifteen minutes each, say, to comment on matters of crucial importance to the nation and the world...

...Fewer than fifty members of the House were present when Representative William Steiger, Wisconsin Republican, offered his amendment, and they shouted it down...

...We are not sure why those of us who represent the mainstream of the Democratic Party should continue to support a system which denies us appropriate representation in the leadership councils of the party and House," they declared...

...Once the "basic blockage" of the seniority system is removed, says Representative Reuss, "the party in power in Congress can be held responsible for determining priorities...

...that makes John L. McMillan of Florence, South Carolina (1938) the de facto mayor of Washington as chairman of the District of Columbia Committee...

...An eleven-member Democratic group has been studying the seniority problem since last March...

...Ten old members held three chairmanships each...

...Indeed, the liberal Democratic Study Group contends that secrecy has "a more debilitating impact on the House" than seniority...

...Subjugated by seniority, kept uninformed by committee secrecy, House members troop to the floor to transact the nation's legislative business according to agenda and schedules devised by the gerontocracy...

...Its effect is to lodge the power of the House in the hands of its oldest members—those from safe one party districts who run no risk of being deposed by a challenger...

...The statement attracted only about twenty signers, and now that the time for action is approaching, most of them would rather not say any more about it...

...The scramble for support was fierce during the recent lame-duck session— "a real snakepit," one member called it—and newly elected Representatives have been swamped with solicitous letters and telephone calls from the aspirants...

...Is the essential well-being of the nation dependent on a political landslide every generation...

...The outcome remains in doubt...

...Chairman Rivers of Armed Services contended that open meetings "would tie up your military until kingdom come...

...Chairman Mahon of Appropriations said his committee could not open its doors because it deals with "such sensitive matters...

...As the new Congress convenes, the identity of the new Speaker is a foregone conclusion...

...Among the fifty-six new members entering the House, a dozen won their seats by defeating old-timers in campaigns that made much of the issue of House reform...

...When word of the House action reached the White House, President Nixon said he was "elated...

...It is the seniority system—and only the seniority system—that keeps eighty- two year-old Emanuel Celler of New York (elected to Congress in 1922) in the chairmanship of the Judiciary Committee...

...I've been disappointed too many times...

...f The candidate of the big-city machine Democrats is Dan Rostenkowski of Chicago, who prudently clears all major decisions with Mayor Richard Daley...

...The Appropriations Committee, which holds some 300 meetings a year, always meets behind locked doors, barring even members of the House who do not serve on the Committee...

...The House even rejected an amendment that would have required the Congressional Record to serve as an accurate and verbatim account of House proceedings...

...They are strident defenders of the system, and its only menace, as they see it, comes from upstart ghettodwellers and rampaging students...

...It is seniority that makes the House a graveyard of talent and drives able, younger members to run for the Senate and for other offices...

...The Chicago Daily News disclosed that a $13,000-a-year secretary on the Congressional payroll of Representative John C. Kluczynski, Illinois Democrat, was actually the manager of a restaurant owned by the Congressman on the South Side of Chicago, and that a $9,200-a-year "highway research assistant" was operating Kluczynski's leased hot dog and ice cream stand near Lake Michigan...

...The Wall Street Journal also uncovered the fact that Representative John C. Watts, Kentucky Democrat, and Securities and Exchange Commissioner A. Sydney Herlong Jr., who served as a Democratic Representative from Florida from 1949 to 1969, had received loans of almost $38,000 to cover the purchase of $50,000 in West Virginia Turnpike bonds in 1967...

...They enjoy handsome salaries, generous expense allowances, capacious offices, large staffs...

...a third that would have limited the tenure of committee chairmen to eight years—the same constitutional limit now placed on the Presidency of the United States...

...The members of the House must be allowed adequate time to debate and fully explore the vital national problems which face us...

...A few stories in the newspapers were enough to bring the House around...

...Congress is like Calcutta—nothing prepares you for it,': Allard K. Lowenstein, the free-wheeling New York Democrat, said when he came to the House as a freshman in 1969...

...With precisely that aim in mind, a House Republican task force headed by Representative Barber Conable of New York has proposed that ranking Republican members of all committees should be chosen not by seniority but by secret ballot of Republican members...

...Its recommendations, not yet made public when this article went to press, may include an age limit for committee chairmen (seventy...

...Unless the seniority system is modified or abolished, all could look forward to retaining their power until removed by death or political defeat—in which case they would be succeeded by the next man on the seniority ladder...

...The Senate Ethics Committee, headed by John Stennis, Mississippi Democrat, concluded that "Senators should not accept any favorable terms and conditions that are available to them only as Senators...

...Secrecy in the House is corrosive...

...They ranged from outright violations of the law to highly questionable practices that are not covered by present loophole-riddled codes and regulations...

...A war which has taken 50,000 lives and sent Seniority It is the rigid observance of seniority that stultifies, deforms, and obstructs the work of the House...

...Congressional Quarterly found that the National Bank of Washington, owned by the United Mine Workers, routinely made loans at 6.38 per cent interest to members of Congress, while charging the public eight per cent...

...And since Americans are in no mood to laugh, they react to the absurdities by becoming angry...

...McKneally denied that he owed the Government any money, and claimed he was entitled to "substantial" tax refunds...

...The public should not know every detail...

...This time it will be different," the Congressman replied...

...The situation really ought to be looked into...

...More important, we must be able to vote on these vital substantive questions...

...No one should regret the lack of opportunity to sit in on Armed Services hearings, Rivers assured his colleagues in the House...

...A small sampling can illustrate the atmosphere of easy tolerance that pervades the House: • A New York grand jury is continuing its investigation of allegations that Speaker McCormack's office served as the base for lobbyists and fixers seeking special favors from federal agencies...

...Their powers and perquisites are the envy of parliaments around the world...

...The light of publicity should not be focused on every nook and cranny," said Chairman Celler of the Judiciary Committee...

...House supporters of the amendment could not obtain even one hour for discussion...

...Yet the House is under scrutiny, by the voters if not by its own members...

...seventy-five...

...The House has never been squeamish about appearing undemocratic," columnist Mary McGrory of The Washington Star wrote at the time...

...It undermines the democratic process by denying members information they need to make intelligent legislative decisions and by denying voters information they need to make informed electoral decisions...

...The names of five Congressmen figured in a Baltimore grand jury's investigation of the contractor who built the parking garage for the Rayburn House Office Building...

...It is indicative of the miasmal mood in the House that this optimistic assessment is not widely shared, even among the most outspoken reformers...

...McCormack's former administrative assistant, Martin Sweig, is appealing a perjury conviction, and McCormack's old friend, Nathan M. Voloshen, who pleaded guilty to charges of conspiring to use the Speak- "Right—we have to watch out for those radical young long-hairs" er's office in his influence-peddling practice, is reported to be furnishing new details to Federal investigators...

...Moreover, since there is no time limit on the tenure of a committee chairman, the beneficiaries of this gerrymandering can monopolize power for long periods in defiance of any control by the Speaker and the rest of the leadership, by the other members of the dominant party, or by the national electorate...

...One of the five—Democratic Whip Hale Boggs of Louisiana—was reported to have received a cut-rate home remodeling job from the contractor...

...f A few, particularly in the large California delegation, are supporting that state's Representative B. F. Sisk, a "moderate" who also enjoys the confidence of many of the eighty Southern Democrats in the House...

...In last year's primaries and in the November election, some of the most firmly entrenched House veterans were turned out of office by young reformers...

...It destroys public confidence in the House as a responsive legislative body...

...Both men were members of the tax-writing Ways and Means Committee then, and both received their loans from Winn-Dixie Stores, Incorporated, a Southern supermarket chain which managed, coincidentally, to obtain favorable Congressional action on a tax bill benefiting its executives and stockholders...

...In recent years, while at least a large minority of the Senate—and on occasion a ma- jority—has forcefully reasserted its prerogatives vis-a-vis the Executive Branch, the House has forcefully reasserted its preference for serving as a rubber stamp...

...The system should be abolished tomorrow...

...He was right...

...The principle of election is important in a democratically elected body...

...But indications on Capitol Hill are that the House spent itself last year in its exertions on the legislative reorganization act...

...Americans are beginning to get the message...

...Secrecy pervades the legislative process in the House of Representatives," the Democratic Study Group declared in a special report last summer...

...Representative Sisk, floor manager of the reorganization bill, said the question of publishing an accurate Congressional Record needed further study...

...It is not an accident but an inescapable consequence of House procedures that while the Senate has devoted weeks and months to major debates on the Indochina war, the House has had barely three debates in the last five years—and they were truncated discussions at best...

...With 435 members, the House is of course in a more difficult parliamentary situation than the Senate, which still affords its 100 members the luxury of virtually unlimited debate...

...A majority are from the South...

...Since the act had not yet been passed, the position of members on the teller vote was not recorded...

...The 140-page measure included one major reform—elimination of the non-recorded teller votes that have in the past permitted House members to duck responsibility for the votes they cast (or fail to cast) when the House is shaping legislation as the committee of the whole...

...It has to happen because the havenots in the House so greatly outnumber the haves...

...Except for these two dozen, they serve primarily as functionaries expediting routine contacts between their constituents and the Federal bureaucracy— prying loose a veteran's pension here, a sewer grant there, perhaps a Government contract somewhere else...

...Each house may determine the rules of its proceedings," says the Constitution, and the House of Representatives, in its wisdom, has determined rules that strip its members of the right to choose their own powerful chairmen, of the right to debate on the House floor the momentous issues confronting the nation, of the right even to be fully informed on the questions to be decided by their votes...

...Representative Carl B. Albert of McAlester, Oklahoma, McCormack's loyal lieutenant and anointed heir, whom television viewers will remember as the presiding officer of the catastrophic 1968 Democratic national convention, has no serious rival for the Speakership...

...If they care...

...Is the Congress to continue as the least responsible organ of Government, acting, if at all, ten and twenty and thirty years late...

...The House Committee on Standards of Official Conduct said nothing...

...Or will the nation improve itself by means of other institutions and, thereby, push the Congress to the outskirts of American society...

...Last summer and fall the House labored mightily over the first legislative reorganization act in more than two decades and produced—well, not a mouse, exactly, but perhaps a rabbit...

...They.are, for all that, a species of untermenschen, who come to Washington to mind their manners (and their tongues) and to obey their elders— the two dozen or so senior members in whom the real power, the only power of the House is vested...

...I'm amazed at these men...

...If the House is ever to function as an effective, representative, democratic legislative body, it must address itself to major reform in four basic areas: It must: One—Abolish the seniority system Two—Eliminate secrecy in its committee work...

...Eight of the chairmen in the last (Ninety-first) Congress had held their chairmanships for more than twelve years, and three had been chairmen for twenty-two years...

...Boiling has asked...

...Almost half of the meetings and hearings of House committees are closed to the press and the public...

...It will no longer be possible for the party itself to shrug its shoulders and blame the mess on the seniority system...

...The Rules Committee decides to what extent, if any, measures may be amended from the floor...

...It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress," Mark Twain wrote...

...Most members of the House place a high enough premium on the privilege of holding office to subject themselves in every even-numbered year to the rigors of a re-election campaign—to bull roasts and fish fries and Sunday school picnics, to press conferences and television appearances and aftermidnight strategy sessions, to hat-inhand appeals for campaign contributions and tongue-in-cheek promises of post-electoral performance...

...another that would have stated that seniority need not be the sole consideration in the selection of chairmen...

...Four—Create and enforce a rigorous code of ethics for its members...

...Representative Henry S. Reuss, Wisconsin Democrat who came to the House in 1955, and is therefore himself several rungs up on the seniority ladder, has pointed out that these "elderly gentlemen who have long held power" preside over "a network of baronies and feudal fiefs, without any central control...

...The antiquated rules of the House of Representatives must be reformed and radically revised," New Jersey Democrat Frank Thompson said after the Cooper-Church fiasco...

...In the substantive work of the House they play a "supportive" role—that is, they go along...

...It is a custom that has hardened into inflexibility only in the last few decades...

...The Senate Appropriations Committee, presumably at least as concerned about "raids on the Treasury" as the House, manages to conduct seventy-five per cent of its business in open session...

...Today, defeated in his first bid for reelection, he says: "I've seen efficiency sacrificed for democracy and democracy sacrificed for efficiency, but the House of Representatives gives up both and ends up with neither...