C. Lawrence Evans
College of William and Mary
In November 1994, incoming Speaker Newt Gingrich attempted to streamline the House committee system and make it more accountable to the leadership and a remarkably unified Republican Conference. The list of formal reforms and informal changes is well known to congressional scholars - for example, term limits for full committee chairs and appropriations subcommittee chairs, the abolition of open-ended joint referrals, allowing full committee chairs to appoint subcommittee chairs and control subcommittee staffs. Gingrich bypassed the ranking Republican on three committees to appoint less senior, but more aggressively conservative, lawmakers as chair.
As John Aldrich, David Rohde, Barbara Sinclair and others have demonstrated, the 104th Congress was characterized by a remarkable level of leadership involvement in the standing committee process. During House action on the Contract with America, committee consideration was routinely circumscribed or even bypassed, and GOP leaders relied on partisan task forces, rather than standing committees, to craft a number of major initiatives. In fall 1995, it was Newt Gingrich - not the chair of the Ways and Means or the Commerce Committee - who convened the conference committee meetings on the proposed Medicare reforms in the year's reconciliation package.
Gauging Gingrich's legacy for the House committee system, however, is not a straightforward exercise. For one, it is difficult to demonstrate that that these trends were uniquely characteristic of the Gingrich era. Congressional committees have been declining in autonomy at least since the 1970s. An enhanced policymaking role for party leaders was noticeable a full decade before the landmark 104th Congress, largely because of contextual factors such as increased unity within the majority Democratic Caucus. And prior Democratic Speakers such as Tip O'Neill were appointing partisan task forces back in the days when Gingrich was an obscure backbencher railing against C-SPAN camera angles.
In addition, the first session of the 104th Congress did not end with Gingrich and his band of GOP revolutionaries successfully storming the congressional gates. Instead, the political year culminated in Clinton's veto of the reconciliation measure, a partial government shutdown, and the ensuing public relations disaster for congressional Republicans. The urgency of the Contract period dissolved, significant policy disagreements emerged within the GOP Conference, and rank-and-file Republicans grew less willing to cede significant legislative authority to the leadership. By early 1996, the committees of the House were poised to resume their traditional role as policy initiators. The aborted coup attempt against Gingrich and the narrow partisan majority of the 105th Congress led to further pledges by the Speaker to respect the operating autonomy of the standing committees. And when Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) became Speaker in January 1999, he assured his colleagues that the leadership would once again rely on the committees of jurisdiction to craft policy recommendations for the majority party and the chamber. The House, Hastert pledged, would return to "regular order."1
Still, I believe that there is a Gingrich legacy for the committee system and for the House more generally. This legacy takes the form of certain behavioral changes that resulted from the Republican reforms of January 1995 and a more extensive involvement by party leaders in the committee process due to the rise of message politics.
Most observers agree that the reforms of the 104th Congress did have certain behavioral implications, although the magnitude of these changes will remain unclear until we have more extensive empirical research.2 According to House parliamentary staff, for instance, the level of jurisdictional infighting between committees declined sharply from the 103rd to the 104th Congress and remains at a low level compared to the years of Democratic control. In part, this decline in turf battles can be traced to the Republican rules changes, particularly the substantial reduction in committee staff and the abolition of open-ended joint referrals.
Under Democratic control, the various standing committees typically had one or more committee aides who served as "border cops" for their respective panels.3 These aides monitored bill introductions and referrals that touched on their jurisdictions, attempting to keep other panels from poaching on their turf. Substantial member and staff time was allocated to expanding or protecting jurisdictional prerogatives. In January 1995, Gingrich and the Republican majority slashed committee staffs by more than one third, and the number of committee aides in the House increased only slightly during the years that followed. Democratic committee leaders have argued that the staff reductions undermined the legislative capacity of the committee system (the evidence on this point is mixed).4 But one clear consequence of the staff cuts has been to reduce the resources available to committees for monitoring their jurisdictional prerogatives. The border wars between House panels have become less pervasive.
The GOP referral reform of 1995 also helped reduce jurisdictional conflict in the chamber. During the years of Democratic control, jurisdictionally complex bills typically were referred to multiple panels with few practical restrictions on how much of a bill the relevant committees could consider. The open-ended nature of the Democratic referral process complicated all stages of the legislative process. For example, committees with relatively limited jurisdictional claims on an issue often lobbied the leadership (successfully) for representation on the relevant conference committee, making the conference process excessively complicated and unwieldy. As a result, Gingrich pushed through a rule mandating that the Speaker designate a primary committee of jurisdiction to take the lead in multiple referral situations. By assumption, the primary committee would also dominate the conference delegation. Indeed, the size of House conference delegations on multiple-referred measures did decline in 1995-96, and in the 106th Congress Republican leadership aides continued to assert that the reform had simplified the appointment of conferees.5
Also included in the GOP reform package was a six-year limit on the terms of chairs -- a change intended to circumscribe the operating autonomy of committee leaders. Some lawmakers argue that the chair limitations will eventually lead to the "dumbing down of Congress," as more experienced leaders are forced out of their positions.6 Other observers assert that the six-year rule will serve instead to bring new blood into leadership circles, enhance creativity, and make committees more accountable to the majority party. In 2000, however, as the six-year limit neared for the initial class of Republican chairs, the primary impact of the rule appeared to be a spate of retirements from the House, and active campaigning by Republican members for the open chairs. Among the term limited chairs, Bill Archer (R-Tex.), Thomas Bliley (R-Va.), Bill Goodling (R-Pa.), and John Kasich (R-Ohio) chose to retire from Congress, complicating GOP efforts to maintain or expand their razor-thin majority. In addition, the term limit rule appeared to undermine the seniority principle, as less senior committee members prepared to challenge the ranking Republican on at least five panels, including Armed Services, Commerce, and Ways and Means. At least 13 of the chair wannabes had organized political action committees to raise money for their GOP colleagues and presumably build support for their committee leadership ambitions. (If Democrats assume majority status in the 107th Congress, they are not expected to continue the six-year limit on committee chairs.7)
Although certain of the GOP rules changes mattered in their own right, Newt Gingrich's legacy for the House is not rooted in his role as an internal institutional reformer a la Richard Bolling. We need to keep in mind that Gingrich's signal contributions were as a party campaigner and a communications entrepreneur.8 During the 1980s and 1990s, he was the preeminent practitioner of what I elsewhere have labeled message politics.9 Particularly in the House, both political parties now develop organized messages, which are comprised of issues, themes, and policy symbols that legislators believe will generate a positive response toward their party among voters. By message politics, I am referring to the interrelated set of electoral, communications, and legislative strategies that congressional parties employ to advance their respective messages.
From his early years in the chamber, Gingrich encouraged House Republicans to vilify the Democratic leadership and coalesce behind a common message. In the mid-1980s, he pioneered the use of C-SPAN and Special Orders speeches as a vehicle for minority Republicans to communicate directly with voters. During the 100th Congress, Gingrich was pivotal in focusing media attention on the alleged improprieties of Democratic Speaker Jim Wright. As the chair of GOPAC in the late 1980s, Gingrich crisscrossed the country to build a national campaign infrastructure for his party. In 1994, he convinced House GOP candidates to embrace a unified campaign message - the Contract with America - which became the party's governing agenda in the 104th Congress.
In part as a response to Gingrich's tactics, House Democrats also placed greater emphasis on message during this period. Shortly after becoming majority leader in 1989, Richard Gephardt organized a message team of Democratic House members who put out a message of the day for media consumption. The communications apparatuses in both House parties were relatively small during the 1980s. But by the 106th Congress, the collective party leadership staffs included dozens of professionals who specialized in party communications, and media accounts of the institution routinely referred to the Republican and Democratic party messages. The main ingredients of message politics would have emerged in the House even without Gingrich, but he clearly took the lead in integrating party campaign tactics and the internal legislative agenda.
We need to consider Gingrich's legacy from the perspective of message politics. The key committee changes of the 104th Congress, for instance, reflected efforts by Gingrich and other GOP leaders to (1) ensure that committee-based impediments would not delay prompt consideration of the Republican message, and (2) build and market a reformist name brand for the party among voters. Indeed, the most prominent examples of leadership involvement in or domination over the House committee system in 1995-96 concerned issues that were central to the Republican message (for example, the various Contract bills, reconciliation, the appropriations riders).
Interestingly, the linkages between message politics and party leadership activism have outlived the Gingrich speakership. Even with the small partisan majority of the 106th House, Dennis Hastert and other GOP leaders were routinely involved in the committee process. The level of leadership activism varied substantially by issue, depending on the relevance of an item to the majority and minority party messages. That is, the message status of a measure determined the political stakes for the two parties, and thus the incentives for party leadership involvement in committee.
If we consider the 30 major bills that received floor action in the House during 1999, 17 were directly related to one or both party message agendas.10 Education legislation, for example, was prominent in both party messages. Defense bills and juvenile justice legislation were message items for the majority Republicans (but not the Democrats). And gun control and campaign finance reform were central components of the Democratic (but not the GOP) message. The thirteen major bills that were not message items for either party included, among other measures, bankruptcy reform, reauthorization of the FAA, and Y2K liability reform.
Based on data culled from the public record and interviews with leadership staff, the level of GOP leadership involvement in committee on these bills appeared to be greatest on legislation central to the Democratic message.11 Because of the narrow Republican majority and the public popularity of the Democratic initiatives, the Republican leadership could not rely on the standing committee system to keep these bills off the floor, or focus chamber consideration on alternatives that reflected core GOP values. As a result, Republican leaders dominated the committee stage on these measures. The level of leadership involvement on items relevant to the Republican message was also substantial. For these bills, the leadership typically set the agenda for committee action and occasionally shaped substantive deliberations during the markup stage. For the legislation that did not directly relate to either party message, the level of leadership involvement in committee was less extensive - typically taking the form of routine monitoring or coordinating action across different panels. Hastert's intentions aside, it is on these (non-message) items that we are most likely to witness the contemporary version of regular order.
In short, there does exist a Gingrich legacy for the House committee system. Although certain of the 1995 reforms helped shape member behavior in committee, Gingrich's primary impact on the committee process derived from his broader public role as a partisan campaigner and practitioner of message politics. Perhaps more than any recent member, Newt Gingrich contributed to the integration of party campaigning and internal legislative work in Congress. This linkage between communications and policymaking has important implications for all aspects of the legislative process, including the committee stage.
Notes
1. Jackie Koszczuk, "Hastert Gently Gavels in an Era of 'Order' in the House," Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, February 27, 1999, 458.
2. See Richard L. Hall and Gary J. McKissick, "Institutional Change and Behavioral Choice in House Committees," in Lawrence C. Dodd and Bruce I.. Oppenheimer, eds., Congress Reconsidered, 6th ed. (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 1997), 212-28.
3. David King, Turf Wars (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).
4. In one internal survey, 10 of 13 committee chairs responded that their panels had not encountered significant operational problems as a result of the committee staff reductions. However, all four of the Democratic ranking members who responded to the survey asserted that they had encountered such difficulties. Report on House Rules Committee Survey, September 5, 1996.
5. But see William Hixon and Aaron E. Wicks, "Parties, Leaders, and Committee Jurisdictions," presented at the Annual Meeting of the Southern Political Science Association, Atlanta, November 9-12, 2000.
6. Karen Forestal, "Chairmen's Term Limits Already Shaking Up House," Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, March 25, 2000, 628.
7. Karen Forestal, "Gephardt Gets a Misguided Thank You," Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report, April 22, 2000, 937.
8. David R. Mayhew, America's Congress: Actions in the Public Sphere, James Madison Through Newt Gingrich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), 232.
9. C. Lawrence Evans, "Committees, Leaders, and Message Politics," in Lawrence C. Dodd and Bruce I. Oppenheimer, eds., Congress Reconsidered, 7th ed. (Washington, D.C.: CQ Press, 2000), chapter 10.
10. Ibid. Designation as a major bill derives from the CQ lists of major bills and key votes, supplemented by the four largest appropriations measures. A bill's message status was inferred from the coordinated one-minute speeches made by congressional partisans at the beginning of each legislative day.
11. Ibid.
