What Makes Congress Run?
Ornstein, Norman
What Makes Congress Run? by Norman Ornstein Senator William Proxmire is not the only one jogging on Capitol Hill these days. On sunny afternoons tourists are apt to see half the House of...
...The major objection Hays and his cohorts faced was the predictable complaint about the cost to the taxpayers...
...Despite the inconvenience, it would be politically difficult for the House to relax the time limit any further...
...Purple Hearts All of this would be of interest solely to Capitol Hill tour guides if electronic voting did not have some significant- and rather unexpected - side effects...
...In fact, tradition has it that Thomas Edison’s first patent was for a device to automatically record congressional roll-call votes...
...He has become one of the powers of the House, not only from other members’ terror that his attention will light on Answer to the November puzzle: them, but also through his control of routine housekeeping tasks and his supervision of all House employees...
...Norman J. Orizstein teaches political science at Catholic University...
...It is difficult to analyze their voting records, especially when they indulge in such legislative tricks as voting one way on an amendment and the opposite way on final passage of the bill...
...So life on Capitol Hill has become significantly less pleasant for many senior congressmen...
...Yet in the long run, such non-ideological reforms as increased pensions and electronic voting may have an enormous political impact...
...All this haste is decidedly uncongressional and most closely resembles a class change on a busy college campus...
...There are few reliable ways for most voters to measure the performance of their congressmen...
...On sunny afternoons tourists are apt to see half the House of Representatives chugging across Independence Avenue toward the House floor for a roll-call vote...
...Although 19th-century legislators refused to consider Edison’s gadget, several state legislatures have adopted computerized voting within the past decade...
...Also, most liberals favor rapid voting, because it allows them to cram in more votes on floor amendments during the House’s tightly scheduled legislative debates...
...the allure of the $42,500 salary and the prestige of being in Congress have paled significan tly . Meanwhile, increasing citizen concern with good government has effectively removed for most members the obvious solution-simply ignoring roll-call votes...
...I had about 12 minutes after that point, and if I left my office five minutes after the second bells, I made it to the floor easily...
...The issue was raised repeatedly in the House during the 1960s but was thwarted by a mixture of congressional inertia and the reluctance of many members to alter their hallowed traditions...
...Hays, one of the most conservative of northern Democrats, has a sadistic disposition which has won him a reputation as the most genuinely unpleasant man in Congress...
...A few members like Harold Donohue, the last of John McCormack’s Massachusetts cronies still in Congress, solve the entire problem by merely spending their days dozing on the House floor...
...Retirement and death have become almost the only way that congressional seats change hands-95 per cent of the incumbents who ran for reelection in 1972 won...
...In addition, the project had the support of Democrat B. F. Sisk, chairman of the Rules subcommittee that had jurisdiction over the project...
...While congressional reform has become one of Washington’s favorite topics during the last five years, reformers have been almost totally oblivious to such mundane matters as voting attendance...
...No longer do the clerks drone through an alphabetical list of 435 names...
...Most House liberals supported electronic voting, but they did not consider it a priority issue and spent little time gathering support for it...
...The frequent sprints across Independence Avenue increase the risk of being felled by a coronary in the line of duty...
...And if this wasn’t long enough for procrastinating members, understanding ‘clerks could always stretch the process out another five minutes to accommodate latecomers...
...by Norman Ornstein Senator William Proxmire is not the only one jogging on Capitol Hill these days...
...Perhaps reformers should shift their focus to other nuts-and-bolts issues such as closing the congressional gyms or removing the elevators from congressional office buildings and assigning space on the basis of senioritywith freshmen on the ground floor...
...These good old days are now fondly remembered...
...For example, the instantaneous flashing of votes on the tote board has greatly increased the congressional leaders’ ability to pinpoint party defectors on close and important votes...
...The big change in the pace of congressional life occurred last February, when an electronic voting system was installed in the House of Representatives...
...The new voting system provides him with more than 40 additional employees to supervise and puts him in control of the House’s only computer...
...Reforming the way Congress votes is far from a new idea...
...Unlike other reforms, such as the modification of the seniority system and the adoption of the recorded teller vote, computerized voting was not debated along ideological lines...
...In fact, the key advocate of reform was Wayne Hays, then ranking Democrat on the House Administration Committee and now its chairman...
...The pressure of the new voting system may give older members one more reason not to prolong their congressional careers into their 70s and 80s...
...Voting has become particularly irksome for the less issue-oriented legislators who have to commute from the House gym to make roll-call votes...
...Fifteen minutes is just not very much time to get from a congressional office to the House floor and cast your vote, especially, as is the case with many members, if you have no idea what’s being voted on...
...These are not replacements for more direct ways to keep Congress from being a life-tenure institutionreform of the franking privilege, for example, or public financing of campaignsbut they may be useful weapons against those who should be spending their sunset years elsewherere...
...But for veteran members who have not reached such a happy accommodation with technology...
...As- one veteran Democrat recalls, “I used to have the old system down pat...
...Passage of measures like electronic voting may owe more to serendipity than design, but reforms like these may play a significant role in making the House a more responsive institution...
...Instantly, their vote is flashed on a tote board which is mounted over the Speaker’s head and which resembles nothing so much as the latest advance in basketball scoreboards...
...Joining Hays in support of computerization were such technologyoriented Republicans as Robert McClory, who had long been advocating that Congress be run more like a business, with efficient, modern equipment...
...Almost nothing in the checkered political career of Adam Clayton Powell inspired more comment than his habit of spending his time on the beach in Bimini instead of on the House floor...
...That’s why it was rather surprising when electronic voting was finally adopted in July, 1970, as an amendment to the Congressional Reorganization Act...
...Until 1973 voting in the House of Representatives was one of the more leisurely activities in the entire federal government, an institution never known for its frenetic pace...
...It wasn’t always this way...
...Instead, congressmen now have just 15 minutes to register their votes on computer consoles triggered by the insertion of individualized plastic cards...
...But the real impact of computerized voting stems from the rigid time limit...
...Take the vote earlier this year in which the House rejected by one vote, 197 to 196, an effort to increase minority staffing for House committees...
...But even the most apathetic voter senses something awry if his representative has missed 40 per cent of the roll-calls...
...Now congressmen must bolt their bean soup in the House dining room and head for the Capitol as soon as the bells ring for a vote...
...And as if all this were not enough to keep Congress from returning to its leisurely old ways, the lurking shadow of Wayne Hays may make members prefer shortness of breath to the whiplash of his tongue...
...Generally, it took the House clerks 35 minutes to read through the roster of 435 members and then record the absentees...
...Meanwhile, their colleagues are plugging along labyrinthine underground passages toward the subway that links the Raybum House Office Building with the Capitol...
...In the same way, Margaret Chase Smith was far better known for never missing a Senate roll-call than for any position she ever took on a specific issue...
...Originally, proponents of electronic voting wanted the time limit to be 12 minutes, but when confronted with a chorus of objections they settled for a quarter of an hour...
...They would ring the bells, call the roll once, then the bells rang again, and they called the names of the non-responding members...
...Electronic voting allowed Carl Albert and Tip ONeill to quickly locate a couple of errant Democrats and strong-arm them into changing their votes before the 15-minute rollcall was up...
...Allowing 20 or 25 minutes for a roll-call would awaken members’ fears of the inevitable AP feature story beginning, “Congress has spent $1.1 million of the taxpayers’ money for a new voting system that saves six minutes on each vote...
Vol. 5 • December 1973 • No. 10
